analysis Asia
What's behind Singapore's increasingly negative attitudes towards people with disabilities in the workplace?
"Well-meaning overprotection" of people with disabilities can inadvertently lead to a lack of soft skills that ultimately hold them back at the workplace, says a human resources trainer.
In jobs she did land, Ms Tan claimed to have been been abruptly dismissed from one after being wrongly accused of not pulling her weight. In another, she resigned after what she felt was an unfair reprimand for not meeting deadlines.
And in jobs she could hold down, there were times she felt excluded or unsupported.
“Employees often chit-chat among themselves and I won’t be included in conversations," said Ms Tan, who still finds it challenging to secure full-time work and has been making ends meet through freelance tutoring.
"I even had to pay for sign language interpreters out of my own pocket for meetings.”
Ms Tan was thus not surprised by the findings in Singapore's first disability trends report, released by the Ministry of Social and Family Development earlier in December.
They revealed that only about half of those surveyed had positive attitudes towards people with disabilities (PWDs) in the workplace in 2023, down from nearly six out of 10 in 2019. And the proportion of respondents who felt negatively about PWDs in the workplace rose from 9 per cent to almost 14 per cent.
The study did not identify specific reasons. But experts told CNA it could be due to a degree of apprehension among employers and employees; while PWDs on their part could be lacking in social skills due to being "overprotected". In all cases, more education is key, they added.
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