Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Singapore plans to raise productivity, but how?

Ladies and Gentlemen,

As far as you can see the average Singaporean only knows white collar work.

Either he is a professional or he is a clerk in some multinational company pushing paper for some foreign CEO in an high rise office block in downtown Singapore.

As far as you can see, there are no Singaporean carpenters, motor mechanics or welders.

All of them are foreign workers on dirt cheap wages. Singaporeans don't know how do do any of these things. Singaporeans can also be security guards at luxury condominiums in Orchard Road.

The truth of the matter is there are no skilled or semi skilled blue collar Singaporean workers. Every single one of them is a foreigner on a work permit working long hours for peanuts for Singaporean employers who abuse them with the Singapore government's blessing.

Suddenly the government mantra has been to raise productivity among Singaporean workers by raising the foreign worker levy (Don't bank on low cost foreign labor, Goh Chock tong, Straits Times March 16, 2011).

Would anyone care to ask him how you suddenly produce a Singaporean a welder overnight by increasing the levy of foreign workers! This talk by Singapore's multi million dollar minister is just so much nonsense, simple as that.

There are no Singaporean welders and if you raise the levy for foreign welders, you only hurt the businesses for having done nothing wrong.

This great plan of Goh Chock Tong to increase productivity by increasing foreign worker levy would be as successful as being able to make the pigs from the farm in Pongoll fly. They won't and neither would raising foreign worker levy suddenly produce Singaporean welders.

Lets face it, Singapore has no hope other than to continue employing foreign labor. The fault lies with the government once again as is always the case with Fascist one party states. They simply did not have the ideas which the rest of the Singapore civil society had about the way to go about these things.

For one, they could have thought of building sufficient technical schools providing hands on work training for the trades, they could have thought of paying decent wages for a decent days work and they could have allowed the thinking to be done by the people of Singapore instead of monopolizing it.

Now it is too late. You are simply not going to get enough Singaporean blue collar workers no matter what you do. You are simply not going to get enough local lawyers because you discredited the law by state sanctioned abuse through corrupt judges like Belinda Ang Saw Ean. You are also simply not going to get enough professionals in any walk of life because they would prefer to leave Singapore entirely.

With or without an increase of foreign worker levy, Singapore will be populated by foreign workers in every sphere of activity while the local born Singaporeans will die, emigrate and vanish without enough babies.

The sooner they realize this the better.

Gopalan Nair
Attorney at Law
39737 Paseo Padre Parkway, Suite A1
Fremont, CA 94538, USA
Tel: 510 657 6107
Fax: 510 657 6914
Email: nair.gopalan@yahoo.com
Blog: http://singaporedissident.blogspot.com/

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is another bullshit from our SM GCT. Their main motive in raising levies, ERPs, revenues from a host of other sources (eg certification of Employment Agencies workers) is just a reflection of their greed in maintaining or improving their gang's (about 35 of them) million $ salaries. It is high time to get rid of all these old blood suckers (SMs, MMs etc) as they are really redundant to Singapore. We do not need these loose cannons who like to bullshit around undermining the intelligence of Singaporeans.

Anonymous said...

SIngapore runs on the system of quantity not quality . Instead of having less better qualified and motivated workers , it uses cheap unqualified labour from other countries. The standard of work and remuneration has never been lower. And the so called green country with ideas has'nt had a new idea in the last 20 years . And the education system is still using prehistoric ideas concerning actual education and measuring educational levels . The system is not producing the people needed for the country , even with the necesssary social education. Singapore is on the decline