IMPORTATION OF LABOUR

Supplementary Labour Scheme (SLS)

The SLS allows employers with genuine difficulties in finding suitable staff locally to import workers at technician level or below. However, to ensure the priority of local workers in employment and to safeguard their salaries and benefits, employers must accord priority to fill available job vacancies with local workers and make active efforts to train up local workers for the vacancies. Administered by the Labour Department, the SLS operates on two cardinal principles:

1. local workers must be given priority in filling job vacancies available in the job market; and
   
2. employers who are genuinely unable to recruit local workers to fill their job vacancies can be allowed to import workers.

Safeguards have been in place under the SLS to ensure that employers do provide job offers to local workers first before their applications for imported workers will be processed further. Sanctions will also be taken by the Government against unscrupulous employers who are found to have breached the conditions of the Scheme.

Imported workers under the SLS are required to be paid at least median monthly wages of local workers in comparable positions and be accorded no less favourable treatment as that enjoyed by local workers under the labour laws. They are only allowed to work for the employers and in the positions, and for the duration of employment as stipulated under their employment contracts, and they must return to their place of origin on expiry of their contracts.

Under the SLS, the approval granted to an employer to import workers would not be automatically renewed. An employer who wishes to continue employing imported workers upon the expiry of their contracts are required to submit an application afresh to the Labour Department, and the application will be considered on its own merits.

There are no industry-specific quotas under the SLS. All applications are considered on a case-by-case basis. To ensure priority of employment to local workers, each application has to go through the newspaper advertising procedure, a mandatory local recruitment period at the Labour Department, and the arrangement of tailor-made retraining courses by the Employees Retraining Board if appropriate. The SLS is being monitored by the Labour Advisory Board in that each application is to be considered by the Board before it is submitted to the Government for approval or otherwise.

With effect from 1 August 2008, the Government has suspended the obligation on employers of imported labour to pay the Employees Retraining Levy for a period of five years.

For enquiry, you may contact the application office of the SLS, the Job Matching Centre at 2150 6363.