THE labour movement is joining hands with a group of manpower experts and academics to form a new research community, and is considering funding some of its projects.
The NTUC Labour Alliance co-laB (LAB) is a first-of-its-kind initiative by the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC). It comprises 50 members including academics, practitioners and researchers focused on advancing labour research.
Patrick Tay, NTUC’s assistant secretary-general, said that LAB’s objective is to bring together people who are passionate about issues faced by workers so that they can form partnerships to carry out joint projects or sandbox ideas.
The alliance sprang out of an informal network that started during the Covid-19 pandemic, he said, adding that these members had worked with NTUC on a series of projects and research pieces. Many of these projects were published in the first and second volumes of the Singapore Labour Journal.
Tay said NTUC involved partners from the institutes of higher learning and think tanks as it felt that it “may not have the capacity to do very, very deep research”.
“We saw this meeting of minds. Researchers and academia do so much work, and put lots of grey matter into it, but (face) the frustration of not having it translate on the ground to have impact,” Tay said. “So we provide that link and the bridge.”
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He added that labour movement is prepared to provide funding for meaningful projects that are not able to secure research funding, although he did not disclose the NTUC’s budget.
The research agenda may be set by NTUC or any of the members.
“We come to some consensus on how we can frame it,” said Tay. “We want to benefit workers … so if there are things that
