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Different gigs, different digital skills
Digital skills are a must, especially for higher-skilled own-account workers
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Carol Soon, Neo Yee Win, Beverly Tan, and Chew Han Ei
On June 28, Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong launched the Forward Singapore exercise. The one-year-long exercise will see the Government engaging Singaporeans on six key pillars. Two pillars - "Empower" (economy and jobs) and "Equip" (education and lifelong learning) - hold particular significance for a group of Singaporeans. These are the gig economy workers or own-account workers, defined by the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) as self-employed persons without employees. According to MOM's reports on the labour force published between 2017 and 2022, the number of own-account workers has been steadily increasing in Singapore since 2018 and they make up approximately one in 10 people in the local labour force.
Against the backdrop of ongoing global crises that have highlighted the vulnerability of workers in precarious gig work, policy and public discussions thus far have been, and rightly so, focused on the lack of physical and financial security faced by delivery workers and private-hire car drivers, who make up a third of own-account workers in Singapore.
