Sme complains of labour crunch when he only pays workers $800!

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

LOCAL BUSINESS OWNER COMPLAINS OF LABOUR CRUNCH WHEN HE ONLY PAYS WORKERS $800

Post date:
26 Jul 2014 - 6:14pm








Dear TRS,

A Local Indian Business owner complained to me the other day that he couldn't find locals to work for him so he wanted to hire foreigners.

He runs a lorry transportation business and this is the conversation that I had with him:

Business owner: I cannot find locals to work for me. I want to hire SPASS but no quota.

Me: How much are you paying the locals?

B: $600 to $800.

Me: You know right SPASS minimum salary is $2.2K?

B: Ya I know. But what to do. I can't get locals to work for me. I advertise for 2 weeks but no one wants. So that's why I want to hire SPASS. But MOM says I don't have the quota. I have enough head count. 6 locals to 1 SPASS.

Me: You do know that if salary of locals are below 1K, they're considered to be part-time workers?

B: But they are working full-time what..

Me: B, you mean you pay locals ONLY $600-$800 for full-time staffs? And you are willing to pay $2.2K to SPASS holders?

B: What to do.. No locals want to work for me. Very difficult for me to hire locals.

Me: On $600-$800 per month? For a full-time job? Local Singaporeans? Are you sure?

B: Yes that's why I need to hire foreigners. No locals want this job.

Our conversation continued and I found out that he wanted to hire a foreigner because he could just over declare their salary a little and so he could still hire them for a fairly low price.

Currently, he has 8 locals working for him but the MOM rules say that part timers only count for half a person on the quota so he would need at least 12 locals earning less than $1k before he could hire a foreigner.

What's worse, he even went on to complain that the locals working for him often take MC and AWOL complaining of body aches and pains.

But when he's paying them only $800 a month for full-time work, there's really no surprises.

This whole thing made me wonder, who exactly are the ones complaining to the government about labour shortages?

Are they all like this business owner who just want an easy, cheap way to exploit workers? We really shouldn't be entertaining their demands because it's clearly just promoting bad business practices to let in cheap foreign labour to satisfy such terrible employers.

Concerned Citizen
TRS Contributor


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