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of cheap-sourcing. Therefore, our third-tier help consists of targeted interventions to
support wages at the very low end, through regulatory enforcement of the Progressive
Wage Model (or PWM) concept developed by NTUC. We have started to do this in the cleaning
sector. Parliament has just passed a Bill by the Ministry of the Environment and Water
Resources, to introduce a new licensing regime for cleaning companies under the Environment
and Public Health Act. Cleaning companies have up to September this year to ensure that
for all new cleaning contracts, they pay their resident cleaners basic wages in line with
the progressive wage levels recommended by the Tripartite Cluster for Cleaners, or risk
incurring penalties, including having their licenses revoked. By September 2015, the PWM
requirement will apply to all existing contracts as well. We will work closely with our tripartite
partners to provide greater clarity to the industry on how to ensure compliance to
PWM. Last year, we announced the formation of a
Security Tripartite Cluster (or STC) to develop a PWM for the security sector.
The STC is currently negotiating the terms of the PWM and, when ready, the Government
will apply the PWM requirement to the licensing regime that is in place for the security sector.
One of the key issues the STC is deliberating on is how to also address the issue of the
industry's reliance on very long overtime hours, in order to improve the working conditions
of security officers. This is an important aspect of the tripartite discussions because
wages alone will not ensure that employers will be able to better attract and retain
manpower to address manpower shortages in the sector.
Beyond the cleaning and security sectors, the landscape sector is the third sector where
cheap sourcing is prevalent. Basic wages for resident workers are not as low as they are
in the cleaning and security sectors but they have stagnated at around $1,000 for several
years. Concurrently, we have seen little improvement
in the number of local workers in the sector even though the number of jobs available has
been on the rise. We will take steps to improve the wages and
employment conditions of landscape workers. Like the cleaning and security sectors, we
will set up a Tripartite Cluster for the Landscape Industry to study the need for mandating a
progressive wage model for the sector. MOM and NParks will work with the tripartite cluster
to assess whether and how best to do so. In total we expect the third tier of targeted
interventions in wages in the three sectors -- cleaning, security and landscape -- to
impact more than 80,000 local low-wage workers.