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Introduction
Madam Deputy Speaker there have been movements around the world throughout the decades that have sought to elevate and empower women, yet even then, there exist ridges and differences within these very movements. Some invoke race, others invoke class, and sometimes these movements discount, if not cannibalize one another. Indeed, a house divided against itself cannot stand, and this cannot be for the case of elevating and empowering women, especially in a year we have declared the Year of Celebrating SG Women.
I know that even as I stand here speaking in Parliament today about a motion on women’s interests submitted, also, by a woman, that we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. Broad are the shoulders of the sisters who have gone before us, and there is always space for more—and we welcome the solidarity the Workers’ Party has shown in picking up arms to join our ongoing ascent to elevating and empowering women.
Willing to Listen, Willing to put in the Hard Work, Willing to Look Ahead
Willing to listen, willing to put in the hard work, and willing to look ahead. These are principles on which the Labour Movement has moved to organize our society’s resources and shake up cultural mindsets to elevate and empower our Singaporean Women in the Workplace. In this movement for Women Workers we have forged, I’d like to remind us of its decades-long importance as we look to chart the next few decades to come for our Women in the Workplace.
Willing to Listen
On being willing to listen: the year is 1973, and women are stepping up in full force to work in paid employment roles, especially with exciting foreign direct investments flowing into Singapore. Much like today, women were going on the ascent in their own right, and the taste of empowerment gave us the confidence and momentum to traverse through barriers that might have still stood in our way. Sister Annabella Sim, then just 21, a visionary whose form many of us take after today, became the first founding chairperson of the NTUC Women’s Committee, and I would say, the first female elected to our Central Committee. She said, “Through the Central Committee, I hope to bring about parity treatment with equal wage for equal work for women”. Annabella and her team of unionists started their journey with an ear to the ground, consulting with working women to identify their primary concerns. They discovered, that after making their first forays into the workforce, women would often leave their jobs after starting a family. This was merely what was expected of us in the household then as women. Our unionists listened, and they took to heart—this birthed out pioneering efforts by women in the Labour Movement to provide childcare support and helping women rejoin the workforce.
Willing to put in the Hard Work
On being willing to put in the hard work: in response to women’s waning labour force participation rates after childbirth years, Mrs Yu-Foo Yee Shoon and the unions took over and expanded the then Department of Social Welfare’s 10 childcare centres. The Labour Movement started NTUC Childcare in 1977, to shoulder the burdens of women who felt the need to leave their jobs early on in their careers without support for childcare. NTUC Childcare scaled the number of these childcare centres to double digit figures within a couple of years, we drove fundraising efforts to establish new centres, as well as contended for government subsidies to keep childcare fees easily affordable for parents. Today, the seed Mrs Yu-Foo had sown almost 50 years ago is what is known today as NTUC First Campus, which continues to provide affordable childcare through its 160 preschool centres islandwide and nine primary-school based student care centres serving more than 20,000 families. Pioneering and building our childcare infrastructure was no small feat and this is an ongoing work in progress. In 2019, our Women’s Wing put up a position paper titled ‘Supporting Parenthood and Young Families’. Our PM acknowledged the importance of a good pre-school and how it provides many long-term benefits in life. The Government has steadily improved the accessibility, affordability and quality of pre-schools. Childcare subsidies were further enhanced in 2020 and the number of full-day childcare and infant care centres have risen from 140,000 to 190,000. The long term plan is to cap our pre-school fees so that the full-day childcare will be the same as primary school fees plus after-student care fees.
Willing to Look Ahead
On being willing to look ahead: in the mid-2000s, Singapore was met with a sustained shortage of labour, as well as an ageing population problem looming around the corner. Not only was this a golden opportunity for us to usher women back into the workforce, but it needed to be delicately balanced with strong support for women to start families. The Labour Movement has helped women re-enter the workplace as early as the 1990s and through the years, we have evolved our programmes to keep with the zeitgeist of the times. As the Director of the Women’s Programme back then, our President Mdm Halimah Yacob and the Women’s Committee started a Back to Work (B2W) Programme in 2007 to create new opportunities for women in the workplace. The programme, with a robust strategy including recruitment, re-adjustment and retention plans for women’s return to the workforce was intended for the benefit of future generations.
With its introduction, we saw the consolidation of best practices in training, counselling, and job placements, as well as the promotion of flexible work arrangements. With these best practices, we fueled the Employment and Employability Institute to do its good work in matching workers with employers. With this forward looking vision, it promoted companies to provide facilities for breastfeeding mothers. Over the years, the Back2Work Programme has helped more than 28,000 women return to work, and provided training to more than 30,000 women.
Today, building and evolving on the work the Labour Movement has advocated for, Flexible Work Arrangements is the new norm, and we continue to work with our Tripartite Partners to implement and redesign jobs to enable women to return to work. Companies such as Le Essen, a catering and canteen operator, now have 50% of their workforce comprising of women returning to work on redesigned flexible work hours.
Indeed, in the area of workplace harassment, the tripartite partners have also drawn up a tripartite advisory on managing workplace harassment. NTUC has also developed a Workplace Harassment Prevention Policy to be adopted and adapted by companies and indeed, both are promoted by TAFEP. For progressive companies with the Labour Movement family, they are guided by workplace harassment clauses in their collective agreements. Our unions and women leaders represent both women and men in harassment and grievance cases. But the work does not stop here. We continue to listen, work hard, and prepare for the new work norms. We are only eating the fruit of the trees planted by those who have come before us, and we will continue to plant trees for those to come.
Conclusion
The enterprise, tenacity and vision of our women who had gone before us indeed lay the foundation for the work we continue today, and we are glad to have reinforcements even across party lines to continue their good work. As we consider the motion filed for a whole-of-society approach in empowering women, we say let’s do it. And let’s continue to do it the way we have been doing it for years—being willing to listen, willing to put in the hard work, and willing to look ahead. These core principles will continue to shape our success.
Decades later, though the challenges women face have evolved in form due to the myriad of opportunities made available to women, we must continue to put our ears to the ground, be good listeners, to be able to roll with the punches. Policy measures that look good on paper sometimes only look good because they are overly convenient and fail to consider repercussions downstream—to this we say let’s continue to innovate solutions, and undertake them even if they seem difficult, because that’s the diligence our women deserve. And finally, let’s be willing to look ahead, together, and not be transfixed on the quick-fix, but the long game. When whole societies begin to elevate and empower women, women begin to elevate whole societies to greater heights than before. Welcome to the movement.
