Keynote Speech at The NTUC U Safe Forum & Awards 2024
Zaqy Mohamad, Senior Minister of State for Manpower, Devan Nair Institute for Employment and Employability (E2I)
1. Good morning. I am very happy to be here today to celebrate the efforts and achievements of 21 organisations in their workplace safety and health journey.
Tripartite collaboration in strengthening WSH culture
2. Since we exited the Heightened Safety Period in May last year, the Multi-Agency Workplace Safety and Health Taskforce or MAST has put in place several Safety Accountability, Focus and Empowerment (SAFE) measures to strengthen our workplace safety and health (WSH) performance.
3. MAST is a whole-of-Singapore approach. With the collective input from WSH Council, members from businesses, trade associations, unions and government agencies, we will continue to look at sector-specific ideas to strengthen workplace safety and health. Entrenching a strong and pervasive culture of WSH excellence is a collective responsibility.
4. Unions play a critical role in ensuring the safety and health of workers by advocating for better working conditions, proper WSH protocols and access to necessary WSH training. This requires the trust and open communication that ASG Yong highlighted earlier. Let me elaborate on three specific areas where unions can play an active role to improve WSH:
a. First, union leaders and members can and should participate actively in companies’ discussions on WSH matters, such as in their WSH committees. As “eyes on the ground”, they are in the best place to raise feedback on WSH to the management and to resolve them in a constructive manner. In this way, every worker can become a WSH advocate. This will allow us to achieve similar outcomes as what ASG Yong has been advocating for a long time, which is that every company ought to appoint a WSH personnel.
b. Second, I am glad that last year NTUC complemented our national “Reporting Saves Lives” campaign with your own “Spot, Stop and Report” campaign to help create a culture where individual workers feel empowered and equipped to speak up to improve WSH practices at their workplace. It is more than just a whistleblowing policy. It is really about trust. Can the worker trust that he will not be sidelined and have action taken against him for reporting? Can the employer be open to taking feedback? These are all aspects of workplace safety culture that we want to build. I want to thank NTUC for establishing an alternative channel where workers can provide their feedback to the unions who can then resolve the issue with the management.
c. Lastly, unions can also play an active role in identifying relevant WSH training for their members. I’m glad to hear that more than 1,700 union leaders have been
trained in WSH. I encourage the unions to send more members and not just leaders for WSH trainings so that we have more partners to build a pervasive safety culture.
5. Today, we have come together to celebrate the efforts and achievements of four unions, 14 unionised companies, and three SMEs.
a. The U Safe awards are presented to organisations that actively champion WSH initiatives, harness technology to improve WSH outcomes, and engender greater collective ownership of WSH among stakeholders.
b. The awards recognise not just their achievements, but their enduring commitment to continuously strengthen WSH culture. I am pleased to note that many of the winners’ efforts extend across various levels within and across their organisations, from the management team to individual workers, and from their own workers to those of their contractors.
6. Among them is the Building Construction and Timber Industries Employees’ Union or BATU.
a. Mr Zainal has been a strong advocate for WSH for many years, and BATU has been a strong advocate for WSH for many years. They have been relentlessly promoting a safety-oriented culture among branch officials and management partners and have promulgated WSH best practices by curating and sharing WSH-related information, and organising WSH initiatives such as safety walks, mental health workshops and sharing sessions. They have also worked with companies to organise Safety Time Outs (STO) where necessary.
7. Another award winner is PUB. PUB has demonstrated strong management commitment to WSH that has extended beyond its own employees to also involve management and workers of its contractors.
a. PUB’s senior management walk the talk not just by chairing safety committees and participating in management walkabouts, they also personally conduct safety training to underscore the emphasis on safety, organisation-wide.
b. PUB’s commitment to WSH can also be seen in its investments in technology. It has introduced smart wearables to help all workers at its worksites improve situational awareness, and thermal sensors to provide risk alerts.
c. It has also developed an in-house app for safety reporting both by its own employees and those of contractors. The app not only allows prompt intervention on safety concerns but also supports analysis of incident trends so potential issues can be addressed proactively, and more effective preventive measures can be put in place.
8. Excellence in WSH is not just limited to large organisations with huge budgets. Being an SME has not stopped Kindly Construction and Services Pte Ltd from being exemplary in its efforts to build a pervasive safety culture across the organisation.
a. The company has taken heed of the SAFE measures implemented by MAST, and its CEO has signed up for and will be attending the Top Executive WSH Programme next month. Kindly has also supported its workers to sign up for the new online micro-learning component of the Safety Orientation Course, taking advantage of the bite-sized modules to allow workers to learn at their own pace and in their own time.
b. In addition, the company regularly runs safety campaigns to reinforce the importance of safety awareness among its workers, encourage reporting of unsafe practices, and recognise individuals for their efforts in strengthening WSH at their workplaces.
c. To make it easier for workers to comply with safety practices and raise productivity on-site, Kindly utilises mature technology such as the Electronic Permit-To-Work system (ePTW) and the Video Surveillance System in its fabrication workshop. It also introduced an innovative self-fabricated safety enclosure to protect workers from high-rise killer litter and weather elements.
9. Congratulations to all our award winners today! You have proven that workplace safety is achievable when everyone works together and set high exemplary standards for others to follow.
First time achieving a Fatality Rate of below 1.0
10. I am also pleased to announce that at a national level, our collective hard work and tripartite effort have paid off. In 2022, including the spike of fatal incidents, our workplace fatal injury rate was 1.3 per 100,000 workers. Last year, it fell to 0.99. Why is this significant? This is the first time, other than 2020 when work was disrupted due to COVID-19, that our fatality rate has fallen below 1.0 per 100,000. This is a significant achievement as only four OECD countries, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany and Sweden, have consistently achieved such a rate. This puts Singapore among the world class. This is testament to the hard work and collaboration that the employers, workers and the Government have with the tripartite partners over the years. In fact, our fatality rate has more than halved, from 2.3 in 2013 to 0.99 in 2023. In ten years, we have seen a significant difference as a result of the hard work that has been done on the ground.
11. Many of you would know that in 2017, Prime Minister Lee had set us the target of achieving and sustaining a workplace fatal injury rate of less than 1.0 per 100,000 workers in ten years, in other words, before 2028. This was an ambitious target. We have reached this milestone for the first time because of our collective effort.
12. But it is not “mission accomplished” by any means. We may not be able to go much lower below 1 in 100,000 because this is already best in class. Whether we can maintain it though, depends on all of us not letting up our recent efforts. This will require all of us to stay the course, remain laser focused on our objective, and reinforce a strong and pervasive culture of workplace safety excellence. We need to have proper risk assessment and management in place. When an incident occurs, we must investigate it thoroughly, identify the underlying causes, learn from our mistakes, and do our best to avoid doing it again. If we can do this, I am confident that we will entrench our improvement, and keep the number down over a longer period.
13. In Singapore, we take workplace safety and health very seriously, because human capital is our only resource. As NTUC’s tagline goes “Every Worker Matters”, in the context of WSH, “Every Life Matters”!
14. Thank you all once again for playing your part to keep our workforce and workplaces healthy and safe. As we will soon be ushering in the Year of the Dragon and celebrating the Lunar New Year, I wish all of you a prosperous, healthy, and safe year ahead.
15. Thank you.