SINGAPORE: The Workers’ Party (WP) has called for redundancy insurance for many years now. It published a comprehensive proposal on this additional support for the unemployed way back in November 2016, although the WP started talking about it a decade before.
In the years that followed, the WP brought it up in Parliament several times, including in Budget debates. The matter has become one of the key points the party has called for repeatedly, making it part of their GE2020 Election Manifesto. In 2024, redundancy insurance was again mentioned in WP chief and Leader of the Opposition Pritam Singh’s May Day statement.
At Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s first National Day Rally speech last year, he announced a scheme that would provide temporary financial support to lower- and middle-income workers who are involuntarily unemployed. The WP issued a statement welcoming the policy shifts announced in his statement and pointing out their similarities to WP’s past proposals.
On Apr 15, the first day of applications for the government’s redundancy scheme, the WP re-shared a video over social media it released on Feb 17, 2024, titled “Let’s Talk: Redundancy Insurance,” featuring Aljunied GRC MP Gerald Giam.
However, the WP had something to say about a news report that said the “idea of supporting the involuntarily unemployed in Singapore was first mooted” in 2023,
“This is inaccurate in our view,” the party wrote in the caption to the video, adding, “The Workers’ Party has been publicly championing the idea of support for the involuntarily unemployed for much longer, more than a decade. Our proposal for a Redundancy Insurance scheme may be found in our party’s manifesto back in 2006, and our MPs (Members of Parliament) have continued to raise this in parliament, most recently during the Budget debate in March.”
It also wrote that “in the name of public interest,” it was relaunching the video with Mr Giam, where he speaks about the key features of the WP’s proposed Redundancy Insurance Scheme and how it would be a safely net for workers going through troubled times.
The party wrote in its 2020 manifesto that under the scheme, employees would pay S$4 a month. This would be matched by employers into an Employment Security Fund. Retrenched workers will then receive a payout equivalent to 40% of their last drawn salary for up to six months.
The payout would be capped at S$1,200 a month, with a minimum payout of S$500 a month for low-wage workers. The second and any subsequent payouts will be conditional on the worker actively seeking a new job or undergoing retraining. This is, as they mentioned, due to technological disruption and global events that will lead to higher rates of workers becoming redundant, heightening insecurity.
“Redundancy Insurance will not only ease the immediate financial pressure that retrenched workers face but will also provide an automatic stabiliser to the economy — consumer spending will be sustained to help prevent the economy from spiralling downwards,” the WP said.
During the Budget debate in 2020, Aljunied MP Sylvia Lim proposed the implementation of unemployment insurance for older workers who have been retrenched. Then Manpower Minister Josephine Teo said that the Government would “keep an open mind” to the suggestion but called the present support given to such workers “more sustainable.”
Ms Teo answered that providing unemployment insurance would lessen the motivation of workers to become employed again and also reduce employers’ willingness to shell out retrenchment benefits. /TISG