A tripartite effort to improve productivity – that will be one of the key focus areas for the Labour Movement in 2015, said NTUC Assistant Secretary-General (ASG) Cham Hui Fong.
Fielding questions from the media on the topic during a media conference on 15 January 2015 to outline the Labour Movement’s priorities for the year, ASG Cham called on companies to evolve and share best practices on improving productivity.
Pace of improvements
Elaborating on the Labour Movement’s commitment to work with companies to improve productivity levels, ASG Cham said the sense is that it is moving at a very slow pace.
NTUC is prepared to help companies implement new measures and redesign jobs.
ASG Cham said: “The initiative must certainly come from the employers. We could give ideas and workers could give ideas to see how we could improve the processes but the big changes must come and that we are not seeing enough… The last thing we want to see is we reach a wage stagnation or wages are just not moving up at no fault of the employees, at no fault of the company.”
Share Best practices
Another way is for companies to share their best practices on productivity improvements with one another, but some still have reservations.
“A lot of them look at it as being their competitive advantage, if we are to share so much, then what is there for me. We also have some companies which say, I am the first mover, I must have an advantage, why should another company just jump on it, just benefit from it immediately. So a lot of mindset change is needed,” added ASG Cham.
In a nutshell, what then is the Labour Movement’s desired outcome for 2015? “Sustainable and scalable wage increases,” concluded ASG Cham.
(Source: NTUC This Week)