Guest of Honour Mr Speaker, Sir.

Special Guest Nominated Member of Parliament Associate Professor Razwana Begum

Award Winners

Ladies and Gentlemen

A very warm welcome to this year’s Security Officers’ Day Awards. This year’s awards ceremony is especially jubilant because it is the 10th year of SAS recognising our security officers for your great work in keeping Singapore safe and secure. We introduced the Golden Circle Best Employer Awards last year to help security employees identify the best employers in the industry, and this year we are happy to introduce awards for the best auxiliary police officers as well, to ensure we are inclusive of all officers in the private security industry.

Over the years, SAS has been working hard with the tripartite partners to improve your livelihoods and working conditions. The Progressive Wage Model has increased security officers’ wages to above the Employment Act’s threshold for lower wage workers. Security officers are now the highest paid workers across all the PWM sectors. We have also changed the way the wage floor is calculated – from a basic + overtime model to a basic equals gross model. This allows officers to negotiate for better working hours at the same prescribed wages or more.

Working hours, however, continue to be too long. I have raised in Parliament and elsewhere – that we need to not only reduce but to regularise the working days of our officers. It is difficult to reduce shift durations to 8 hours, but we must aim to reduce working days until officers work 5 days work weeks instead of 6 days work weeks or the 5-6-5-6 pattern.

Of course, this has to be done gradually and there are several reasons why. First, as you know we already have a very severe shortage in manpower. When we reduce working days, we will need more manpower to top up for the additional days off, or alternatively, we will need clients to take up more technology so that we don’t have to deploy so much manpower.

Second, the cost of deploying officers will go up significantly because of the cost of the additional reliefs to cover the additional days off. This means that clients will have to pay much more for officers. Again, this can be dealt with by clients taking up technology in such a way that less officers need to be deployed at each site.

But of course we also know, that there are situations where the headcount is reduced but the jobscope remains the same. So less officers are deployed, but they are expected to do the same amount of work. So more work for each officer. So we need to ensure that technology takes off some of the work of officers and also helps make you more productive so that you don’t have to manually take up all the work of the reduced manpower.

So how do we achieve this gradual reduction in working days. I have a suggestion that I would like all of you, our security officers, to consider raising with your employers and negotiating with them. Ask your employers that for every year of service with them, from 2024, to reduce your working days by 1 day every month, while adhering to each year’s PWM wage floor. This way employers are rewarding loyalty and you are getting lower working days and working hours every year. If we have a sufficient number of security agencies willing to commit to this – to offer this as a loyalty scheme for their officers – then we will be able to achieve across the board – lower numbers of working days year on year, even as the PWM pushes your wages up.

So if we give and take, with one day reduction every year, by 2030, we should see most officers working 5 day work weeks. This approach will be gradual so the agencies and buyers can tahan the increases in costs because it will be over a few years – and it will also allow clients to consider and put in place technology that can reduce the amount of headcount needed.

I also call on security agencies to find means and ways, like the one I suggested above to reduce our officers’ working hours. This requires a whole of industry effort.

Security officers are already the highest paid of the PWM sectors. Once we reduce working days, you will be the higherest paid PWM workers. So can we work towards this?

What I ask from you is that as we reduce the working hours and increase your pay, we also must ensure that the quality of our service does not suffer. In fact it must become better.

On SAS’ part, we are the trade association representing the employers. We will encourage our members to adopt this scheme so that they can give you better working conditions in a sustainable manner. In this regard, I am happy to announce that from next year we will include a new criteria in the Golden Circle Best Employer Awards – whether the agency has schemes to reduce working hours for security officers. We hope that this will encourage an industry-wide movement for a collective effort to reduce working hours overall.

We have also revamped our certifications programme to recognise the different pathways that security officers can progress to or branch out into, which we will be launching today. These are: the Certified Controller, Certified Protection Officer, and the Certified Security Manager. Do look out for these

As I mentioned, SAS represents the employers in the industry. But we also know and our members know that they are made up of all of you – the officers – and we know we will be nowhere without you. So we will continue to advocate for you, we will continue to defend you including against incidents of abuse, and we will continue to uphold your pride and the dignity of the work that you do.

Finally I would like to thank all our generous sponsors and our co-organiser TP-SII for contributing to today’s meaningful event!
I wish all of you a very happy Security Officers Day, and once again I congratulate all of the award recipients here today. You are truly the stars of our industry.

Hormat Security!