One of the aims of Future of Singapore website is to curate articles that are of interest to Singapore and Singaporeans.
15 May 2026
Here’s the article about retrenchment in Singapore:
https://www.straitstimes.com/business/hm-lays-off-staff-in-singapore-shifts-regional-headquarters-to-malaysia
This is what Bertha Henson has to say about it (15 May 2026)
What the union said about fashion retailer H&M’s retrenchment exercise was telling, less for what it said than for what it could not say. It is also why the NTUC has been pushing for mandatory advance notice of retrenchment. To put it bluntly, its original collective bargaining raison d’être is struggling to fit into a tripartite framework conceived when Singapore did not have as many PME jobs, new-fangled industries and companies headquartered outside the country.
For older workers, the stakes in this debate are especially high. Singaporeans in their 50s and 60s who are retrenched face the longest re-employment journeys, the steepest pay cuts when they do find new work, and the greatest exposure to the gap between what is in their CPF and what retirement actually costs. Advance warning before they get their pink slip would make for a softer landing in so many ways.
To recap: So the Swedish multinational told its staff on 11 May that it had decided to move its regional headquarters from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, axing about 78 of 256 positions.
Four days later, the Singapore Manual and Mercantile Workers’ Union (SMMWU) noted that “H&M Singapore is a non-unionised company, but there are workers who might be members of the SMMWU”. Union secretary-general Andy Lim said it “stands ready to offer assistance and resources to help our members and workers transition to new job opportunities and provide financial support if needed”. He added that “all companies, including non-unionised ones, are encouraged to work with the union to provide better support for workers during periods of transition”.
This is a careful, even cautious, statement — and that caution is itself the story.
Unionised company versus unionised company
First, note the distinction. A company is unionised when a trade union has been formally recognised by the employer as the collective bargaining counterparty for a defined group of employees. Only then can the union negotiate a Collective Agreement, demand consultation on retrenchment, dispute selection criteria, or take the company to the Industrial Arbitration Court if the terms are breached.
A worker, separately, can be an individual union member without their workplace being unionised. It’s just like joining any association – pay a subscription and get NTUC benefits, such as job search support, training subsidies, financial help, NTUC LinkPoints and FairPrice rebates. They do not, through that individual membership alone, gain a collective voice at their workplace. NTUC channels this kind of individual membership through what it calls the General Branch and the U Associate scheme — vehicles designed precisely for workers whose own companies are not unionised.
This is the difference SMMWU’s first sentence flagged when it said H&M Singapore is not unionised “but there are workers who might be members of the SMMWU”.
What a unionised company looks like in retrenchment
In a unionised company, the union has real instruments in the form of the Collective Agreement, including the right to require advance notice of retrenchment before affected employees are told. The norm is one month. This is so both sides can work out a retrenchment package they can agree upon, and the mechanics of retrenchment and placement. The unionized everance benchmark — typically one month’s salary for every year of service — also sit above the usual market range of two weeks to one month. For an older worker with two or three decades at the same company, that difference can amount to a year or more of pay.
When Yeo Hiap Seng announced 25 retrenchments at its Senoko plant in March 2026, the Food, Drinks and Allied Workers Union (FDAWU) could state, plainly, that retrenchment packages would be provided “in line with its Collective Agreement and unionised norms” . The package is anchored in a certified contract and the union can go to the Industrial Arbitration Court if terms are breached.
Of course, employers have sometimes disregarded this with impunity.
Take Lazada and Twelve Cupcakes. Both are unionized yet both bypassed the union when the moment came. NTUC and the affiliated union (FDAWU) called Lazada’s move to retrench 100 workers with consultation “extremely disappointing” and “unacceptable”. Twelve Cupcakes, which informed FDAWU only on the same day it closed and let 80 staff go without paying their October salaries was given a stern warning by MOM.
In both cases, FDAWU could negotiate after the fact — enhanced packages at Lazada, partial salary recovery at Twelve Cupcakes — only because the bargaining relationship existed in their Collective Agreements, even when the firms initially ignored it.
Here’s another involving a non-unionised company, Agoda. The travel platform went further than simply bypassing a union — it included clauses in its severance letters threatening forfeiture of severance pay if affected workers sought help from unions or government agencies. NTUC and the Singapore Industrial and Services Employees’ Union (SISEU) said they were “appalled” and called on MOM to investigate; Agoda subsequently apologised and retracted the clauses.
What the three examples show: In unionised firms, the union has a contractual hook even when the rules are breached. In non-unionised firms, it has none — and some employers, given the latitude, will actively try to silence workers from approaching it.
None of these levers exist at H&M Singapore. What the union can offer is the support available to individual members through NTUC’s General Branch through job matching, career coaching, training subsidies, hardship support. Useful, but only after the fact.
The H&M case is not an outlier. Think Agoda.
The reason is structural. In Singapore, companies do not have to agree to unionisation in the first place. Under the Industrial Relations Act, a union must first be recognised by the employer before it can bargain collectively. A union has to do the organising work first, by signing up enough members inside a workplace to credibly serve a recognition claim. The employer then has seven working days to grant recognition or notify MOM that it disputes the claim. If disputed, MOM may, at its discretion, call a secret ballot. There is no automatic right to one, and no penalty for an employer that simply remains non-unionised.
For new sectors and new companies, the organising step is the hard part. Tech firms, professional services partnerships, regional headquarters of multinationals, financial services outside a few unionised banks, fast-growing SMEs are workplaces with no union tradition, often PME-heavy, with transient staff who do not see themselves as part of a labour movement. There is also the Act’s s exclusion of senior PMEs from collective representation. BTW, there is no publicised case in recent memory of an NTUC-affiliated union serving a contested recognition claim that went MOM.
Recognition in Singapore happens by agreement or it does not happen — the contentious statutory route, though it exists in law, is not in practical use. The labour movement’s strategy is to invite cooperation rather than force the issue. For multinationals shaped by jurisdictions where union recognition is more contested, the path of least resistance is simply to stay out, and there is no real cost to doing so.
Why you are not “covered”
What has worsened the situation is that a growing share of Singapore’s workforce sits outside the reach of collective bargaining.
The numbers tell the story. Around 1,607 establishments in Singapore are unionised. Trade union density across the workforce is 34.6 per cent. But Collective Agreements in force cover only about 154,000 employees, against an NTUC individual-membership base of more than 1.4 million.
In case you are confused by the terms, here’s what they mean.
An establishment is a single workplace, like a factory, an office, a depot. A large company with multiple sites can therefore count as several establishments. The 1,607 figure refers to workplaces, not corporate entities; the number of distinct unionised employers is somewhat lower.
Trade union density is the share of the total employed workforce who are members of a trade union — including, importantly, individual NTUC members in non-unionised firms. It is not the share of workplaces that have a recognised union; that share, measured against Singapore’s roughly 300,000-plus active business entities, would be well under one per cent.
The composition of unionised establishments is also revealing. Unionisation in Singapore is concentrated in the country’s older, traditional sectors: manufacturing, the public sector and statutory boards, hospitality and F&B (FDAWU), and parts of healthcare. These are sectors where unionisation took root in the 1960s and 70s and has carried through.
What is not well-represented in the unionised establishment count is the bulk of modern Singapore: the regional headquarters of foreign multinationals, the professional services firms (law, consulting, accounting), the tech sector, the financial services sector outside a few unionised banks, fast-growing SMEs, and the start-up ecosystem. The 1,607-establishment figure is, in effect, a snapshot of an industrial structure that is at least a generation old.
The gap between personal union membership (1.4 million) and workplace unionisation (about 154,000 covered by CAs) is the hole into which workers like H&M’s regional support staff fall.
Of the professionals, managers and executives who make up close to half of Singapore’s workforce, only 10 to 15 per centare union members, according to Business Times. The Industrial Relations Act excludes from collective representation those PMEs whose duties involve hiring, firing, or access to confidential information.
For multinationals with regional headquarters in Singapore dominated by exactly such workers, the result is a structural mismatch: the workers most exposed to offshore restructuring decisions are the ones least covered by the country’s collective bargaining architecture.
Hence the advance notice proposal
Which is why NTUC is pushing for mandatory advance notice of retrenchment, instead of the current rule to alert MOM with five working days of the affected worker being told. In the H&M case, the company appears to have met the five-day deadline; that is precisely the problem. Career bridges, redeployment, training conversion, union-mediated negotiation on selection or severance — all begin belatedly rather than weeks in advance.
NTUC’s proposal moves the notification point upstream — and, crucially, extends the statutory advance obligation to the relevant union, not just MOM.
Where a Collective Agreement exists, the “one month before” norm is already supposed to apply, but Lazada and Twelve Cupcakes show how easily that can be bypassed. Where no CA exists at all, as at H&M Singapore or Agoda, there is no advance obligation of any kind. A statutory advance-notice rule would close both gaps at once and would, for the first time, give workers in non-unionised firms a piece of the protection that until now has only been available through collective bargaining.
Not surprisingly, the Singapore National Employers Federation has pushed back, warning of “significant implementation challenges and uncertain benefits” such as the operational reality that restructuring decisions for regional offices are often made overseas at very short notice. MOM has said it will review the proposal as part of a broader Employment Act review.
While Singapore’s tripartite model has delivered industrial peace, the H&M moment exposes the question the model now has to answer. When the next regional headquarters consolidates out of Singapore, when the next AI-driven restructuring eliminates a category of PME roles, when the next non-unionised employer notifies workers on a Monday and MOM on a Friday — what does meaningful labour representation actually consist of?
What will protecting the worker, not the job, mean?
19th May 2026
Bertha post 19th May 2026:
This is an example of a company here with its HQ based elsewhere which has to fall in line with corporate instructions. About 250 people retrenched – which is not small even though it is less than 10 per cent of its workforce. It is NOT unionised. The affiliate union takes looks after the sector is the Singapore Manual and Mercantile Workers Union. But even not unionised and no collective agreement, it seems various parties are okay with the two months notice period for workers and severance pay. The union was told one day early (before workers I presume) so not after the fact as is the case for most others. Amazon says it will try and fit workers into other roles in the company if possible. Which raises the question: Is there a Company Training Committee (CTC) set up between company and union to over see this? I am making this point because while the NTUC is making much progress unionizing companies, it is trying to get a foot in the door by setting up CTCs. So it working in this case or not? I also say this because taxpayers money go into this, and NTUC is asking for more. It doesn’t seem to me that any journalist has enough expertise to cover unions properly…without press releases.
20th May 2026
In the last three years (2023–2026), several prominent companies have announced plans to relocate either their regional headquarters or specific manufacturing and production capabilities from Singapore to Malaysia.
Driven largely by rising overhead costs, rental pressures, and labour constraints in Singapore—coupled with Malaysia’s lower cost base and the development of the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone (JS-SEZ)—these companies include:
1. H&M (Hennes & Mauritz)
- The Move: In May 2026, the Swedish fashion giant announced it was restructuring its Asia-Pacific operations and relocating its Southeast Asia regional headquarters from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
- The Impact: This shift resulted in cutting about 30% of its regional support workforce, affecting close to 80 roles primarily based in Singapore, as part of a move to a leaner commercial operating model.
2. Asia Pacific Breweries Singapore (Tiger Beer)
- The Move: In March 2026, the Heineken-owned maker of Tiger Beer announced that it will phase out and cease large-scale brewing operations at its historic Tuas brewery in Singapore by the end of 2027.
- The Impact: Large-scale production is being shifted to existing regional hubs in Malaysia and Vietnam to leverage lower production costs and better scale. While around 130 Singapore-based roles are being cut, the company is restructuring the Singapore site to focus strictly on regional logistics, corporate capabilities, and high-tech innovation.
3. Yeo Hiap Seng (Yeo’s)
- The Move: In March 2026, the home-grown Singaporean beverage icon announced it was consolidating its canned drinks manufacturing processes by moving them entirely to Malaysia.
- The Impact: The transition resulted in the retrenchment of 25 staff at its Senoko facility in Singapore. Moving production to its automated plants in Johor and Selangor allowed the company to optimize its manufacturing efficiency, while the Singapore office was downsized to function primarily as a corporate headquarters and a localized cross-border logistics hub.
4. Pegasus Co., Ltd.
- The Move: In April 2026, the manufacturing and industrial sales company established a new primary sales subsidiary base, Pegasus United Asia, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
- The Impact: After maintaining a major presence in Singapore for 45 years, the company shifted its structural focus to Malaysia as a proactive investment to build a more flexible, cost-effective, and swift foundation for its Asia-wide business operations.
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