The Government of Singapore will make adjustments in its foreign worker policies with an aim to resolve the issue of competition for jobs among the locals. With the city-state still in the process of recovering from the adverse effects of the pandemic, Singapore is trying to allay the fears of the local population with regard to jobs being grabbed by foreign talent.
If the tweaking goes well, the city-state will be able to continue to employ overseas talent and immigrants as it has been doing all this while.
While in 1990, the percentage of non-residents in Singapore was 10 per cent, the figure has gone up to almost 30 per cent of the city-state’s population of 5.7 million over the years.
The Government has been making foreign worker policies stricter for some time now, with a focus on pushing local hiring. It has already raised the salary limits for the issuance of work permits.
For the first time in about 17 years, Singapore saw a dip of 0.3 per cent in the number of people living in the city-state. This happened due to the rise in unemployment and mobility restrictions owing to the pandemic.
The tweaking of foreign worker policies is expected to positively affect the quality of foreign workers in the city-state.
In 2020, there were reportedly about 1,77,000 employment pass holders in Singapore, of which about 4,200 were intra-corporate transferees or ICTs. Of these, around 500 were from India.
