Millennium Hotels and Resorts Retrenched 159 Employees Due to COVID-19

In less than 24 hours, there have now been two major companies that announced their retrenchment exercises which involve at least 140 people per company.

Yesterday, SPH announced that 140 people would be laid off due to COVID-19.

And today, Millennium Hotels and Resorts, which owns six hotels in Singapore, announced that they’ve laid off 159 employees.

Mr Coronavirus, I think you’ve made your point.

Millennium Hotels and Resorts Retrenched 159 Employees Due to COVID-19

Millennium Hotels and Resorts owns six hotels in Singapore: Copthorne King’s Hotel, Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel, Orchard Hotel, M Hotel, M Social and Studio M Hotel.

As you can probably tell from the name, these are high-end hotels, with all of them located in town.

The hotel chain has more than 145 hotels across the world, and many were closed or operating at much lower occupancy rates than before.

I won’t need to tell you how COVID-19 has impacted this industry.

According to them, they’ve “embarked on a workforce rationalisation and right-sizing plan following a rigorous review of its Singapore corporate office and hotel operations.

“This is a difficult but inevitable move considering the business recovery outlook on the hospitality industry caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

From January to mid-August, the company has actually reduced its foreign employee population in Singapore from 520 to 329, or a reduction of 37%.

In other words, 191 foreign workers were let go in the last eight months or so.

However, that still didn’t help, which led to today whereby 159 employees have been laid off.

They said, “Following this layoff today, there will be an additional reduction of 42 foreign employees, in total reducing our foreign employee dependency by 45 per cent.

“This will bring our Singapore core from 61 per cent in January to 69 per cent today.”

So, that could mean that 117 Singaporeans or Singapore PRs were let go in this latest retrenchment exercise.

The company said that they’ve tried to navigate through the crisis brought on by COVID-19 by tightening of company-wide expenditures, salary reductions for the senior leaders of up to 30%, graduated pay reductions for other “corporate and hotel level employees”, and laying off and furloughing excess manpower across various regions.

The Food Drinks and Allied Workers Union (FDAWU) is now working to achieve a “fair and responsible outcome” for the 159 affected employees, and it has secured the retrenchment package for workers represented under the collective agreements at the company’s four unionised hotels: Copthorne King’s Hotel, Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel, Orchard Hotel and M Hotel.

The other two premises, M Social and Studio M Hotel, are not unionised.