Impact of Recent Realignment of Roles and Salaries in Social Service Sector

Dr Tan Wu Meng asked the Minister for Social and Family Development with regard to the outcome of the 2023 review of job roles and salary guidelines in the social service sector (a) whether any senior care staff have been pegged to a lower job worth as a result of the realignment process; (b) whether potential implications for support care staff in the healthcare sector have been considered in the review; (c) whether a tripartite approach has been considered in the review and, if so, to what extent; and (d) if not, why not.

Sector salaries are reviewed regularly to ensure that salaries in Social Service Agencies (SSAs) remain competitive against comparable roles in competing markets. The recent review took into consideration the economic outlook, wage growth in the general market, including healthcare and public service, the contributions of social service professionals, funding sustainability of SSAs and alignment with the Skills Frameworks for Social Service and Healthcare. In particular, the Skills Maps, which outline the range and levels of skills and competencies required for each job role, were developed and validated with representatives from the sector, academia and the Government.

Arising from the review, some job roles were merged or right-sized. These include: one, adjusting the organisation budget ranges for Head of Agency roles; two, merging Executive, Programme Coordinator, Programme Executive and Volunteer Executive into a single Executive role; three, merging Social Worker (Entry) and Social Worker into a single Social Worker role; four, merging Therapist (Degree) and Therapist (Diploma) into a single Therapist role; and five, mapping the Senior Care Staff role to Social Service Assistant job grades, while reclassifying social work associates more appropriately to the Social Work Associate and Senior Social Work Associate roles.

The revised salary ranges for merged job roles provide greater flexibility for SSAs to hire employees at various competency levels and to plan for their progression according to experience and performance. For merged job roles, the starting salary guidelines took reference from the blend of the merged grades and are higher than the starting salaries of the lower merged roles before the review.

As explained in an earlier reply provided by Minister Masagos to a Parliamentary Question (PQ) on 21 April this year, the salaries for the right-sized Senior Care Staff role represent an increase in salaries, once those with competencies and performance at the job level of Social Work Associate are reclassified into the correct job role.

The National Council of Social Service (NCSS) has been supporting SSAs to implement the guidelines and to ensure that employees continue to be remunerated commensurately. Current staff should not have their salaries reduced as a result of the changes to the job roles. SSAs should continue to pay staff competitively, including paying above the guidelines if they are able to do so, in order to attract and retain quality manpower.

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. The work in the social service sector is challenging and oftentimes can be emotionally and mentally draining. How often does the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF) intend to review the salary adjustments to make the pay more competitive and to attract people to join the sector?

Besides salary adjustments, what else is MSF doing to improve their attractiveness of the sector and is MSF working with the Ministry of Education (MOE) to attract more students into the sector through more industry-relevant course curriculum in tertiary institutions, like the Institute of Technical Education (ITE), polytechnics and our universities?

I thank the Member for his supplementary questions. The short and quick answer to his questions is yes. We do work with MOE to go upstream to green-harvest and we do review our salary guidelines annually. I thank the Member for his suggestions.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I thank the Senior Parliamentary Secretary for his reply. May I draw the Senior Parliamentary Secretary's attention to a Facebook post by the Healthcare Services Employees' Union (HSEU) on 15 April 2023?

The President of HSEU stated in this post, and I quote, "More broadly the review potentially impacts support care staff in the healthcare sector as there is much overlapping similarities in job functions and skillsets...".

May I also draw the Senior Parliamentary Secretary's attention to the following paragraph in HSEU's Facebook post, "HSEU was not consulted for this wage review. HSEU reiterates that any review of sectoral wages and remunerations should adopt a tripartite approach."

Given this, may I ask the Senior Parliamentary Secretary if he can help address the second and third parts of my PQ? Firstly, whether potential implications for support care staff in the healthcare sector have been considered in the review. Furthermore, whether a tripartite approach was considered in the review; if so, to what extent and, if not, why not?

Mr Deputy Speaker, I thank the Member for his additional supplementary questions. Yes, just to reiterate what I mentioned in my speech, we have consulted the sector, academia and the Government, not the unions this time round. We do note his suggestion that we can possibly involve the unions in future salary reviews.

I thank the Senior Parliamentary Secretary for his response. I wanted to clarify MSF's role in facilitating the support of additional wages in the Social Service Agencies, particularly for those which are providing essential services, many of whose salaries for the Chief Executive, Finance and even for IT positions are not supported by MSF or NCSS.

I want to ask if MSF would consider facilitating help agencies, such as NCSS, SG Enable and so forth, to support and fund these positions because these are important and integrative roles. To bring especially multi-million-dollar agencies together, we do need these positions. For funders to support only those services of so-called direct staff will not actually be realistic without these integrative roles.

Mr Eric Chua: I thank the Member Ms Denise Phua for her supplementary question. I think she would also understand that in the social sector, the approach has always been one of many helping hands, where the Government, the corporate sector and the community partners, including Social Service Agencies, all come together to bring something to the table to make sure that, in terms of various aspects of running the social sector – funding, expertise, resources – everyone brings something.

The Government cannot possibly fund all the programmes that are running on the ground and, yes – Sir, I seek your patience in letting me finish my reply – and so, it is in that spirit that we take an approach where many stakeholders come together to bring something to solve the many social problems that we face today.

Thank you, Sir. Could I just ask whether MSF follows up with the SSAs on whether they are able to meet these new salary guidelines and, if so, what percentage of SSAs are able to meet these guidelines?

Mr Deputy Speaker, I thank Mr Louis Ng for his supplementary question. I do not have the numbers right now. If he likes, he may wish to file an additional PQ and we can attend to that. But we do work with NCSS as well as the relevant SSAs if there are cases where, in particular, the actual salaries on the ground do not quite match up to what has been stated in the guidelines.