Unemployed workers refuse to work in retail industry

A report in the Straits Times said that there are 70,000 unemployed workers in Singapore, but they do not want to work in the retail industry. The employers have to look for foreign workers.

Why?

I think that they find it difficult to cope with the difficult Singaporean customers. Some customers are quite demanding. They have high and unreasonable expectation of service and are not forgiving of mistakes. It is quite stressful to deal with them.

Many years ago, NTUC Income had difficult to recruit people to work in the frontline to serve customers - i.e. at our call center, service center or branches.

We manage to solve this problem, and are now able to get people to work at these places and to stay there. We still have difficulty, but not as much as other organisations.

What is our strategy? If you are in Human Resource management and are interested to know, send an e-mail to me at tankl@income.coop.