12 ASIAN LEGAL BUSINESS – MAY 2024 WWW.LEGALBUSINESSONLINE.COM EMPLOYMENT In August last year, Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower announced its acceptance of the final set of recommendations by the Tripartite Committee on Workplace Fairness (Tripartite Committee) for the Workplace Fairness Legislation (WFL). The WFL, which is slated to be passed in the second half of 2024, prescribes measures that employers in the country must follow to prevent discrimination in employment decisions at all stages of employment, put in place processes for resolving workplace grievances and ensure fair outcomes for victims of workplace discrimination, and prohibit retaliation against those who report cases of workplace discrimination. There are five protected characteristics under the WFL on which employers may not discriminate: age, nationality, sex, marital status, pregnancy status, caregiving responsibilities, race, religion, language, and disability and mental health conditions. Employers are prohibited from referencing protected characteristics in job advertisements, recruitment, inemployment (e.g. promotion, performance appraisal, training selection), and end-employment (e.g. dismissal) stages. The law also requires employers to put in place grievance handling processes. This includes protecting confidentiality of the complainant, building infrastructure for compulsory mediation and taking claims for adjudication before the Employment Claims Tribunals (ECT) as a last resort. Small firms with less than 25 employees will be exempted from the This ensures that the job advertisement avoids the perception of discrimination and enables employers to reach the widest pool of qualified candidates, the Tripartite Committee’s final report states. It is important to note that many of these regulations are already in place under the Tripartite Guidelines on Fair Employment Practices (TGFEP), which will not stop being in effect once the WFL is passed. “The proposed WFL is not intended to replace TGFEP, but to complement it. The existing TGFEP continue to apply, and employers are expected to continue to observe them,” says Toh Wei Yi, employment partner at Harry Elias Partnership. BUILDING COMPLIANCE For the requirements in the proposed WFL, which are already contained in the Tripartite Guidelines, many employers in Singapore are already familiar with and in compliance with these requirements. WFL for a start, but this will be reviewed in five years. “This approach recognises that smaller firms may not have the expertise and resources to fully implement the legislated requirements at the start,” says Wong Pei-Ling, employment partner at CNPLaw. Exemptions are also available to a tightly scoped group of religious organisations that may make employment decisions based on religious considerations. The law also allows employers to consider a protected characteristic in employment decisions if it is a genuine and reasonable job requirement. For example, explains Wong, language teachers should be proficient in the language that they are teaching and the employer can state language proficiency as a job requirement in advertisements. “However, the employer must state the job requirement (e.g. ‘Tamil-speaking’) instead of the protected characteristic that is not the job requirement (e.g. ‘Indian teacher’).” LEVEL PLAYING FIELD Singapore is set to introduce a new anti-discrimination employment law later in the year, and while employers welcome the changes, lawyers say more needs to be done in terms of building capabilities to ensure compliance. BY NIMITT DIXIT Image: Andrey_Popov/Shutterstock.com
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