Re-employment of Women beyond Age 62

14 Ms K Thanaletchimi asked the Minister for Manpower (a) what is the current percentage of re-employment of female workers who have reached the age of (i) 62 years and (ii) 65 years; and (b) whether the Ministry will consider strategies to improve the employment of female workers beyond 62 in light of females having a longer lifespan.

The Minister of State for Manpower (Mr Sam Tan Chin Siong) (for the Minister for Manpower): Mdm Speaker, the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) collects re-employment data regardless of their gender. In 2015, over 98% of local employees who wished to continue working were actually offered re-employment upon reaching the ages of 62 and 65. It shows that the re-employment rates for male and female workers, older workers, were both very high.

The Government will continue to help older workers work for as long as they are willing and able to. And how do we do this? First, we will raise the re-employment age from 65 to 67 by 1 July 2017. We will also support employers with Special Employment Credit of up to 11% of wage offset when they employ workers aged 65 and above.

Secondly, we seek to improve the quality of employment for our older workers. We fund companies to implement age-friendly workplace practices through WorkPro. And employers can also make free use of the Job Redesign Toolkit jointly developed by the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) and the Singapore National Employers Federation (SNEF), and they can sign up for age management courses under the Age Management@Workplace programme. And we also support and promote public education through campaigns, such as "Ability is Ageless" run by the Tripartite Alliance for Fair and Progressive Employment Practices.

Mdm Speaker: Ms Thanaletchimi.

Ms K Thanaletchimi (Nominated Member): I thank the Minister of State. Madam, just a supplementary question. Are there further strategies that we can embrace to ensure that older workers, especially the female cohort, could work longer in the workplace because it is important that they have sufficient savings, especially those low-wage workers and those who are middle income? They need to continue with their employment.

The second supplementary question is: while the retirement and re-employment age has been raised to 67 by next year, in the meantime, what are the measures that we can take to ensure that these older workers will continue remaining in their employment, before this legislation is enacted?

Mr Sam Tan Chin Siong: Mdm Speaker, I thank the hon Member for raising two very important questions. Older workers have always been an important consideration in our work in MOM. This is why we have paid a lot of attention and also rolled out a lot of programmes to help older workers to get re-employed if they are willing and able to.

So far, we have worked very closely with the tripartite partners in finding ways and means to assist the older workers to continue working beyond the ages of 62 and 65. As a matter of fact, I chair a tripartite committee on mature workers, and the main function is to help them.

The approach taken by the tripartite partners has been that we will take a gender-neutral approach in helping older workers to continue working beyond 62 and 65. So far, the programme, activities and strategy have been working reasonably well, in the sense that older workers beyond 62 and 65, including both genders, male and female, 98% of them are able to continue working and get re-employed by the employers.

The challenge for the tripartite partners is not how much more we can do to roll out new initiatives, strengthen the current initiatives and raise the re-employment age. One of the challenges is to how to better reach out to older workers, particularly the female older workers. In this aspect, we can work very closely with the tripartite partners, and I understand that NTUC has a programme called U Live, catering to older workers aged 55 and above, U65 catering to older workers aged 65 and above.

I welcome NTUC and MOM together with SNEF to work together in a tripartite collective effort to reach out to older workers, particularly the senior female workers to encourage them to come back and rejoin the work force and then also to work beyond 62 and 65.

The Member also asked about what more we can do during the interim period to encourage greater opportunities for re-employment of older workers. From MOM's effort, we have been doing or providing three kinds of support, to encourage and also entice employers to offer re-employment opportunities to older workers.

First, it is the wage offset to manage the manpower cost. We do this through the Special Employment Credit, which I mentioned in my reply just now.

We also subsidise employers who adopt age-friendly workplace practices through this programme called WorkPro.

The third support that we are giving to employers and HR practitioners is to raise the age management capability through a programme called Age Management@Workplace programme jointly launched by NTUC and SNEF in July this year.

MOM also works together with NTUC and SNEF to jointly launch this toolkit called Job Redesign Toolkit to help companies, employers to better enable the older workers to work in the workplace. All these are still work-in-progress, and we will continue to work very closely with the tripartite partners to make sure that whether we will raise, or whether we raise the re-employment age from 65 to 67 come next July or not, there is always a sustained and collaborative efforts by the tripartite partners to help the older workers.

Mdm Speaker: Mr Murali Pillai.

Mr Murali Pillai (Bukit Batok): Madam, given the time, I wonder whether this question can be held over. There is only one more minute.

Mdm Speaker: We have one minute, so the Minister of State can make his reply. If you can reply in one minute, Minister of State.

The Senior Minister of State for National Development (Mr Desmond Lee): I can, Mdm Speaker.

Mdm Speaker: Yes, please, reply in one minute.