Today I asked the Minister for Manpower whether there are plans to review the Employment Pass (EP) scheme to introduce a new dependency ratio ceiling for the bottom half of income earners among EP holders to encourage employers to enhance their Singaporean workforce by hiring and training more Singaporean talent and transferring skills from their foreign employees to the local workforce.
In short, the Minister said no.
I asked two follow-up questions:
“Since the Ministry is not imposing any quotas for Employment Pass (EP) holders, will the Ministry consider having fixed term EPs, which cannot be renewed after they expire?
This way, employers will be incentivised to hire and train Singaporeans to fill those positions when the EP expires, and there would be more knowledge and skills transferred to Singaporeans. This is a proposal that the Member for Aljunied GRC, Mr Leon Perera, raised in Oct 2020.
Second, even with the Compass Framework, a candidate can attain the passing score even with zero points from the Diversity criteria, which in any case is quite a low bar because it only looks at the share of candidate’s own nationality among the firm’s PMETs.
Can MOM tighten the Compass Framework to require the candidate to obtain at least 10 points from each of the four Foundational criteria and a minimum of 50 points overall?
This will ensure that companies give consideration to all the criteria to ensure a more level playing field for Singaporean PMETs during the hiring process.”
