Bernard Rodrigues
Singapore
“The Housing and Development Board, not to mention other landlords, may have to be prepared to write off a significant sum of money as unrecoverable debts because of the provisions of clause 16. It seems to me that this Bill requires a lot of further amendments before it can become an Act. 3.53 p.m.”
“Mr Speaker, Sir, I beg to move, That the sum to be allocated for Head 53 be reduced by $10 in respect of subhead l0l*. * The same amendment also stood in the name of Mr S. V. Lingam Sir, has the Minister any plans to organise or renovate the Museum to make it more interesting for the public and in particular for the tourists?”
“The provision of overhead bridges merely strives to remedy the symptoms without removing the cause of the problem of the kamikaze attitude of Singapore residents.”
“Mr Speaker, Sir, I only want to touch on the allocation of the flats, if I may. There are applications for Housing Board flats where the applicants have applied for Housing Estate A but have been offered flats in Housing Estate B, while there are other applicants who have applied for Housing Estate B and have been given Housing Estate A.”
“Sir, I would like to ask the Minister whether it cannot be made law that a pedestrian must use the overhead bridges otherwise he will be committing a traffic offence. I per sonally think it is a waste of funds to build more overhead bridges if people do not use them.”
“Mr Speaker, Sir, I only have one question to ask as a result of what the Member for Bras Basah has said. Will the Minister for Finance consider granting an amnesty over a fixed period of time to tax-dodgers to reveal their hidden assets and income which, when revealed, will not be taxed on condition that such assets and income are capital…”
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“This may not be palatable, but the settlement of this dispute on the terms of the 1961 Agreement will prove to be the acid test of principled response. The Government's integrity in industrial relations has to he immaculate. So we would say the fulfilment of governmental moral obligations is of supreme importance because it goes to the very roots of the political philosophy and the ideals of high civilisation we are striving to evolve. No less than the Prime Minister himself was an eloquent spokesman on moral obligations. In more or less these words he said: "Workers should not be made to suffer for delays in negotiations for which they are not responsible" - referring to the interim bonuses paid to the Harbour Board workers. because of prolongation of negotiations for which the Harbour workers were not to blame. The Prime Minister when he said this was in the distinguished company of the Arbitration Courts of Australia, India and elsewhere who have upheld that the principle of retrospective payments is justified in those circumstances in which the satisfaction of union claims has been delayed through no fault of the Union. Such delay, the Courts have declared, may occur because of administrative reasons, or the unwillingness of employers to take matters seriously at the negotiating table or even because of delays in the hearing of trade disputes by Arbitration Courts. In all such cases, retrospective payments have been justified in the past and will continue to be so justified. The principle of retrospective payments must be regarded as a penalty provision on employers who are inclined towards procrastination and delays in the face of legitimate union claims.”
“Nevertheless, we have no quarrel with the suggestion because we believe in this Parliament, rational argument will be given its proper weight. The primary stake to us in the dispute is the sanctity of the collective agreement. In fact in Singapore today, the collective agreement is the touchstone of industrial stability. Both trade unions and employers have adopted a responsible attitude towards collective agreement that a measure of the Queensbury rules has been possible for some time now between both management and labour, where fury and scorn were the order before. Dr Goh Keng Swee, our Minister of Defence, in his address in the International Labour Seminar gave pre-eminence to social values in the development of a country which to our minds must include moral obligations and in this dispute the moral obligation of the Government is to respect the undertaking given to the workers in the Agreement that the back-dating of wage claims has to be effective from 1st January, 1961. In short, we expect the Government to honour the undertaking it has given to the workers. Members of this Parliament will realise that since the democratic trade union movement has assumed command of the labour situation after defeating the anti-national forces, strikes by trade unions have been few and far between, not for pure love of virtue, but because we want to establish a climate for economic growth and advancement and we are proud to say that we have made a direct contribution in this regard. We have gone out of our way to emphasise the need for orderly industrial relations, not only in our own interests simply because we want to stay alive as a movement but for our collective interests.”
“Yet the nearest the Commission of Inquiry came to castigating the Treasury officials for their failure here was in these words: "that the procedure stipulated in clause 9 be implemented as soon as possible", when on this score there was ample justification for lambasting the Treasury officials for their contempt of the Agreement. The Commission of Inquiry which looked into the grievances of the workers seems to have taken the view that a revision of the wage structure was an extraordinarily complex task. This is hardly credible in Singapore when we have shown an extraordinary ingenuity in solving even more difficult problems. What is extraordinary is that four years have gone by and that we are no nearer a solution. The whole issue reeks of the lethargy of the Treasury officials and probably on the mistaken belief that here is a sector of the public service whose just demands can be comfortably ignored by the higher echelons in the civil service. I hope it is a belief they will hasten to correct. Having said all this, I would now like to come to the central argument of the N.T.U.C. in this case. The Prime Minister invited the N.T.U.C. to discuss this issue in the Parliament, where he assured us, Members would be free to speak their minds on this issue. The Prime Minister's grounds for Parliamentary discussion of this dispute were that certain fundamental principles are involved when questions of back pay are raised. The Prime Minister has not said something new. Public funds are perennially involved in the payment of public workers, and back-pay is no exception. The normal arena for a resolution of this dispute between both parties when collective bargaining is exhausted is in the Industrial Arbitration Court. The suggestion by the Prime Minister is unprecedented.”
“Devan Nair may be present at Committee meetings at the request of the Federation." There are several counts on which the Government is to be blamed for the delay in the implementation of these clauses. The most important we could consider is that the proposed Committee of Representatives to undertake the formulation of a new wage structure was not formed. Instead one year after the Agreement, the Treasury put to the Union a unilaterally formulated scheme, in direct contravention of the clause which provided for a Committee to set about the establishment of a new wage structure. This was signally wrong and in our opinion generated most heat. It must be apparent to all and even more to the Treasury officials that the unilateral approach is the quickest route to a deadlock. It is therefore difficult to understand why the Treasury officials ignored the Agreement stipulated procedure of revising the wage structure. Joint consultation, joint discussion and joint formulation has become part and parcel of healthy industrial relations. And those who signed the Agreement in 1961 knew perfectly well that a joint approach would be the only means of producing quick results. The only thing to be deduced from the manner in which the Treasury officials have gone about in this matter is perhaps bureaucracy has not altogether disappeared and the proper orientation is yet to take place. How else can one explain this glaring disregard of a provision in a collective agreement between the Government and its workers?”
“Mr Speaker, Sir, I wish to draw your attention to the dispute in the public sector between the Public Daily-Rated Employees' Unions Federation and the Government which has received sufficient publicity in the press. I can therefore safely assume that Members of this Parliament are conversant with the wrongs alleged and this makes my task so much easier in taking up the cudgels for the workers. The principal issue involved is the question of back-dating of wage revisions provided in clauses 5 and 9 of the Agreement signed in November 1961 after the strike by these workers was called off. The strike was called off because the workers were confident that the pro-labour Government would abide by the promises solemnly given and written into the Agreement. Clause 5 runs as follows: "The wages, working conditions and all other terms and conditions of service of the daily-rated employees of the Government shall he revised to be the same as those of similarly employed daily-rated employees of the City Council who are employed in Government Ministries. The cash emoluments so revised shall be payable from the 1st day of January, 1961." Clause 9 enveloping clause 5 states: "The wage structure of the daily-rated employees of the Government shall be revised generally at the same time as the wage structure of the daily-rated employees of the City Council employed in Government Ministries. The cash emoluments so revised shall be payable from the 1st day of January 1961. A Committee of Representatives of the Government, the City Council, the Housing and Development Board and the Federation shall undertake the said revisions and shall attempt to conclude it within two months from the making of this Agreement. Mr C. V.”