Stupid Sinkie! Lim Swee Say Has Been Spekaing Up For Sinkie Workers!

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

Really idiot sinkie! If he had been reading the Straits' Times, he would know that Mr. Lim Swee Say had been speaking up for sinkie workers all these years.



Quote:
I was driving home this morning and happened to hear the US President’s State of the Union address over the radio. It was a good speech but then I heard something else that really stood out for me. President Obama said, “to the CEOs out there, I want to tell them that if you want to get something done and done right, hire an American!”.

I tried to remember when was the last time I heard a Singapore leader say publicly “Hire a Singaporean!” but I really cannot remember it ever been said at all!

In Singapore, the message from the leadership is “hire people with the “right skill sets”". While this is not wrong, more often than not, this is used as an excuse to hire foreigners. There are parties that promote the employment of foreigners but not parties that promote the employment of locals! The Singapore Business Federation was in the news
recently for requesting the government to remove the levies on foreigners who hold the S-Pass Employment Visa, essentially making it even cheaper to employ foreigners and hence promoting foreign competition for precious local jobs.

Normally, the workers’ unions should be speaking up for the workers but in Singapore, the government owns many of the large companies and institutions and the unions are part of the government so will not speak out on issues that will “inconvenience” the owners of those companies and institutions. A fine and ironic example of this is the case of the NTUC Financial Consultants who are taking their own union, the SIEU (Singapore Insurance Employees Union), to court because they believe that their union did not protect their interests when they were forcibly asked to renounce their employment status.

Local Singaporeans are criticized for demanding high salaries although nothing is said about the fact that Singapore is one of the world’s most expensive cities to live in (link).

Foreign workers here fall into two categories. Those who are cheaper than locals, in which case no criticism applies to them, and those who are more expensive than locals, in which case they are worth what they are paid. When Singaporean workers cannot make what they need to have a decent living in Singapore, expectations are often managed by the government’s throwaway line that “higher pay will come when productivity is increased”. Now “productivity” in Singapore is calculated from the Financial Statements of the company. There is also no law that states that an increase in productivity mandates an increase in the pay of workers. So not only is the Singaporean worker unable to directly influence this KPI, he does not know what it is and even if he does, whether he gets a raise or not is quite another matter.

Support for business interests and non-support for worker interests is excused by a vague promise that promoting an environment conducive for businesses would translate into more jobs (although here too, jobs for whom is again another issue). Now with depressed local wages and a free flow of foreign labor, many companies are still relocating from Singapore but we don’t have the government looking at other factors e.g.bringing down the cost of property and rental. In fact, we have REDAS asking the government to intervene and support land prices should the property market go down too much!

So we have the SBF speaking to promote foreign worker employment in Singapore and we have REDAS speaking to maintain high real estate prices in Singapore. American workers have President Obama speaking up for them. Who speaks for the Singaporean worker?

http://therealsingapore.com/content/...aporean-worker




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