BY PROFESSOR IRENE NG, DR MATHEW MATTHEWS, MR ASHER GOH, MR TAN ZHI HAN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR VINCENT CHUA, DR GERARD CHUNG, MS CARYS CHAN AND MS LIVIA LIM

Arthur[i], age 38, is a single father of a ten-year-old boy and is also looking after his 80-year-old mother. He switched from regular employment as a logistics worker to food delivery which enables him to better fulfil his caregiving duties, however sacrificing income security in the process. In his words, “If I’m a boss and if let’s say my employee keep on doing this, taking leave, going home because of this family issue, who doesn’t have a family, who doesn’t have family issue, what makes you so special?”.

Freyaⁱ, age 37 and a mother of four young children, really wants to work. She was taken aback by the harsh questioning at a job interview. The interviewer’s rant revealed his double standards that he as the boss can hold his job and care for his young children, but not Freya as the employee: “Your child is two years old. My child is also two years old. It’s very tough. It’s not easy. So how do you work (as in balance childcare and work)...…I'm a boss, anytime I can leave the job and just go to care for my child…...But your situation, how? How would you work? I need workers. I cannot give you leave many times for (reasons) like ‘my baby is sick’”.

The above parallel accounts from our research on in-work poverty among young workers show that both employers and low-wage workers themselves internalise the expectations of no work-life balance for low-wage jobs. This is in sharp contrast to today’s elevated emphasis in the general workforce on flexible work arrangements to enable better work-family balance.

The contrast bears out in the rest of our data. In our interviews, Professionals, Managers, Executives and Technicians generally enjoy greater flexibility in work settings where family-friendly policies are formal, transparent and supportive. Thus, the ability to attend to caregiving or other personal needs is largely expected in higher paying jobs. The same cannot be said for low-wage work where family-friendly policies are weak and highly dependent on colleagues or managers.

Similarly, in our survey, respondents with secondary education or below and lower education reported the lowest amount of flexibility, whereas respondents with degrees and above reported the highest amount of flexibility, and lowest extent of work-family conflict.

Studying Young Singaporean Workers
This contrast in actual and expected work-life balance is only one of many “polarities” we have found between higher and low wage jobs. Labour market polarity is a concept highlighted by social scientists such as David Autor and Arne Kalleberg to describe how the labour market has bifurcated into good and bad jobs, with high-earning workers enjoying strong wage growth and favourable job conditions, while low wage work tends to be precarious and undesirable with poor and stagnant wages (Autor, 2019; Kalleberg, 2011).

Funded by two rounds of the Social Science Research Thematic Grant, our research project undertook deep and wide methods to understand the experiences of young working low-income Singaporeans[ii]. First, we collected four waves of survey data with an initial sample of 1,905 young workers, 980 who were lower educated and lower income, and 925 from a comparison group of respondents who were higher educated or higher income. Second, we conducted four waves of in-depth interviews with a starting sample of 90 respondents. Third, we collected high frequency data from 220 low-income respondents through a mobile application that spanned 8.5 months. Finally, we conducted a series of occupation-specific ethnographies.

Fortuitously for our research project, but unfortunately for the rest of the world, wave 1 of our study coincided with the outbreak of Covid-19. Before this worldwide pandemic, there was little interest in young workers. But with Covid-19 and the post-pandemic world having thrown into disarray the lives of young workers, there are now grave concerns over the uncertain economic future for young workers in general, and the plight of low wage essential workers in particular.

Polarity of Experiences
What types of polarities did we uncover? Crucially, we have found persistent wage gaps by highest educational qualifications, despite recent aggressive measures to close the gap, for instance through Singapore’s Progressive Wage Model. Training is a promising avenue to close wage inequality, especially given Singapore’s national SkillsFuture movement, where the government invests in the training of Singaporeans through individual SkillsFuture credits and industry-based subsidised programmes. Despite SkillsFuture, training inequality by highest qualification also persisted, even though lower educated respondents who attended training experienced higher wage increases. This persistence in wage and training inequalities suggests the need for continued, and perhaps more aggressive, efforts to boost training and wages of low-income workers.

We have also found other bifurcations, for instance:

• More adverse economic impacts of Covid-19 on low-wage workers;
• Job search networks don’t benefit everyone equally. They help professionals and managers—especially those further along in their careers—earn more, while rank-and-file workers gain much less. As a result, the gap in opportunities between these groups keeps growing;
• Wide disparity in the use of AI (artificial intelligence) by highest educational qualification; and
• Disparate work-family interface, as discussed in the beginning of this article.

Together, the findings show multiple disadvantages faced by low-income young people, in the domains of work as well as family, in terms of key outcomes such as wages, and also emerging issues such as AI and technology.

What’s Next?
We are now completing wave 4 of data collection, at a time when the business environment is transitioning from being described as VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) to BANI (brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible). Our wave 4 survey suggests that across educational qualifications, there is a rise in a sense of job insecurity. The only exception is with respondents who had secondary education and below. Many of them have moved into self-employment, therefore to them, fearing loss of employment is irrelevant but earnings insecurity is a reality. Taken together, the current ongoing insecure environment compels further understanding of young workers.

Will the polarisation diverge, persist, or converge? Will convergence come from improved conditions for low-income workers or worsened conditions for higher income workers? What policy levers can improve conditions for all levels of young workers and close inequalities? These are important questions which we would like to answer through the following research directions:

1. Extend our surveys and interviews by another two waves; and
2. Apply agent-based modelling to our current four waves of data to simulate policy and programme interventions and predict possible outcomes from the simulated interventions.

Through this two-pronged approach to collect more data in today’s uncertain times while applying simulations on our rich data, the next phase of this research will be more focused on social solutioning. For example, solutions for polarity in work-family balance might entail making platform work a more viable option for low-wage workers, while also working industry-by-industry to undo the expectations that low-wage workers are not entitled to work-life balance. For the former, Singapore has taken initial steps to better protect and recognise platform work through the recently enacted Platform Workers Act, which requires workplace injury insurance and CPF (Central Provident Fund) contribution for platform workers, thus making platform work more similar to regular employment. For the latter, breaking unfair expectations on low-wage workers might require new human resource or industry practices such as buffer hiring and job-sharing.

Our future surveys and interviews could add questions on views towards changes in human resource practices or CPF contributions. We might also be able to model outcomes such as switching between self- and regular employment, or other changes such as increased training rates. We seek funding partners for this next phase of research and development.

References

Autor, D. H. (2019). Work of the past, work of the future. AEA Papers and Proceedings, 109, 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1257/pandp.20191110

Chua, V. et al. (2023). Job (non)search. In Ng, I. Y. H. & Mathew, M. (Eds.) Proceedings of the Symposium on In-Work Poverty and the Challenges of Getting By Among the Young. Singapore: National University of Singapore.

Goh, A. (2025). Investigating precarity: Experiences of low-income precarious young workers in Singapore. NTU Masters' Thesis. https://doi.org/10.32657/10356/182804

Kalleberg, A. L. (2011). Good jobs, bad jobs: The rise of polarized and precarious employment systems in the United States, 1970s-2000s. Russell Sage Foundation, American Sociological Association’s Rose Series in Sociology.

Lim, L. S. J. (2024). Strategies employed by low-income partnered parents with young children in sustaining their employment. Master’s Thesis. Department of Social Work: National University of Singapore.

Notes

[i] Pseudonym used to mask the respondent’s identity.

[ii] We acknowledge also a small side project funded by the Singapore Children’s Society.

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Irene Y. H. Ng is SR Nathan Professor in the Department of Social Work and the Social Service Research Centre, NUS;  Mathew Mathews is Head of the IPS Social Lab and Principal Research Fellow in the Institute of Policy Studies, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS; Asher Goh is a Research Associate in the Social Service Research Centre, NUS; Tan Zhi Han is a Research Associate in the Social Service Research Centre, NUS; Vincent Chua is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, NUS; Gerard Chung is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Work, NUS; Xi Wen (Carys) Chan is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Management, Griffith Business School, Griffith University; and, Livia Lim was a master’s student in the Department of Social Work, NUS.