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A quiet anxiety on the ground: why this Bill matters
Mr Speaker, just last night, a regular at my MPS sessions shared that she has started taking AI courses on her own. She is in her 50s, and has worked as a HR admin for over twenty years. She told me, “Ms Yeo, I’m not worried about robots taking my job. I just want to know there’s someone thinking about what comes next for me.”
That quiet anxiety is something we hear often on the ground. Not panic. Not resistance. Just a very human need to know that someone is watching out for you. Mr Speaker, that is why this Bill matters. I support it, and want to speak to what it must achieve — not as policy, but as lived experience.
I declare my roles as Executive Secretary of the National Transport Workers’ Union, Assistant Secretary-General of NTUC, and Chairman of the Manpower GPC, and these are the lens that I am using to speak on.
From skills to careers: why we need a new approach
Mr Speaker, ten years ago, we established SkillsFuture Singapore and reconstituted Workforce Singapore — one focused on skills, the other on jobs.
That model served us well. But the world of work has shifted. Today, careers are longer, but no longer linear. The idea of one employer, one skill set, one trajectory belongs to an earlier generation. At the same time, Artificial Intelligence is shortening the half-life of skills. What took years to build can be reshaped within a few. So the challenge is no longer just training workers, or helping them find jobs. It is ensuring that training leads to jobs, jobs lead to wage growth, and transformation produces gains that are shared with workers.
That is the gap this Bill is designed to close. The formation of the Skills and Workforce Development Agency (SWDA) is a strategic reset — bringing skills and careers into one continuous journey.
What transformation looks like on the ground
As Manpower GPC Chairman, I recently visited three companies with fellow GPC members to understand how tech-enabled, AI-powered business transformation and workforce upskilling are actually playing out — on the ground, in real workplaces, with real workers.
I want to share what I saw, because these visits were not just informative. They were instructive. Each company showed a different face of Singapore's workforce — and together, they speak to why SWDA's mandate is as important as it is.
Our first visit was to SMRT. At SMRT, I witnessed what happens when a large employer commits fully to workforce transformation as a cultural and operational mission. SMRT has institutionalised the Kaizen philosophy — a Japanese yet universal concept of continuous, incremental improvement — as a unifying mindset across all levels of the organisation. This is not a top-down directive. It is a shared way of working.
Layered onto this, SMRT has adopted AI to unlock operational efficiencies — managing worker fatigue, boosting safety through predictive maintenance, and redesigning workflows to reduce the physical burden on staff.
And who benefits most from this? Their older workers. Workers who have spent decades on the job — who know every quirk of the system, every subtle sound that signals a problem — are now working smarter. Following retraining and job redesign, productivity improved. And critically, their wages have increased.
This is the promise of how continuous learning ensures that technology is done right: not replacing experienced workers but augmenting them. Giving them tools that honour their expertise, extending their working lives, and rewarding their commitment.
I call on the SWDA to support more companies to be like SMRT, to ensure that workplace cultures support lifelong learning, and to reward workers when they walk the talk.
Our second visit took us to FairPrice’s Store of Tomorrow at Punggol Coast Mall — Singapore’s first generative-AI-powered supermarket. And Mr Speaker, as an MP for Punggol GRC, I felt a particular sense of pride that this innovation is rooted right here in our Punggol community.
What I want to highlight is not the AI, impressive as it is, but how the transformation was designed. Staff were not presented with a finished product and told to adapt. They were involved from the beginning — shaping service design, store navigation, checkout, and backend operations. Customers, too, were part of this co-creation.
Many of these frontline staff are women, including mid-career returnees who came back to work after years of caregiving — not the typical profile technology is designed for. Yet because FairPrice chose to design with them rather than for them, the result is a system that works — for staff and customers alike.
The lesson is clear: when workers are treated as co-creators rather than recipients of change, transformation is smoother, adoption is faster, and outcomes are better. SWDA must champion co-design — not as a nice-to-have, but as a defining feature of how Singapore approaches workforce transformation.
We know AI will reshape our workplaces, but how it unfolds in practice will depend on pioneers on the ground. My Manpower GPC colleagues and I saw this firsthand at FairPrice — a company willing to reimagine not just its own operations, but the broader retail cluster. They have taken bold steps to reimagine not just their own operations, but the broader retail cluster — helping workers, and Singaporeans, begin to see and experience what an AI-enabled workplace could look like.
So my call to SWDA is this: support more such companies. Enable them to experiment, to learn, and to lead — “to boldly go where no one has gone before” — and in doing so, light the way for their sectors and for Singapore’s future of work.
Mr Speaker, our Manpower GPC’s third visit was to Chye Thiam Maintenance, and I would like to dwell into this visit — because it speaks to a segment of our workforce that is too often less visible in conversations about AI and transformation – that of our lower wage workers and senior workers.
CTM is a homegrown company many of us would recognise from the orange and yellow vehicles that keep our estates, malls and highways clean. From a small family outfit, they have grown into a team of 3,500 strong.
Over the decades, CTM has continually invested in technology and machinery — and at every stage, their workers moved forward with these changes, not out of them. In the past two years, they introduced robosweepers and autonomous service vehicles. But the real story is what came with it — job redesign, skills upgrading, and new roles.
Workers trained to operate autonomous equipment now receive AV allowances, recognising the higher skills and responsibilities they carry. This is a small but important signal — that when work changes, we recognise and reward it differently. And the result is clear. Technology did not displace workers. It raised the quality of jobs — creating pathways for seniors and lower-wage workers to move into safer, more skilled, and better-paying roles.
For CTM, embracing technology also brought in more business — and with it, the ability to hire more, and uplift more. This is the virtuous cycle we want to see: when innovation drives both enterprise growth and worker progression. CTM is now an Accredited Training Organisation, working with our agencies to build structured training programmes tailored to their workforce. This is important.
What CTM has done is to build a ladder with support and guidance from our agencies — this is a structured pathway through skills upgrading, moving from physically taxing work to roles that are more skill-centric, safer, and better compensated. CTM shows us that with the right intent and support from Government, transformation can be inclusive — not by asking workers to simply “keep up”, but by enabling them to move forward.
Mr Speaker, as we look at the work of the Skills and Workforce Development Agency, it must support more local enterprises and SMEs on this journey — and scale support as our local companies grow from SMEs to LLEs, so that productivity gains translate into more better jobs, better wages, and above all, greater dignity in work.
Mr Speaker, across all three companies, a common theme emerges. These employers adopted AI and technology to transform their businesses without leaving their workers behind. They built a culture of employee stake-holding in transformation and one of lifelong learning. Supported by grants and partnerships, they took on the responsibility of designing and delivering training. And their workers came out the other side with better conditions, new skills, and wage growth. That is exactly the model Singapore needs to scale.
Making SWDA work: partnerships, delivery and outcomes
Mr Speaker, the merger of SSG and WSG must lead to bold steps — not incremental ones — to streamline programme delivery, simplify grant and funding administration, and take a genuinely customer-centric approach that puts real worker and employer outcomes at the centre.
I am confident that our ecosystem partners stand ready to work alongside SWDA in this — the Tripartite Jobs Council, our Trade Associations and Chambers, labour market facilitators and employment agencies, continuing education and training providers, our unions and Platform Work Associations. They are already embedded in companies and communities across Singapore. They have the trust of workers and employers built up over years. SWDA should build on this, not bypass it.
I want to make this call specifically: SWDA must establish regular, ongoing engagement with these stakeholders — not just at the point of policy design, but continuously. The world of work is changing faster than any policy cycle. Policies that are not continuously grounded become policies that do not work.
SWDA is also well-positioned to drive research — to develop a data-driven view of jobs of the future, and to design grants that supercharge company transformation. This research role is important and I welcome it, particularly as companies and sectors embark on their starship enterprise reimagination journeys with their workers.
But in implementing transformation, SWDA must be the champion of a human-centred, worker-centred approach. This will make the difference between transformation that works for people, and transformation that works for productivity metrics alone.
What success looks like for workers
Mr Speaker, let me put faces to what success looks like, if SWDA gets it right. These are composite sketches drawn from real ground conversations. I have changed names.
Joanne — not her real name — spent nearly a decade out of the workforce, first caring for her young children, then for her mother who had a stroke. When she finally wanted to return to work, she came to see me. She was 46. She had real skills, genuine experience, and she was ready. But her retirement savings were depleted from years without CPF contributions. She had a caregiving gap on her resume that employers looked at askance. And she needed to undergo retraining — but had no financial buffer to sustain her through it.
If SWDA gets it right, Joanne would be supported by a structured return-to-work pathway for caregivers — one that bundles caregiver respite support to free her time for training, a training allowance to sustain her through the programme, and a CPF top-up in her first month back at work to begin rebuilding her retirement adequacy.
Our NTUC’s C U Back @ Work programme has shown us that this model works. Since we launched it in 2023, we have close to 1,000 CUBbies in the programme — and in 2025, we expanded it to PME roles including accounting and office administration. SWDA must build on this, not reinvent it. And it must make these pathways permanent and accessible to Joannes across Singapore, not just those lucky enough to find their way to us.
Sakthi — not his real name, but he will recognise himself — is a bus captain. He has been on the road for over twenty years. He takes pride in his work. His passengers know him by name. On a good day, he tells me, someone will leave a packet of kopi on his seat with a thank you note. Those days keep him going.
But here is what most commuters do not know. His lunch break is 25 minutes. Between runs, some breaks are as short as 6 minutes. He starts his day at 4.30am when the first bus leaves the depot. He can drive up to 16 runs in a day. At 60, the fatigue is real — and it is a safety matter, not just a welfare one.
If SWDA gets it right, AI-informed fatigue monitoring and job redesign can enable Sakthi to work a smarter shift structure — one that is informed by data about when fatigue peaks, that keeps him safe, keeps his passengers safe, and keeps him economically active and contributing for longer. Older workers are not a burden to be managed. They are experienced contributors who deserve workplaces designed with them in mind, not around them.
David — not his real name — was a mid-career IT professional when his company restructured. He was retrenched at 52. While he searched for work, he turned to platform driving to keep his family afloat. The flexibility suited him. The income helped. But now, two years in, he reads the news about autonomous vehicles and he comes to me with a question I have heard more than once: "Ms Yeo, if the technology matures, what happens to me?"
He wants to reskill. He knows the window is open — but he cannot afford to stop driving. His family needs the income now, not after he has completed a training programme.
If SWDA gets it right, David would have access to structured financial support that allows him to transition gradually — to drive part-time while undertaking a credentialled reskilling programme connected to real employment pipelines in sectors where his IT background, refreshed with new capabilities, opens doors. He should not have to choose between his family's present and his own future.
Mr Speaker, Joanne, Sakthi, and David are not unusual cases. They walk into my Meet-the-People Sessions. They sit across from me at kopi chit-chats. They come to our union dialogues. They are the reason this Bill matters, and the reason I hope we will measure SWDA's success not just by programmes launched or grants disbursed, but by the number of real Singaporeans whose working lives genuinely change for the better.
Looking ahead: an inclusive future of work
Mr Speaker, ten years ago, we built the foundations. Today, we are building the integration. And ten years from now, I hope we will look back on this Bill as the moment Singapore chose to ensure that our next bound of growth is one that every worker can be part of.
The Labour Movement stands ready and our unions, our Tripartite Jobs Council will keep walking the ground. And we will hold SWDA — and ourselves — to the standard of making transformation inclusive, practical, and human-centred.
To my resident at MPS who just wants to know that someone is thinking about what comes next for her — I want to say: Mr Speaker, that is exactly what we are here to do.
I support this Bill. Thank you.