Economics professor Walter Theseira, from the Singapore University of Social Sciences, said it was important to standardize telework and flexible working arrangements. Workers should not have their careers hampered by adopting such measures.
“With a badly accepted policy, there will generally be differences in how workers who work from home and workers who do not are evaluated at work, and this will mean that families will feel that the choice of these options will set them back. their career,” he said.
However, mandating an agreement with the WFH won’t be easy, said Christopher Gee, senior fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies.
“It won’t be so simple to set up for everyone – nurses, for example, or people whose jobs are linked to their workplace. Knowledge workers have the most flexibility and are the most able to telecommute, but even for them it will be difficult to impose something,” he added.
Knowledge workers include engineers, doctors, and others whose primary capital is knowledge, as opposed to “hands-on” workers like artisans and “heart” workers like therapists.
Professor Theseira said that for jobs where remote working is not possible, the question is whether there should be compensating benefits for them.
The marriage and parenthood survey showed that married couples want to have more children. Although half of the 3,017 married respondents, aged 21 to 45, either had one or no children, 92% said they wanted to have two or more children.
It was similar to the results of previous surveys conducted in 2016 and 2012.
The top three reasons cited by married respondents for not wanting to have more children were the financial cost, having enough children already, and the stress of raising children.
As for the 2,848 single people surveyed, the top three reasons cited were the high cost of raising children, lack of time and/or energy to care for children, and uncertainty about future income.
In a recent commentary published in The Straits Times, Assistant Professor Tan Poh Lin of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and Mr Gee suggested having a universal childcare and kindergarten system, with the government subsidizing it. strongly.
“Just as we have a compulsory public provision of primary education, we could also have heavily state-subsidised early education and childcare,” Mr Gee told The Sunday Times.