Mr Pritam Singh (Aljunied): Mr Deputy Speaker, just a quick question for the Senior Minister of State on the legislation and the earlier point he made the in excess of 300 complaints with regard to discrimination. Of those complaints, can I confirm whether the Senior Minister of State how many of them involve companies with a headcount of less than 25? That would give us a sense of whether the five-year timeline is too long and whether it can be shortened or whether more work needs to be done to try and bring smaller firms up to speed.
Dr Koh Poh Koon: Sir, I thank the Member for his question.
When I mentioned that there are 315 complaints, I do not have the exact breakdown of the complaints by company sizes, but I would say that the complaints like these do span across companies of varying sizes as well. In our thinking and deliberation of initial exemptions for companies with employees less than 25, it was really to give them more time to really build up their capabilities and ability to deal with more of these workplace grievances so that there is also time for stakeholders to engage smaller companies to up their capabilities to put in grievance handling processes within the companies. So, it is really more targeted towards building capacity.
Having said that, smaller companies today are already subjected to the TGFEP guidelines which also stipulate that all forms of discrimination are not to be tolerated at the workplace. The only difference between the guidelines and the legislation is that the legislation allows us to have more finely calibrated penalties on the companies. The guidelines today allow MOM to actually take administrative measures against companies of any sizes which discriminate against a worker by imposing, say, a blacklist for them to hire further foreign workers. So, there is already some pain that we can inflict on companies which undertake discriminatory practices today under the TGFEP.
But obviously, that is a very blunt approach and certain companies may find that such forbidding of hiring foreign workers over a case of infringement against one hiring of a Singaporean, may become too overly excessive and impede the company’s ability to function properly, thereby impacting the wider business operations, that will impact a larger workforce within a company as well.
So, in drafting the legislation, what we are trying to do is have a graded approach of penalties that is more commensurate with the egregiousness of the company’s offence in workplace discrimination. But companies that are already less than 25 workforce today will still have to follow the TGFEP guidelines that forbid all forms of discrimination.
I hope that kind of clarifies that we are not letting smaller companies completely off the hook, but we are giving them more time to build their capabilities so that through this process, we can build a more harmonious workplace and not a more litigious one.
Ministry of Manpower
3 July 2023
https://sprs.parl.gov.sg/search/#/sprs3topic?reportid=oral-answer-3264
Office of the Leader of the Opposition 