Preferential Flexployment

 

 

 

In 2013, a number of us from my organisation coined the term "Preferential Flexployment" as a viable alternative to structured forms of employment in Singapore (we skilfully played on the terms flexible employment, combined them to create flexployment! Get it? No?)

As mentioned by the newscaster (smugly I might add), it is essentially the idea of part time employment with greater flexibility. Take for example Bakery Hearts, a Social Entrepreneurship wing if you may call it as such (you can find out about Bakery Hearts here, here and here). 

As discussed in the video clip, some of the main difficulties plaguing low income families in their attempts to find employment surround their need to be able to attend to their responsibilities as mothers, as well as responding to various unplanned events that affect their lives. In the case of the participants in the programme, their social positions as women put them in further disadvantage when trying to find employment. 

Issues include:

• Influenced by culturally dominant discourses where women are expected to care for the children and the elderly at home.
• Limited access to appropriate employment options (for e.g. women I have worked with discuss about acts of micro aggressions made in men-dominated work environments)
• Limited skills gained as women tend to have been out of the working environment for some time due to the points mentioned above. 

In Singapore, the dominant discourse, is that ultimate you would have to help yourself. Financial assistance and support comes in to provide you the added boost that you would need in order for you to get back on your own two feet. And logically, "getting back on your" own two feet would usually involve you having to find employment. I am personally ok with this philosophy: for one it addresses the oft mentioned fear of over dependence on welfare (and Singapore's "ill-fated" slippery slope slide into welfarism), but more importantly for me, it is consistent with my belief that everyone can be meaningfully engaged as active participants of the economy (I will discuss this later). My concern lies in how this philosophy is currently practiced.  

To put things in a simplified (albeit reductionist) manner, the formula for financial assistance intervention can be summed as such:

• The family is assessed on whether income exceeds expenditure
• If income exceeds expenditure, and assessment is done on whether expenditure is made on a "need" or a "want". (for e.g. paying for electricity is a need, cable tv is a want. But would going for an outing with your family be a need or want?)
• The family is assessed on whether there are employable members. Those who are employable, should thus be employed. 
• Assistance either scaffolds the family's income, or is provided temporarily until the "needs and Wants" issue is addressed, and when all employable family members are fully employed. 

For example if a two parent nuclear family is not able to survive on the income of a single breadwinner, alone, the expectation is for the "employable" member of the family to eventually find a job and increase the family income. Herein lies the difficulty, especially when the expectation is for a person who is unemployed to find at least a part time job. In a qualitative study we did with the participants of the Bakery Hearts programme, we identified a  perceived gap from a state of unemployment to even a state of part time employment (where employees had to attend a structured work environment), because of the various barriers the women from lower income families faced. I had worked with someone who told me about how, due to the various stressors she experienced in her life, she lived her life on a "day to day" basis. Social Economic status brings with it the added family related stressors such as marital and child behavioural concerns and issues, and hence the magnitude of the challenges one might face in their quest for financial stability. 

In such situations, we can easily move into our own middle class perceptions of how unmotivated our clients are, and how ill-adept they are in coping with their jobs. Work is work, we say. It's all about meeting bottom lines, KPIs and getting profit, so you need to work hard. Even two years after espousing the benefits of flexployment, the dominant discourse is still "this person must find a full time job, we cannot support them if they can't find a job without CPF", and at a recent platform, I was shocked to hear a presentation that talked about how most of the difficulties faced by low income families lay in "factors inherent in the family system" that made them unmotivated to find employment!

The realities of caregiving was recently accentuated for me, when my ever dependable main-caregiver-primary-attachment-figure-to-my-son wifey went on a work trip for just three days. Suddenly I was placed in the role of a single parent to an active toddler, who still had to manage his usual working hours. I found that being committed to the job was difficult, where I was blessed to have reliable childcare with my mom. Even then, putting Fikri (my boy) to sleep and entertaining to his late night requests to watch Thomas the Tank Engine took a heavy toll on me during an exceptionally tiring workweek.

This experience probably was not even close to what the people I work with experience. Usually they would not have extended family who could assist in caregiving, placing their children in childcare or student care. This arrangement provides its own share of challenges, where you have to pick your children up at a specific time.  

Preferential flexployment could then be a possible goal we could work towards. Imagine a world where employers are committed towards being socially responsible over their usual profit making goals in allowing flexible employment for less privileged groups and communities, for e.g. women and the elderly. A world where an older adult can still experience being a meaningfully engaged member of the community where he is able to work flexibly, but also be able to obtain financial assistance that scaffolds his total income. Where families are able to still be responsive to life's various exigencies, and yet not be deemed incompetent in their work. 

The current social narrative is that "the real world is all about numbers and making profit", but perhaps there is a possibility to believe that this real world still has space for compassion towards making a living in socially conscientious manner to better provide creative employment options to those who need it.