NTUC's Ng Chee Meng: PMEs Are Tomorrow's Working Class, and AI Could Make Their Transition Painful
Source: Mothership
Ng Chee Meng sees a future where white-collar professionals become the new working class — and he's racing to put safety nets in place before AI reshapes the job market. His proposal to raise the SkillsFuture Jobseeker Support income threshold and the NTUC's work on job redesign reveal a labour movement preparing for a disruption that's already underway.
Singapore's workforce is undergoing a quiet transformation that few are talking about. The traditional image of the working class — blue-collar workers in manufacturing and construction — no longer reflects the reality of an economy where professionals, managers, and engineers (PMEs) make up an ever-growing share of the labour force. NTUC secretary-general Ng Chee Meng believes this shift is accelerating, and that within 10 to 15 years, white-collar PMEs will be the new working class. Speaking to Mothership, he laid out a vision of a labour movement that must retool itself for a world where AI threatens not just factory floors but office desks — and where job insecurity is no longer something that happens to someone else.
Ng's diagnosis of the AI threat is nuanced: not every sector faces the same risks. In healthcare and aviation, where labour shortages are acute, workers see AI as an enabler that handles routine tasks like shift planning. But for programmers, coders, and other tech professionals, he acknowledged that the threat is "very real" and that NTUC is still working to understand its full scope. His proposed solution has two prongs: job redesign that integrates AI adoption with worker retraining rather than mass layoffs, and stronger financial safety nets. On the latter, Ng has proposed raising the income threshold for the SkillsFuture Jobseeker Support scheme to the median PME income, which would extend the programme's S$6,000-over-six-months buffer to mid-career professionals who may have parents to support and children to educate.
The timing of Ng's comments matters. Singapore's tech sector has seen a wave of restructuring over the past 18 months — Shopee, Grab, and various fintechs have all trimmed headcount — and the emergence of agentic AI tools capable of handling tasks once reserved for junior knowledge workers is raising existential questions about entry-level PME roles. Ng's framing of PMEs as the future working class is less a prediction than a description of what's already happening: a cohort of well-educated professionals who, for the first time in their careers, face genuine displacement risk from technology rather than globalisation.
What sets NTUC's approach apart, Ng argues, is its emphasis on partnership over confrontation. The union is working with AWS and Huawei to build AI-driven business models and support companies in digital transformation, a model that contrasts with the layoff-first approach he observed among some Western firms that cut workers after adopting AI, only to rehire a year later when they realised human talent was still needed. NTUC's 1,000-strong mentor network offers another layer of support — career guidance and knowledge sharing that Ng hopes will help workers navigate transitions without feeling they have to go through it alone.
Why it matters for Singapore: Ng's framing of PMEs as the new working class has implications that go beyond labour policy. If white-collar workers become the primary constituency needing protection from technological disruption, the social compact that has long underpinned Singapore's political stability — upward mobility through education and professional employment — will need to be renegotiated. The SkillsFuture Jobseeker Support scheme, the NTUC mentor network, and the ongoing conversation about AI and job redesign are early pieces of that renegotiation. How quickly and effectively they scale will determine whether Singapore's AI transition becomes a model for inclusive growth — or a cautionary tale about who gets left behind.
