Mr Speaker Sir, I am glad that the Government is softening its stance on welfarism and is taking the right steps in strengthening our social safety nets. We may not be a welfare state in the Western sense of the term, but we should certainly be a state concerned with the welfare of the people, especially those left behind when Singapore was transformed into a global city in the past decade. I am also glad that the Government acknowledges that our social compact cannot be left exposed to market forces.
In my speech today, I would like to raise three issues to help us push ourselves further in the right direction. The three issues are: one, empowering our social worker and other professionals in the social service sector; two, reaching out to the vulnerable; three, adopting a holistic approach to forging an inclusive society.
Empowering our social workers and other professionals in social service sector
Sir, to help the vulnerable, we need to empower those who are actually holding up the social safety nets to catch them. Social workers and other helping professionals such as counsellors, are in the frontline of forging the inclusive society and they have to be empowered to do it. We have long treated social workers like fire-fighters squelching bush fires and told them to thrive on the passion to serve. We need to change our model. Passion is good and well, but social workers need to be recognised as talents deserving fair compensation, social respect, and optimal workloads.
The starting salary of helping professionals, particularly social workers, is not sending the right message that social work is a vocation deserving of high social respect. This will undermine the Government’s announced efforts to groom more social workers. According to the National Council of Social Services, the expected starting salary of social workers ranges from $2,550 to $2,750. In comparison, the starting salary range of a degree-holding teacher begins above the social worker starting salary range, at $2,770, and tops off at $3,250 for a Honours degree. This is almost 20 percent above a Honours degree-holding social worker pay. Social workers are more like teachers in nature. Social workers help the vulnerable pick up valuable life skills and attitudes so that they can help realize their own potential human capital. Hence, the wages of both Social workers and teachers should be comparable.
I recognise that the Government has been raising recommended social worker salaries and rolling out professionalisation measures in the past few years. However, we need to move faster and more decisively, just as the Government did when the teacher vocation came under threat in the late 1990s. We should make social worker compensation equivalent to teacher compensation.
There is also a structural issue here for the social services. Unlike the centralised education system, the social services are made up of a large voluntary sector. Social workers who work in the frontline voluntary welfare organisations do not enjoy the leverage of Government salary compensation, only recommended salaries. Faced with better pay and opportunities elsewhere, social workers have to make a painful decision to leave the frontline and more sadly their passions, for better jobs to serve their own family needs. I would like to propose that our government to consider funding a Connect Plan that teachers now enjoy to retain social workers? As the Ministry of Education puts it, “dedication should never go poorly rewarded”.
It is good that the Government aims to reduce the caseloads of social workers from 50 to 40. This is not different from reducing class sizes for more effecting teaching. We should aim to reduce caseloads further, not only by grooming more social workers, but also reviewing the workload of social workers. We need to reduce spurious administrative work so that social workers can focus on their main task of helping the vulnerable.
Reaching out to the vulnerable
Sir, I am concerned with the high application rejection rate for our ComCare programmes, which the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports kindly provided in answer to my parliamentary questions a couple of weeks ago. The rejection rate for the Work Support Programme has stayed above 40% in the last five years, while the ComCare Transitions Scheme has seen figures hovering around 30%. For the Work Support Programme, only about a third of the rejected applicants were ineligible because they had sufficient income or other resources. The rest were rejected for other reasons, including not giving sufficient information for assessment, could not be contacted, or not agreeing to the terms of assistance.
The vulnerable are usually less educated, less confident and therefore more introverted than average Singaporean. I have encountered constituents in need who have approached me during MPS are often worried about the application process and I have to write letters supporting them so that they can feel more confident in approaching ComCare officers. We need to make them feel safer about applying, less anxious that it would be a demeaning exercise, where a rejection could be devastating to their already low confidence. I propose the Government to consider reviewing the ComCare application process to make it more applicant-centric?
We are a face-saving Asian society after all and most of us would not admit to being needy and asking for help unless there is real felt need. Perhaps, it may be better for CDC to err on the side of benevolence rather than on the side of caution in our effort to build an inclusive society. There is scope for improving on the rejection rate. We are glad to see that the rejection rate for the Public Assistance Scheme has dropped from about 40% from 2007-2009 to 18% in 2011. Let us try to do the same for the other ComCare schemes.
It is unfortunate that only 6% of CDC investigative officers are social work trained, as the officers have to make judgement-calls that require the aptitude of trained social workers. Officers should at least be trained and supervised by social workers to know how to evaluate the needs of the vulnerable with compassion. We should give applicants the benefit of the doubt when making the judgement on whether they are really in need.
Holistic approach
Sir, we are glad that the Government now shares with us the desire to foster an inclusive and strong society. However, to achieve this, we cannot just seek to tackle the challenges at the symptomatic level, we must adopt a holistic approach. Families are the foundation of a nation. Strengthening of the social safety net is a reactive approach waiting to catch those who are falling, which no doubt is necessary. We need to reduce the falling in the first place. We should seek to eliminate vulnerability by building strong, cohesive families. Building a strong family should be a coordinated inter-ministry effort to create family-centric housing and education policies and a working environment conducive to quality family life.
Our top-most concern should be work-life balance. A recent survey by Ernst and Young shows that the top motivation at the workplace for local employees is not compensation but work-life balance. The average hours worked per week has remained practically the same form 1990 to 2010, fluctuating between 46 and 47 hours. In South Korea, the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) country with the longest working hours, due to a concerted effort by the government to encourage more family time, the work hours have declined in a decade from over 48 hours a week to 42 hours a week in 2010. The average hours worked per week for all OECD countries was 34 hours in 2010. The National Family Council reported that 63% of fathers surveyed reported work responsibilities as the biggest challenge to spending more time with their kids. We are an anomaly among developed countries for working such long hours. The current productivity drive should take this into account and push for more productive shorter working hours rather than unproductive long hours.
Beyond work-life balance, we should be thinking harder about work-life integration. Work and family life do not necessarily have to be trade-offs pitted against each other. Improved internet communications technology and the growth of the knowledge and service economy means that flexible work arrangements are now more possible than ever. This is something that our current productivity drive can also look into encouraging.
For families with older children, we should encourage greater and deeper parental involvement in the social life of schools. Current parental involvement in education focuses on homework and so-called “enrichment” programs that are really disguised assessment and tuition lessons. This is not healthy. We need to get parents involved in a deeper engagement with the social, cultural and broad-based educational life of the schools, rather than being narrowly focused on academic achievement. Already, almost all mainstream schools have a parent support group or parent-teacher association. But parents remain adjunct to the education process and are often seen as the trouble-shooting help for teachers. A PTA charter to further integrate parents and empower parents and teachers to work together for holistic childhood education and social development could be studied by both MCYS and MOE and implemented.
Last but not least, we need to figure the elderly centrally in the fostering of strong families. The elderly are crucial social and cultural legacy leavers, so they need to be supported to spend time with the younger generation, who needs to inherit the intangible but invaluable social and cultural wealth from the elderly in order to maintain our society’s moral compass. We must be careful that silver housing policy does not diminish the transmission of social and cultural values. Already, the proportion of younger married couples who prefer to live with or near their parents has dropped from 73% in 2003 to 53% in 2008, in just five years. Given the recent spate of not-in-my-backyard protests against eldercare housing or facilities in HDB neighbourhoods, we need to do a mindset change in both government policy and outreach to make the elderly seen as positive contributors to neighbourhood life rather than as social problem. A more consultative urban planning process is called for, so that the HDB or other government agencies could encourage the goodwill of neighbourhood communities towards the elderly and facilitate the integration of the elderly in these communities.
In conclusion Sir, I believe that a more empowered social service sector, a more effective outreach to the vulnerable and a holistic approach towards a more family-centric policies will able to steer Singapore towards a more inclusive society and a stronger Singapore.
Thank you Sir.