Our partner Donovan Cheah was interviewed on radio station BFM 89.9 (The Business Station) yesterday, where he spoke about the Employment Insurance System Bill 2017 (“Bill“) that was recently tabled before Parliament. The Bill, if passed, will require both employers and employees to contribute to an insurance scheme which will be used to provide allowances and incentives to certain categories of unemployed workers. The proposed allowances include job search allowance, training allowance, early re-employment allowance and reduction in income allowance.
“There are some general concerns about the [Employment Insurance Scheme] that it is actually a scheme where a majority of the workforce is funding a minority of the workforce. In reality the unemployment rate is not significantly high, so there are a lot of arguments from the employers’ side and even from some employees that they are really going to be contributing to a scheme and taking away from their monthly salary for benefits which they may potentially never have to claim… If you look at the contribution rates from a ‘per employee per month’ basis, while the amounts are not too high, it has to be remembered that this sum will be multipled across the number of employees in the business. So employers with a large workforce may also be quite rightly concerned about escalating payroll costs.”- Donovan Cheah
Listen to the full interview below:
To read more about the Bill, read our previous article here.
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