At the NDC, the labour movement set a new target of 1.5 million members “with an aspirational timeline of 2025 but would be happy to achieve it by 2030”.

To achieve this, Brother Chee Meng highlighted three areas that need innovation: union model, membership model and training model; with digitalisation underlining all these.

Innovating Union Business Model

“We need to innovate and expand our thinking, explore new possibilities, embrace new experiments and try out new ways of doing things on the ground,” he said.

One idea mooted was to set up a job security taskforce to look into protecting workers at the pre-retrenchment stage. The taskforce will propose solutions to reduce the window between retrenchment and job placements.

Innovating Membership Model

The possibility of a family membership model – providing a suite of holistic products and services tailored to meet the different lifestyles and evolving life cycles needs of the workers will be explored.

In the pipeline, a plot of land will be set aside for NTUC to build a ‘Downtown South’ resort on Pulau Brani, as was announced by PM Lee during his National Day Rally speech. It was a strong signal of appreciation from the government to all workers that ‘every worker matters’.

Brother Chee Meng also spoke about “meeting the needs of members and importantly, consolidating, strategising and leveraging our social enterprises’ strengths; clustered to bring new value to our members”. An example would be a one-stop hub that has been piloted in Kampung Admiralty, which includes childcare, eldercare, hawker centre and supermarket facilities run by NTUC’s social enterprises.

Innovating Training Model

NTUC will continue to accelerate the formation of Company Training Committees (CTCs) with a view of forming 1,000 CTCs reaching 330,000 workers by 2022.

Digitalisation

In order to innovate and translate the above into tangible outcomes, NTUC will tap on digitalisation, harnessing the power of digital technology such as big data, artificial intelligence and more to meet workers’ training needs.

“In 2019, in this NDC, may it be at this seminar that we will set a new foundation for the Labour Movements’ success forward. Let us dare, let us do,” Brother Chee Meng said.