For two decades, the Tripartite Guidelines on Fair Employment Practices have been Singapore’s main lever against workplace discrimination — non-statutory, non-prescriptive, but enforced through MOM’s work-pass privileges and TAFEP’s investigative powers. From late 2026 or 2027, that picture changes meaningfully. Most of the substantive expectations under the Tripartite Guidelines on Fair Employment Practices are being lifted into the Workplace Fairness Act 2025, which Parliament passed on 8 January 2025 and which the dispute-resolution counterpart Bill followed on 4 November 2025. For Singapore HR teams, “soft law” is becoming “hard law” — and the time to fix the gaps in your hiring, grievance and termination processes is now, before the Act commences and creates a private right of action.

This walkthrough sets out what the Tripartite Guidelines currently require, what the Workplace Fairness Act will overlay, and the specific compliance work HR should book into the next two quarters. All references draw on the Tripartite Alliance for Fair and Progressive Employment Practices (TAFEP) and the Ministry of Manpower, with the statutory text drawn from the Workplace Fairness Act 2025 on Singapore Statutes Online. Rules quoted are as at 29 April 2026.

Tripartite Guidelines on Fair Employment Practices: what they require today

The Tripartite Guidelines on Fair Employment Practices (TGFEP) are the umbrella under which TAFEP operates. The core obligation is straightforward: employers must recruit, develop, reward and dismiss employees based on merit — skills, experience, ability to perform the job — and regardless of age, race, gender, religion, marital status, family responsibilities, or disability. The TGFEP set granular expectations across five operational areas:

  • Job advertisements — selection criteria must be related to qualifications, skills, knowledge and experience; protected attributes (age, race, religion, marital status, family responsibilities, gender, disability) cannot be specified or implied. Our piece on the 10 phrases that will get your job ad flagged covers the recurring TAFEP triggers.
  • Application forms and interviews — fields and questions must be relevant to the role; family-status, age and religion questions are TAFEP red flags.
  • Grievance handling — every employer should have a fair, documented grievance process. Our grievance-handling policy walkthrough sets out what TAFEP expects.
  • Performance management — appraisals must be applied consistently and based on documented criteria.
  • Termination and retrenchment — selection criteria for retrenchment must be objective and protected characteristics cannot be the basis of selection. Our fair retrenchment without triggering a TADM claim piece breaks the process down.

Today, breach of the TGFEP is not by itself a statutory offence. The consequences flow indirectly: TAFEP investigations, work-pass privilege curtailment by MOM, and reputational damage from public TAFEP findings. Employers that lose work-pass privileges find themselves unable to renew Employment Pass and S Pass holders — a commercially severe outcome. Our HR Manager’s MOM Compliance Calendar (2026) sets out the cadence of TAFEP and MOM touchpoints across the year.

Workplace Fairness Act 2026: what changes when the Act commences

The Workplace Fairness Act 2025 (WFA) takes the substance of the TGFEP and gives it statutory teeth. Parliament passed the main Bill on 8 January 2025 and the Workplace Fairness (Dispute Resolution) Bill on 4 November 2025. Commencement is expected in late 2026 or in 2027 — the published policy intent has consistently pointed at a phased rollout once subsidiary legislation is finalised.

The four big shifts are:

  1. Statutory list of protected characteristics. The Act prohibits adverse employment decisions made on the basis of: age, nationality, sex, marital status, pregnancy status, caregiving responsibilities, race, religion, language, disability and mental health. Sexual orientation and gender identity are not on the protected list.
  2. Private right of complaint, not just guidance. Employees can file complaints to MOM and seek redress; the WFA includes a dispute-resolution scheffold via the Tripartite Alliance for Dispute Management (TADM) and the Employment Claims Tribunals.
  3. Civil penalties and court action. Serious cases can result in MOM bringing an action for a civil penalty, in addition to administrative sanctions including curtailment of work-pass privileges.
  4. Mandatory grievance-handling process. Employers will be required to have a documented grievance process — not merely encouraged. The TGFEP “should have” becomes “must have”.

Our existing piece on the Workplace Fairness Act 2026: A Survival Guide for Singapore SMEs covers the SME-specific exemptions (employers with fewer than 25 employees expected to receive partial relief on commencement) and the timeline for full rollout.

Fair employment practices Singapore: the HR audit you should run now

Two compliance programmes — TGFEP today and WFA from late 2026/2027 — point at the same operational hygiene. The audit we run with HR teams is structured around six checkpoints.

1. Job advertisements and JD library

Pull every live and recent job advert from the past 12 months. Strip out: any age (e.g., “young and energetic”), language proficiency requirements unrelated to job duties, gender-coded language, marital-status filters, and any nationality preference outside the bona-fide occupational requirement (BFOR) carve-out. Look at the firm-level COMPASS implications too — our piece on the diversity trap in nationality mix shows where over-reliance on one nationality has created compounding risks.

2. Application forms and interview scripts

Audit your application form and interview templates. Strip family-status questions (“are you planning to have children?”), age questions, religion-or-political-affiliation fields, and graduation-year-as-age-proxy questions. Move these into the structured “ask only if BFOR” register.

3. Grievance-handling policy

The mandatory grievance process is the single most overlooked deliverable in WFA-readiness work. The policy needs: a defined intake channel, a named complaint owner, defined investigation steps with timelines, an appeals route, anti-retaliation language, and confidentiality commitments. The TAFEP Workplace Fairness landing page sets out the expected shape.

4. Performance management documentation

If your performance reviews are inconsistent, free-text and irregular in cadence, you will struggle to defend any termination based on “performance”. Build a documented, criterion-based appraisal system with at least an annual cycle and traceable evidence.

5. Retrenchment and termination criteria

For any retrenchment, build a written selection-criteria matrix before the consultation begins, ensure the selection drivers (skill, role redundancy, performance) do not correlate with protected characteristics, and run the resulting list past the matrix one more time before notices go out. Our retrenchment compliance piece covers the operational steps.

6. Workplace harassment and harmony

The TGFEP and the upcoming WFA both require employers to maintain a workplace free from harassment. Your handbook should reference the Workplace Safety and Health framework, the Protection from Harassment Act, and the internal grievance route.

What WFA non-compliance will cost

The Act’s published enforcement architecture allows MOM to:

  • Issue administrative sanctions including curtailment of work-pass privileges — meaning your existing EPs and S Passes may not be renewable;
  • Bring an action for a civil penalty in court for serious or repeated breaches;
  • Direct the employer to pay compensation to affected employees through the Employment Claims Tribunals.

Combined with the existing TAFEP regime, the practical risk is that an employer with poor TGFEP hygiene today will be the same employer that gets caught first under the WFA tomorrow. Patterns reported privately by HR directors at MNCs in Singapore suggest that 20–30% of complaints to TAFEP would, on the WFA’s published criteria, become statutory claims with civil-penalty exposure. The fix is policy, training and documentation — most of which sits inside HR’s normal remit.

Where employment contracts and policies need to flex

The standard Singapore employment contract — see our common employment contract clauses walkthrough — needs three additions for WFA-readiness:

  • A grievance and complaints clause referencing the company’s published grievance policy;
  • An anti-retaliation clause protecting employees who raise complaints;
  • A fair-termination criteria clause that aligns with the TGFEP and signals that protected characteristics will not drive termination decisions.

For groups operating across Singapore and overseas, we typically pair this update with a refreshed handbook chapter on workplace conduct and harassment, plus dedicated manager training. Our colleagues at Raffles Corporate Services handle the corporate-secretarial paperwork that sits behind any policy update — board approvals, register filings, ACRA confirmations — and Singapore Secretary Services can hold the resolutions and registers themselves.

Common pitfalls in 2026

  • Treating the TGFEP as guidance. The TGFEP is enforced through work-pass privileges; treating it as optional is a strategic error today and a statutory error from the WFA’s commencement.
  • Assuming the WFA only affects large firms. Smaller firms (under 25 employees) get partial exemption, not full exemption, and the protected-characteristic analysis still applies in tribunal proceedings.
  • “Cultural fit” hiring rationales. “Cultural fit” is one of the most-cited reasons for hiring rejections in TAFEP investigations and will translate poorly under the WFA’s adverse-decision test.
  • Verbal grievance handling. Without a documented intake and outcome trail, the employer cannot evidence procedural fairness. Verbal-only grievance processes will not survive the WFA test.
  • Using performance scores generated post-hoc. If a documented performance trail does not exist before the termination decision, building one afterwards is not credible.

Conclusion: convert your TGFEP file into your WFA compliance file

The single highest-leverage piece of HR work for the next two quarters is to take your existing Tripartite Guidelines on Fair Employment Practices file — your job ad templates, application forms, grievance flow, performance system, retrenchment matrix — and rebuild it against the Workplace Fairness Act 2025 statutory frame. Most of the work is documentation hygiene and process discipline rather than policy redesign. Done now, the same file works for both regimes; done late, you risk being among the first employers tested under the WFA’s enforcement powers.

As a MOM-licensed employment agency under Little Big Employment Agency (Licence 19C9790), we work on hiring, work passes and HR-compliance set-ups for SMEs and growing MNCs in Singapore. Where the conversation also touches incorporation, accounting and corporate-secretarial obligations — most WFA-readiness audits do — Raffles Corporate Services sits alongside us as one team.

— The Editorial Team, Little Big Employment Agency

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