WP proposes wage subsidies for hiring new grads in apprenticeships amid AI concerns

He said that if young graduate workers are not able to gain the necessary work experience, Singapore will never develop the reservoir of experienced professionals that its economy requires.

“Fresh graduates need stronger support to get past the taxiway and onto the runway. We need to give our youth more pathways to attain real experience, confidence, and foundations for the future,” Mr Singh added.

On the party’s proposal of targeted and temporary wage subsidies to reduce the risks for companies hiring new graduates in apprenticeship roles, he said this support will better ensure that Singapore’s young people are not left behind as industries adapt to technological disruption.

Mr Singh also called for better protection for all workers, given the anxieties over potential displacement in a volatile global economy, and reiterated WP’s proposal for a redundancy insurance scheme.

The scheme had previously been rebuffed by the ruling PAP, which said a mandatory scheme would come at a financial cost to both employees and employers.

The PAP said it was better to focus support on workers who may be most in need of it after facing unemployment shocks, such as through the SkillsFuture Jobseeker Support scheme. One of the scheme’s eligibility criteria is an income cap of $5,000.

In his message, Mr Singh said the redundancy insurance scheme must extend to all income levels to “provide a meaningful cushion against financial pressure”.

He said that with restructuring exercises and retrenchments increasingly likely, WP’s proposed scheme would provide an “automatic stabiliser for the economy, ensuring that workers can sustain their families while they look for new work”.

“Moreover, if our people do not have such a strong safety net taking care of their basic needs, we cannot expect them to be innovative and risk-taking – the exact qualities we want in such a transformative era.”