New centre opens in Tampines for home employees, employers to hunt assist

SINGAPORE – Migrant home employees and their employers now have a brand new venue the place they will search assist or recommendation from the Centre for Home Workers (CDE) over work points.

The CDEConnect centre, positioned at workplace complicated Revenue at Tampines Junction, formally opened on Sunday (July 24).

It joins one other centre at 75 Pasir Panjang Street – which opened in mid-2019 – as a spot for CDE to supply assist to migrant home employees and their employers. CDE is an initiative by the Nationwide Trades Union Congress.

Each venues are areas on weekends for employees to relaxation and recharge by means of leisure actions, which embrace competition celebrations and handicraft workshops.

The centres are additionally venues the place CDE interviews first-time migrant home employees to assess how they’re adjusting to residing and dealing in Singapore, on behalf of the Ministry of Manpower (MOM).

The interviews are carried out in-person, within the employees’ native language and inside six months after they begin work.

“Since 2017, CDE has carried out over 60,000 such interviews with migrant home employees,” mentioned MOM in an announcement on Sunday.

The interviews have been performed nearly from April 2020 as a result of Covid-19 pandemic, however have returned to an in-person format from the center of this month.

An MOM spokesman advised the media that greater than 24,000 employees have been interviewed by CDE final yr.

Frequent points raised in the course of the interviews embrace the late cost of salaries, unlawful deployment of employees by their employers, and efficiency of family chores in an unsafe method.

Typically, CDE will first test with the employers if there had been a misunderstanding or miscommunication between them and the employees.

If the case is deemed critical, CDE will inform MOM or the police.

The spokesman additionally mentioned there are plans to start out the following part of the initiative by the top of this yr. This includes interviewing the employees a second time inside a yr of them beginning work.

At Sunday’s occasion, Minister of State for Manpower Gan Siow Huang mentioned the interviews will assist make sure that points confronted by employees are recognized and addressed early.