..... NTUC has suffered from a dereliction of duty in its original commitment to protect the Singaporea
First, the backroom deals of tripartism, instead of open and transparent negotiations........severely weaken the union and advantage companies during negotiation, because the unions (and workers) cannot appeal to public outcry. Absent the immediate threat of mass public outcry and the associated reputation costs, companies have more leverage to tilt the negotiations to their demands...........
The recent SMRT bus driver saga is a case in point..........the gross unfairness in which the new work regulations disadvantaged bus drivers and how they were imposed unilaterally certainly goes to show how the transport workers union was steamrolled over.
Second, if unions cannot appeal to public outcry, then they may appeal to threaten to strike for their demands. But can Singapore unions really strike ......... but it seems that the Singaporean workers’ right to strike cannot stand........ One, if mass gatherings that disrupt the public order are not allowed (and mass gatherings are defined as 1 or more), then the right to strike sounds really dubious to me. Two, the political ramifications for strike action are costly. Just ask Ong Teng Cheong who sanctioned Singapore’s last strike action in January 1986 for a group of shipyard workers.
Thus, with severe legal and political costs attached to strike action, unions at the negotiating table are further disadvantaged. No appeal to strike. No appeal to public outcry.
Third, does NTUC really help workers get “fair wages”, get a “conducive work environment” and ensure that they are “not exploited”? ...... low wage workers whom NTUC are best supposed to represent, have been grossly underpaid ........for the work they have done over the past decades. As Prof Lim Chong Yah mentioned, low wage workers in Singapore are more than 100% underpaid as compared to their counterparts in Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan. As Prof Tommy Koh also previously mentioned, low wage workers in Singapore are also grossly underpaid in comparable Nordic countries such as Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland.
Even if we do not compare across countries, within Singapore, across time, the fact that the wages of low wage workers have climbed miserably slow or even declined over the past few decades, mean that NTUC has been disastrously not effective in helping workers raise their wages. The extreme low wages that our workers rely on, some may argue, is tantamount to possible exploitation in high-cost Singapore.
Of course, all these critiques are not taking away the good that NTUC has done, such as NTUC Fairprice, discount vouchers for low wage workers, NTUC Income, etc etc. But these small subsidies nibble away at the edges and do not address the fundamental issue of the gross underpayment of our low wage workers.
In my next post, with reference to the union bargains as characterized in Europe, I will blog more about why NTUC is not entirely to blame for the current state of affairs for low wage workers and that if we must pin the blame, we have to blame the PAP since the 1990s
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