SINGAPORE — When an unethical company was putting pressure on its workers to resign during an economic downturn in 1986 in order to avoid paying retrenchment benefits, Mr Lim Boon Heng, who was then the assistant secretary-general of the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC), called for a strike.
He got blessings from then NTUC chief Ong Teng Cheong to hold the strike after the company refused to sit at the negotiation table.
Mr Lim, formerly a Cabinet minister and NTUC’s chief, was speaking during a panel discussion at an event on Wednesday commemorating the 100th birth anniversary of the late founding prime minister of Singapore. Moderated by NTUC’s president Mary Liew, the 90-minute discussion covered the panellists’ anecdotes of their personal interactions with the former prime minister, his view on tripartism and how the tripartite relationship can be developed going forward.
Lee had briefed him that the “Singapore software” had two main aspects. The first was to achieve economic competitiveness, because “if the economy is not competitive, all of us will be poor together”. “If you get the dynamic wrong, you’ll be in trouble… you will not be able to strengthen the trust among the Government, employers and the workers,” he added.
“The questions for young people would be, ‘What can the union do for me?’ So we have to address that point first,” he said. “So we have therefore structurally denied workers with higher education the possibility of joining the union. Ms Liew said that on its part, NTUC has continuously been innovating and reinventing itself to keep relevant and be able to serve the needs of workers.
“In the landmark 1955 General Election, he chose to stand in Tanjong Pagar because it was a working-class area, which had the largest proportion of workers, wage-earners, small traders, and the lowest proportion of wealthy landlords,” Dr Tan said.
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