Mandating Hours of Work and Rest for Drivers

Ms Joan Pereira asked the Minister for Manpower whether the Ministry will consider mandating the hours of work and rest for drivers in line with recommendations by the International Labour Organization, such as that of not exceeding nine hours of work daily and a break after four hours of continuous driving.

Madam, we take a holistic approach to ensuring health and safety of all our workers, including drivers. Under the Workplace Safety and Health Act (WSHA), employers are required to take reasonably practicable measures to ensure the safety and health of their workers at work. WSHA also requires employers to provide workers with a safe working environment and adequate instruction, training and supervision to perform their duties safely.

More specifically for drivers, the Workplace Safety and Health Council (WSHC) has issued the Workplace Traffic Safety Management Guidelines to promote safe driving. These include ensuring that drivers are trained adequately to drive specific classes of vehicles and also have the right driving habits, such as wearing of seat belts and keeping within speed limits. The guidelines also provide recommendations on preventing driver's fatigue and promoting good health practices.

For example, limiting shift work to no more than 12 hours, including overtime, encouraging drivers to take short and scheduled breaks, such as 15 minutes of rest for every two hours of driving, and educating drivers on the dangers and symptoms of fatigue. Failure to comply with these guidelines can be used as an aggravating factor against employers in Court in the event of accidents and injuries.

WSHC also shares best practices, case studies and safety messages with industry through the WSH bulletins regularly. Together with the Traffic Police, WSHC also helps high-risk companies to better manage and improve their safety measures for their drivers.

While there are still unfortunate cases of work-related traffic accidents, they are on a downward trend in recent years. The number of drivers or riders killed in work-related traffic accidents has declined from 14 cases in 2013, to five cases in 2016. Nonetheless, one death is still one too many. We will continue to encourage companies to put in place measures to improve the safety and health of their drivers.

Madam, I thank the Minister of State for his reply. I have one supplementary question. With Singapore's investment in smart cities, innovation, self-driving vehicles and so on, can we not help these drivers by mandating the usage of technologies to enforce theirs and the public's safety?

Madam, I thank the Member for the innovative questions. Together with the Land Transport Authority and Traffic Police, we have been considering the use of suitable technologies if they can help to improve the safety of drivers and other road users. We also examine whether all these technological tools are reliable or affordable. I was told that Traffic Police will be conducting a trial on heavy vehicles this year using this technology called tachograph. A tachograph tracks and records a vehicle's speed and other driving information of the driver. Companies that are involved in the trial will also be able to track their drivers' tachograph records and improve the drivers' driving behaviour. Whether or not we will mandate this will depend on the outcome and the findings of the trial. We will only decide after the trial is completed.