‘), reporting that advertisements of NTUC FairPrice looking for retail assistants, cashiers, store keepers and skilled fish cutting workers were found being put up in Shenyang, China.
TRE then wrote to NTUC asking about the matter and why, as a national labour movement, it would want to hire workers from China when any locals would be competent enough to fill the positions advertised.
NTUC FairPrice has since replied TRE’s query and confirmed that since 2011, it has conducted 4 recruitment exercises in China looking for PRC workers.
The reason given is that despite their ‘extensive’ recruitment efforts to hire locals, it is “still facing a manpower shortage just like most retailers here do”.
It assured that NTUC FairPrice’s recruitment policy has always been “to hire Singaporeans first” and boasted that 80% of NTUC FairPrice’s staff are Singapore citizens currently.
From: Angela Soo Sai Geok <
[email protected]>
Date: Mon, May 28, 2012 at 3:22 PM
Subject: NTUC FairPrice Response to TRE Posting titled: NTUC FairPrice recruiting its staff from China instead of locally
To: Richard <
[email protected]>
Cc: Winston Ng Teck Jin <
[email protected]>
.
Dear Richard,
We refer to the posting on TRE titled “NTUC FairPrice recruiting its staff from China instead of locally”.
We would like to share that as part of the labour movement, NTUC FairPrice’s recruitment policy has always been to hire Singaporeans first. This policy has enabled us to maintain a primarily local workforce. Currently, about 90 percent of NTUC FairPrice staff are Singaporeans or Permanent Residents (PR).
In fact, over 80 percent of our staff are Singapore citizens.
As we open more stores to serve our customers better, we also need more staff to fill all the vacancies. Besides advertising these vacancies in local dailies to hire Singaporeans and PRs, we have also worked with various agencies like Community Development Councils, e2i, various polytechnics, and ITEs to name a few.
In Singapore, we hold about 40 job fairs per month at community centres and clubs as well as walk-in interview sessions at various FairPrice outlets around the island. At such job fairs, job-seekers can also speak to our current employees to better understand our stores’ work environment and job requirements.
Despite all our local recruitment efforts, we are still facing a manpower shortage just like most retailers here do. To ensure that we continue to serve our customers, we have to augment the local workforce from overseas like Malaysia and China with a very small percentage from other countries. In 2011, we held three recruitment activities in China and earlier this year, we have held one. The recruitment advertisement posted on TRE is from one of these activities.
To ensure that the salaries we offer are competitive and in tandem with economic and market conditions, we recently announced that non-executive staff will get up to 15.8 percent in wage increment and adjustment.
Currently, we have various vacancies such as Retail Assistants, Cashiers, Store keepers and Skilled Cutters, to fill across our branches island-wide and we welcome job-seekers to submit their applications for these vacancies to us at
[email protected] or visit us at
www.fairprice.com.sg – Careers for more details.
We also note in the article that that TRE had contacted NTUC Income for comments on this post. For NTUC FairPrice related matters, please direct your queries to NTUC FairPrice Corporate Communications Department at email
[email protected]
We hope you will clarify this matter with your readers.
Thank you.
.
Angela Soo
Director
Corporate Communications
NTUC FairPrice Cooperative Limited
DID: 64247805
www.fairprice.com.sg