Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower set up a “Platform Workers Injury Compensation Network” to help implement a work injury compensation regime for self-employed platform workers. The move follows the government’s acceptance of all 12 recommendations from the Advisory Committee on Platform Workers in November 2022. Those recommendations included ensuring adequate financial protection in case of work injury for the workers and not classifying the workers as employees.

The Ministry of Manpower announced the network on 3 February.

The network will look into the process for reporting working injuries, claims processing for exceptional scenarios — such as when platform workers are injured while working for more than one platform company at the same time — and how to determine platform workers’ earnings to compute income loss compensation.

Taking part in the network are insurance companies, the National Trades Union Congress and the Singapore National Employers Federation as well as work service platforms and other companies such as Gojek, Grab Singapore, Deliveroo and Amazon.

“Platform work is a complex and new area that has no established consensus or norms. All platform workers provide valuable services and spend a disproportionate amount of time on the roads and face significant risks,” said Dr. Tan See Leng, minister for manpower, in a speech on 3 February. “It is imperative, it is important, to make sure that all our platform workers are not left in a precarious situation as the platform ecosystem continues to evolve and platform services become the norm.”

The 12 recommendations by the Advisory Committee on Platform Workers are:

1. Platform workers should not be classified as employees.
2. Require platform companies that exert a significant level of management control over platform workers to provide them with certain basic protections.
3. Require platform companies to provide the same scope and level of work injury compensation as employees’ entitlement under the Work Injury Compensation Act.
4. Require platform company that the platform worker was working for at the point of injury to be responsible for compensation, based on the platform worker’s total earnings from the platform sector in which the injury was sustained.
5. Determine sector-specific definitions of when a platform worker is considered “at work.”
6. Retain the strengths of the current WICA regime, including the provision of work injury compensation insurance through the existing open and competitive insurance market.
7. Align Central Provident Fund contribution rates of platform companies and platform workers with that of employers and employees respectively; this is required for platform workers who are aged below 30 in the first year of implementation.
8. Allow older cohorts of platform workers who are aged 30 and above in the first year of implementation to opt in to the full CPF contribution regime.
9. Require platform companies to collect platform workers’ CPF contributions to help workers make timely contributions.
10. Phase in the increased CPF contributions over five years unless major economic disruption warrants a longer timeline. To ease the impact, the government may wish to consider providing support for platform workers and the form this should take.
11. Give platform workers the right to seek formal representation through a new representation framework designed for Platform Workers.
12. Set up a Tripartite Workgroup on Representation for Platform Workers (TWG) to co-create the new representation framework.