TR EMERITUS

Author: Lucky Tan 13 September 2010 Hong Kong has already done it. Malaysia will most likely have it by next year. In an earlier posting in Jul 2009[The Truth about Jobs, Jobs, Jobs], I discussed why the PAP government will resist having a minimum wage for Singapore workers. We very often hear the government talk how it has done well to lower unemployment in Singapore. That is only one side of the story because creating jobs in Singapore is not the same as creating jobs in other developed nations - all these countries have minimum wage laws and they have to create jobs that pay decent wages while Singapore government can just create jobs that pay any salary. In fact Singapore creates so many jobs, the government imports tens of thousands of foreigners to fill them. What is important is not number of jobs but the availability of jobs that pay good decent wages. "We say Singapore is multi-racial. We all have the equal right to belong and call ourselves Singaporeans. Yes, there will be competition, but it will be fair competition. There may be inequality of outcomes, but we will still look after each other," - Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, CNA, 8 Sep 2010[Link]. . I wonder how hard Dr. Balakrishnan challenged himself when he came up that. Once a critic of the government, he has morphed into a "PAP man" and he is in charge of the MCYS (Community Development, Youth and Sports) that takes care of some of the less desirable "outcomes" of the system. If you end up without housing because prices have gone up so much and have to sleep at the roadside, MCYS men will come quickly to pick you up and send you to one of the government shelters - poverty can be kept invisible. If the MCYS men act fast enough and you're willing to bend the definitions a little to call shelters "homes", the PAP can then boast to the world there are "no homeless in Singapore". They don't boast about that too often these days - NSP's Goh Meng Seng found homeless people living in tents at the beach, I see the homeless sleeping next to pillars at covered walkway leading to Bedok Interchange everyday. Earlier this year Dr. Balakrishnan scolded bloggers and Al Jazeera for misleading the public[Link] in the case involving a homeless couple by saying the couple's plight was due to their own doing when it was government policy and rules that led to them being homeless. Now Dr. Balakrishnan says there is "fair competition" in the system although there may be "unequal outcomes". What is so fair about a system in which a large segment of population work full time jobs and cannot make enough for basic necessities? These people will never accumulate enough for retirement and will have to work their whole life. Is this fair? Under the current system, Singapore has the highest income inequality among developed country. How can a system that produces such a lopsided outcome be considered fair? . In 2007, even though I was critical of the government and had some understanding of how this elitist government operated, I was shocked when PM Lee announced massive pay hikes for the government. At that time the PAP men had already occupied all of the top 30 highest paid politicians rankings in the world[Link]. How could the hikes be justified when Singapore already had the highest income gap among developed countries? They did it just after the elections as if they couldn't wait - doing it so close the elections was politically unwise because it would become a permanent liability in future elections...it was as if they felt so strongly about it and were so confident of winning future elections, they couldn't wait. The debate on the hikes was almost surrealistic with the PM & MM joining the fray talking about the "extraordinary talents" in government and "painful sacrifices" the PAP men had to make to be in government and how the country would sink without them so on. Portraying the government as extraordinarily talented created another liability later on- when hiccups occurred such as escape of Mas Selamat, floods, housing woes, they instantly lose credibility when people see that they are as human as anyone else. While the PAP government was arguing to hike its own pay hike, others around the world saw excessive compensation for executives as inherently unfair, unnecessary and artificial[Link, Link]. Instead of setting the example to correct the unfairness in the system, the PAP government argued that they should simply 'follow the market' : . ".....you have to pay the market rate or the man will up stakes and join Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers or Goldman Sachs and you would have an incompetent man and you would have lost money by the billions," - MM Lee, April 2007. [Link] . So where is Lehman Brothers today? Goldman these days is very busy answering the US SEC for its past unethical behavior. When things are wrong and unjust, we need leaders who are able to see it and set the right example through their actions. Based on what Dr. Balakrishnan said, if you or your children suffer from the unequal outcomes brought about by the system, you have to accept it so long as the system is fair. But how can the system be fair when it produces such a high level of inequality in the first place? Because it is meritocratic and market driven, it has to be fair? We can have meritocracy and the free market, but a different set of government policy/rules will produce a very different outcome. We have rich doctors because the government wants Singapore to be medical hub for the rich at the expense of ordinary Singaporeans who now have to face overcrowded hospitals and rising cost of medical care. We have rich bankers because the government deregulated our markets to allow them to sell structured products with high profit margins to Singaporeans and they can market highly profitable credit cards and unsecured loans....Casino operators make huge profits because the government reverse early policies to allow them to operate in Singapore. It is government policy to open the floodgates to foreign labour which depressed the wages of a large segment of the population. The outcomes we have today are the results of decisions the government has made and the government has been consistently lopsided putting businesses and GDP growth above the interests of ordinary Singaporeans. So when will we have minimum wages? The PAP wants to preserve the status quo. As long as it can maintain its hold on power, it will continue to implement pro-business policies. Minimum wages takes away businesses' access to cheap labour compelling them to invest their profits in machines to increase productivity. Just compare the labour intensive approach to construction in Singapore vs somewhere else where there is no cheap labour. Lim Swee Say, as labour union chief, tells workers to be cheaper, better and faster. Why doesn't he tell landlords to lower their rents to make Singapore more competitive? Why doesn't he tell Singapore Power to lower its tariffs which are the 2nd highest in the world so that businesses can pay workers more? Making labour cheap and all else expensive works against ordinary Singaporeans especially those in the bottom 20%. The PAP government says that businesses will flee if a minimum wage is set....we should ask ourselves what good is achieved if we retain a business dependent on cheap labour in Singapore....let it go and make space for businesses that can pay workers more. Other countries have implemented minimum wages for more than 5 decades. Even Malaysia is going to set a minimum wage.  Read More →

Dear Straits Times, I refer to the 15 Sept 2010 report of your interview of Dale Carnegie's Mr Peter Handel. Mr Handel reportedly said that Singapore is right and the US is wrong when it comes to the remuneration of each country's respective leaders. But the remuneration of the US president is in line with the remuneration of all other first word nation leaders. The remuneration of the Singapore prime minister on the other hand is far and above those of other first world nation leaders, comparable only to some third world country dictators. So if Mr Handel thinks that the US is wrong, he must be thinking that the whole world is wrong except for Singapore and a handful of third world dictatorships. Mr Handel also said that the US president's salary is really out of whack with that of the CEO of a large organisation. But the pope earns absolutely nothing for being the leader of one of the world's largest organisation, the roman catholic church. Just as the head of a religious or voluntary organisation typically does not receive a CEO's pay cheque, similarly we do not expect a head of state to receive a CEO's pay cheque. If a head of state chooses to see himself as a CEO, there is a danger that he will lose his sense of duty to his people. For he may regard his people as employees to be exploited rather than as shareholders to be answerable to. It was also reported that there were 26,500 jobs added against a jobless rate of 3.3%. That jobless rate of 3.3% amounts to nearly 90,000 jobless. Thank you   Ng Kok Lim  Read More →

Ong ran for the presidency in 1993 under the PAP's endorsement. He ran against a reluctant Chua Kim Yeow, a former accountant general, for the post. A total of 1,756,517 votes were polled. Ong received 952,513 votes while Chua had 670,358 votes, despite the former having a higher public exposure and a much more active campaign than Chua. Late President Ong Teng Cheong However, soon after his election to the presidency in 1993, Ong was tangled in a dispute over the access of information regarding Singapore's financial reserves. The government said it would take 56 man-years to produce a dollar-and-cents value of the immovable assets. Ong discussed this with the accountant general and the auditor general and eventually conceded that the government only had to declare all of its properties, a list which took a few months to produce. Even then, the list was not complete; it took the government a total of three years (instead of fifty-six) to produce the information that Ong requested.[6] In an interview with Asiaweek six months after stepping down from presidency [7], Ong indicated that he had asked for this audit based on the principle that as an elected president, he was bound to protect the national reserves, and the only way of doing so would be to know what reserves (both cash and asset) the government owned. In the last year of his presidency (1999) Ong found out through the newspapers that the government aimed to submit a bill to Parliament to sell the Post Office Savings Bank (POSB). However, as this was a statutory board whose reserves were under the president's protection, this move was procedurally inappropriate and did not regard Ong's significance as the guardian of the reserves; his office had to ring up and inform the government of this oversight. Ong decided not to run for a second term as president in 1999 due to medical reasons, according to official sources. Ong's wife, Ling Siew May, died in August 1999 after a cancer relapse. Ong died later on February 8, 2002, at the age of 66, from lymphoma in his home at about 8:14 pm SST after he had been discharged from hospital a few days earlier. Among the five former presidents who have died, Ong is the only president who did not receive a state funeral, he received a state-assisted funeral instead.   John Doe * Late President Ong Teng Cheong was the only President who did not receive state funeral! He was the only President who dare to stand up and protect Singaporeans. Lets hope Singaporeans have not forgotten about him.  Read More →