More Work Permits Will Ease the Manpower Shortage—But Not Solve It
Singapore has expanded the occupations eligible for workers from non-traditional sources, including waiters and kitchen assistants. The move may help labour-starved businesses, but employers must still confront poor job design, weak supervision and unsustainable operating models.
For many Singapore restaurant owners, the most important item on the menu is not food.
It is manpower.
A café can have customers, a good location and positive reviews—and still reduce its operating hours because it cannot assemble a reliable team. Owners wash dishes after closing. Chefs cover absent colleagues. Service staff move between ordering, payments, food collection and cleaning while customers wonder why everything takes so long.
From 1 September 2026, some employers have access to a wider labour pool
Singapore expanded its Non-Traditional Sources Occupation List to include eight additional roles across food services, social services and air transportation. In food services, the new occupations include butchers and fishmongers, food-and-drink stall assistants, kitchen assistants and waiters.
Eligible employers may recruit Work Permit holders from approved non-traditional source countries, subject to the applicable sector requirements, quotas, levies, occupation restrictions and other conditions.
For struggling F&B businesses, this is welcome relief. But relief should not be mistaken for a cure.
If the workplace is badly designed, adding more workers simply gives the dysfunction more people to exhaust.
The shortage is real. F&B work is demanding.
Employees stand for long periods, work during weekends and holidays, handle heat and sharp equipment, manage impatient customers and perform physically repetitive tasks. Peak demand arrives precisely when most other people are resting.
Small operators face particular pressure. They cannot always offer the wages, promotion structures or specialised roles available in larger organisations. One absence can destabilise an entire shift.
Automation helps only to a point.
A self-ordering kiosk can capture an order but cannot reassure a customer about an allergy. A dishwasher reduces manual work but somebody must load, unload and maintain it. Central kitchens improve consistency but introduce logistics, inventory and quality-control requirements.
Food service remains intensely human.
Expanding recruitment sources acknowledges this reality. It gives employers more options and reduces dependence on a narrow set of labour markets.
Yet foreign manpower should enable better operations—not preserve every inefficient process indefinitely.
A Work Permit is not a complete hiring plan
Employers unfamiliar with migrant-worker recruitment may focus on whether they are technically eligible.
That is only the beginning.
They must understand quotas, monthly levies, salary obligations, medical insurance, housing considerations, recruitment costs and occupation-specific restrictions. The worker must perform the occupation declared in the Work Permit application.
Employers cannot recruit someone under an eligible job title and then deploy that person freely across unrelated duties.
Businesses must also confirm that their licences and activity classifications support the application. MOM’s published guidance states, for example, that employers hiring the newly eligible food-service workers must meet specified licensing conditions.
Food-processing roles are subject to different requirements from restaurant or food-shop roles. A rejected application wastes time. A wrongly deployed worker creates compliance risk.
The true employment cost is also much higher than the basic salary.
Employers should calculate recruitment charges, levy, accommodation where applicable, insurance, meals or allowances, transport, uniforms, training, leave coverage and the cost of supervision. They should model the cost over the entire intended employment period rather than looking only at the first month.
Cheaper than another hiring route does not necessarily mean cheap.
Recruitment cannot replace retention
A business that constantly loses workers does not have only a recruitment problem. It has a retention problem.
Some turnover is unavoidable. Workers relocate, change industries or pursue better opportunities. But repeated resignations from the same outlet, manager or shift pattern should be treated as management information.
Are schedules released too late? Are split shifts making daily life impossible? Are employees routinely asked to stay beyond rostered hours? Do supervisors humiliate workers during peak periods? Is training conducted properly, or are new employees expected to “learn by being shouted at”?
Bringing in workers from more countries may temporarily fill vacancies. It can also hide the underlying problem by supplying another stream of replacements.
Migrant workers may be less willing to complain because their right to remain and work in Singapore is connected to their employment. That power imbalance increases the employer’s responsibility.
A worker’s silence is not evidence that the workplace is healthy.
Job redesign must happen at the task level
F&B productivity is often discussed in terms of buying equipment or installing software.
Real job redesign begins with observing a shift.
How many times does an employee walk between the same two stations? Are ingredients stored where they are used? Does the menu create unnecessary complexity? Are online orders entering the kitchen faster than staff can fulfil them? Do multiple delivery platforms interrupt the same employees serving dine-in customers?
Small inefficiencies compound during peak periods.
A menu with fifty items may appear attractive to customers while creating excessive preparation, storage and training demands. A beautifully designed counter may force staff into hundreds of unnecessary movements. An ordering system may transfer work from the cashier to the kitchen without increasing total capacity.
Before adding headcount, employers should map the work.
Remove unnecessary steps. Standardise preparation. Improve equipment placement. Cross-train staff within lawful deployment boundaries. Use technology where it reduces a genuine constraint rather than merely creating the appearance of modernisation.
The best manpower strategy sometimes begins by deciding what the business should stop doing.
Foreign workers are not interchangeable units
The phrase “manpower” can obscure the fact that every worker is a person adapting to a new workplace and possibly a new country.
Language, food, accommodation, transport and unfamiliar workplace practices affect performance. A capable employee can appear ineffective when instructions are rushed, undocumented or delivered in a language they do not fully understand.
Employers should provide structured onboarding.
Workers need written duties, safety training, clear schedules, wage explanations and a named person to approach when problems arise. Supervisors need training in cross-cultural communication. Employment documents should accurately reflect agreed terms, and salary records must be maintained properly.
A kitchen assistant recruited from overseas does not arrive with instant knowledge of the employer’s recipes, hygiene routines or customer expectations.
The organisation must convert labour availability into capability. That requires time and management.
What about local workers?
Any foreign-manpower expansion will raise concerns about displacement and wages.
Those concerns should not be dismissed.
Businesses must continue making jobs attractive to Singapore residents through fair pay, better scheduling, career development and improved working conditions. Foreign workers should address genuine shortages, not become a mechanism for avoiding investment in local employees.
At the same time, insisting that every vacancy can be filled locally does not reflect the operating reality faced by many food businesses. A vacant role serves neither local workers nor customers. Prolonged shortages can lead to business closures and the loss of supervisory, culinary and administrative jobs held by residents.
The answer is neither unrestricted recruitment nor artificial scarcity.
It is calibrated access combined with enforcement, productivity improvements and a credible local workforce strategy.
Breathing room must be used wisely
The expanded NTS Occupation List gives eligible employers breathing room.
What they do with it will determine whether the policy improves the sector.
A good employer will use the additional labour supply to stabilise schedules, reduce excessive hours, train employees and redesign inefficient work. A poor employer will continue operating with chaotic rosters, weak controls and high turnover—only with access to more countries from which to recruit replacements.
Manpower policy can widen the door.
It cannot determine what kind of workplace exists on the other side.
Singapore’s F&B sector does need workers. It also needs better managers, clearer processes, more disciplined menus and business models that can support the true cost of employment.
A new recruitment source can fill an empty position.
It cannot make a bad job worth keeping.
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