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NTUC SETS 1.5 MILLION MEMBERSHIP TARGET
- New NTUC Central Committee Members to Lead and Drive Innovation -
For National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) to continue being a representative voice for our workers and a credible partner of the Government, we must build our collective strength through staying relevant to and representative of our workers’ needs.
At the NTUC National Delegates’ Conference (NDC) 2019, we set a target of 1.5 million members with an aspirational timeline of 2025 but would be happy to achieve it by 2030.
To achieve this, the delegates committed to innovate in three key areas; union model, membership model and training model. Underpinning all these will be our digitalisation drive.
Innovating Union Model
Singapore’s workforce has changed over the years – we now have rank-and-file, professionals, managers and executives, workers in small and medium-sized enterprises and a growing pool of freelancers and self-employed workers. To be a representative Labour Movement for all workers, we will need to innovate the current way in which we protect and represent our workers so that they derive greater value from joining the union and NTUC.
a. Enhance Representation
We will cover workers in new sectors and evolve our model to represent a wider group of workers. This potentially could mean that we may create new unions, consolidate existing structures or even explore new forms of unions. One of the ideas explored was having digital unions.
b. Enhanced Protection
Whilst we will continue to push for enhancement to the existing protection framework, we want to expand the ways in which we protect our workers by moving upstream. We will take a more pre-emptive approach to help workers who are vulnerable and at-risk of displacement, or whose jobs are no longer relevant. Pre-retrenchment training was mooted as a possible intervention.
Innovating Membership Model
Through the years, NTUC’s membership model has evolved to better serve workers through their life cycle needs. This is something that will continue to be the backbone of the Labour Movement.
New Membership Model
a. To be an inclusive Labour Movement, not only will our membership model be worker-centric but expand to become family-centric as well. We will explore the possibility of a family membership model – providing a suite of holistic products and services tailored to meet the different lifestyles and evolving life cycle needs of our workers.
b. Providing Greater Convenience through NTUC Social Enterprises
This transformation would not be complete without the transformation of NTUC Social Enterprises (SEs). While meeting life cycle needs, our SEs will need to evolve to become a one-stop shop to bring greater convenience to time-strapped members. Leveraging the strength of the entire SEs ecosystem, we can create new and greater value for our members.
Innovating Training Model
Training has been and will continue to be an important pillar in NTUC as this has a direct impact on our workers’ employment and employability. We also recognise that Company Training Committees (CTCs) can be an important part of union membership benefit for our workers.
We will continue to accelerate the formation of CTCs with a view of forming 1,000 CTCs reaching 330,000 workers by 2022. To operationalise and implement this, we will strengthen the capabilities of our leaders and relevant NTUC staff through training programmes such as Business Process Modelling, Performance and Rewards Management, and Training Needs Analysis. We also aim to build a pool of Industry Training Officers to further support the rollout of CTCs.
Additionally, NTUC will also tap on digitalisation to further nudge workers to train and upgrade themselves. This will be in tandem with the national push towards lifelong learning and hopefully, help workers take greater ownership of their own training.
Digitalisation as an Enabler
In order to innovate and translate the above into tangible outcomes, NTUC will tap on digitalisation, harnessing the power of digital technology such as big data, artificial intelligence and more.
More details for each of the innovations will be released in due course.
NTUC Central Committee 2019-2023
This year’s NDC saw the election of a new leadership team who will lead and drive these transformation plans. Over 400 delegates from NTUC’s 59 affiliated unions elected, by secret ballot, the new 21-member NTUC Central Committee (CC) for the four-year term of 2019 to 2023. The NTUC CC is the planning, policy and executive organ of NTUC that takes all such decisions and actions to further NTUC’s objectives (refer to Annex A for Backgrounder on NTUC NDC).
The new NTUC CC has elected Ms Mary Liew Kiah Eng as President, Mr Ng Chee Meng as Secretary-General, Mr Arasu Duraisamy as Secretary for Financial Affairs; Mr Ong Hwee Liang, Mr Abdul Samad Abdul Wahab and Ms K. Thanaletchimi as Vice-Presidents; Mr Koh Poh Koon as Deputy Secretary-General; Ms Cham Hui Fong and Mr Patrick Tay Teck Guan as Assistant Secretaries-General.
The list of the newly-elected NTUC CC members and office bearers is provided in Annex B.
These bold moves to innovate will set us on a new trajectory so that our workers can continue to earn better wages as well as enjoy better welfare and work prospects, because workers remain at the heart of everything we do.
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