Grant for Companies to Offset Cost of Hiring Temporary Staff for Pregnant Employees

Mr Louis Ng Kok Kwang asked the Minister for Manpower whether his Ministry will consider setting up a grant that companies can apply for to partially offset their cost of hiring one temporary staff member for each female employee entering their second trimester of pregnancy until their employee's child turns two years old.

Mr Speaker, to make our workplaces more family-friendly, employers, supervisors and co-workers should support working mothers during pregnancy and parenthood. As the requirements of each company and needs of the workers may differ, we do not prescribe how the support should be provided. One main way is through flexible work arrangements (FWAs). To encourage companies to implement FWAs, we provide the Work-Life Grant of up to $160,000 over four years per company.

Mr Speaker, I thank the Second Minister for the reply. A lot of our focus is on providing support during the maternity leave period. I am just wondering whether we can provide more support before and after. Secondly, in a lot of the dialogue sessions that I have, the feedback is really about this kind of discrimination at the workplace. So, I wonder if the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) can conduct a study into this so that we can come up with some solutions and recommendations.

Mr Speaker, Mr Louis Ng's comment brought to mind two instances that I encountered not too long ago. One was the case of a food services company, a very well-known company that has got a significant presence in Singapore and quite a lot of employees. The person whom I met from this company is, in fact, someone who is on a Term Contract. Why is this person on a Term Contract? She is providing relief for the duties of a permanent, regular employee who is with child and is unable to handle all of the work at the same time and so, needs a little bit of support. What this company has done is to bring on board this Term Contract employee so as to allow the pregnant employee to have a greater ability to cope with the twin challenges of work and also the pregnancy. That is one example.

Another example that I came across was an accounting services firm. This is not a very big firm. It provides accounting and corporate secretarial services. The nature of the work is such that, actually, they have got significant representation of women in their workforce. The owners of this practice are themselves very family-friendly. They wanted to be able to support their employees. But they did find that in their circumstance, the continued interaction with the customers is very important. In fact, even if they were to bring on board someone to relieve the duties or to help this person carry out the work, it does not quite satisfy the customers.

So, they were creative and they found an alternative solution. They took advantage of the Work-Life Grant and they put in place a system that is known as double robotics technology. What this equipment allows the company to do is to bring the clients to the office, and even though the staff is working from home, they are actually able to interact with each other, speak, look at each other's facial expressions, talk about the project that is being worked on and how to move forward, and they can do so using technology.

The point that I am trying to highlight is that actually there are very many different needs of companies that we cannot predict in advance, and we have to leave it to the companies to specify and to design interventions that work for them. This is the reason why when we draw up the Work-Life Grant, we make it quite broad. We do not overly prescribe, we do not say you must do only this or do that, we tell them the grant is available to them, they put up a proposal and we will take a look. If it seems to make sense to what they are hoping that it would achieve for their employees as well as for their business, then we would like to be able to support it.

I would also like to share with Mr Louis Ng that since the Work-Life Grant was launched, we have had well over a thousand companies which have signed up. They are making good progress.

I would like to ask the Second Minister on the second point of the study, because, really, during the dialogue sessions, a lot of people are raising that this form of discrimination does happen at the workplace. In fact, this Parliamentary Question is filed on behalf of one of the working mothers who was pregnant and faced this discrimination. So, I am just wondering whether we can launch a study about this, so that, again, we can find what is happening on the ground and come up with some solutions.

If there is a party that would like to get involved in the study, MOM is happy to work with this party to see how we can support it.