| NEWS ARCHIVES |
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| Measures to improve welfare of Foreign Domestic Workers |
| 12 Mar 2010 |
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The Manpower Ministry has unveiled two initiatives aimed at improving the welfare of foreign domestic workers.
It was announced by Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Manpower and Health, Mr Hawazi Daipi in parliament today.
Saifulbahri Ismail with more :
28 per cent of employers who engaged a new Foreign Domestic Worker last year terminated their employment contracts just within three months.
Mr Hawazi said, it's likely that many of these terminations happened because employers thought the workers were not a good match for their family.
In addition, 154 complaints were received against employment agencies for poor job matching or inaccurate worker bio-data.
To arrest this problem, Mr Hawazi announced that a standard bio-data template will be created for the industry :
"The standard template could help distinguish more responsible employment agencies by requiring agencies to indicate if and how they had attempted to verify the information provided. A standard template will also help employers comapre bio-data received from different agencies, and ensure that they have enough information to select the best FDW for their family."
The template is expected to be ready by June this year.
The Ministry is also introducing a Settling-In programme to help employers ensure that their foreign domestic workers are well-adjusted to working here.
For this initiative, the ministry will be engaging the Foreign Domestic Worker Association for Skills Training or FAST.
The programme includes lessons on Singapore's culture and norms, financial management and stress management.
Mr Hawazi elaborates :
"The courses will be held on weekends at selected community centres, and will run from this May onwards. All FDW employers who are interested in signing up their FDWs for the courses may visit FAST’s website at www.fast.org.sg from April onwards for more information."
President of Transient Workers Count Too, John Gee says such programmes are important.
However, the challenge will be to ensure that workers can attend them :
"The programmes are needed but what they need to do is to make sure that workers can actually come to this programmes and often it's workers who most need to have them who are going to be denied access. It means getting time off during weekends, they must have time off to go and attend these programmes. There's still a situation here where around about half of domestic workers are not given any tme off by their employers."
Presently, there are about 196,000 foreign domestic workers in Singapore.
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