TR EMERITUS

Straits Times, 20 March 2010 WHEN Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng's parents first came to Singapore to look for a better life in the 1930s, they sold sundry provisions. But business was not good after World War II, so they returned to their village in Zhongshan prefecture in Guangdong, China, taking their young daughter and son who were born here with them. After six months, they returned here in 1949. Mr Wong was three years old. 'I don't think the conditions in China were favourable,' Mr Wong, 63, tells Insight. 'Having been in Singapore for some years, my parents thought Singapore was a better place to make a living.' What led them to move here is no different from why many of today's migrants decided to come here. Back in their village, his parents and others lived off the soil as farmers. Read rest of article here  Read More →

Written by Our Correspondent After shocking the entire nation two weeks ago with his most outrageous remarks in Parliament on the PAP being "deaf to all criticisms", multi-millionaire Minister (without portfolio) Lim Swee Say is back to his "best" again with another "worthy" quote to entertain Singaporeans. During a tripartite dialogue yesterday, Mr Lim told the participants that the labor market will be "tightening" over the coming years in another sign that Singaporeans will have to face increased competition from cheap foreign workers as employers seek to cut cost. Mr Lim tried to warn the employers and unionists present of the downside of freezing the wages of local workers, but ended up causing a stir among the audience who were amused by his words: "Don't forget workers have two hands to work, but they also have two legs to walk," he said. Stung by rising public fury over its pro-foreigner policies, the PAP now tries to sing a different tune by promising to reduce the "inflow" of foreigners into Singapore. Mr Lim said that the government is "committed" to keeping the proportion of foreign workers in Singapore to its present one-third and this will mean that the foreign workforce will only grow at one or two percent a year. However, this proportion does not include Permanent Residents (PRs) which are lumped together with citizens as "local" workforce to make the figures look rosy. If PRs are included in the foreign workforce, it will account for about 44 percent of the workers in Singapore. "One common bottleneck (every sector) is going to face is manpower. 'Please do not underestimate the implication of one to two per cent growth," Mr Lim added. Minister Lim earns about $1.9 million dollars a year or more than 4 times the annual salary of U.S. President Barack Obama. He is expected to get a hefty 8.8 percent pay rise this year due to higher growth figures. A certain percentage of the PAP ministers' multi-million pay is pegged to GDP growth - the higher the growth, the more money they bring home. Singapore's growth over the last few years was fueled largely by the influx of cheap foreign workers who kept labor costs low thereby inflating the GDP artificially in the process. At the same time, the income gap between the rich and the poor in Singapore has widened considerably with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Singapore now has the highest income gap between the rich and the poor among developed economies after Hong Kong. Not that Minister Lim minds anyway. He will continue getting his fat pay whether he croaks like a frog or walk with four legs.  Read More →

Written by Our Correspondent Yesterday we published an article on the decline in the real earnings of Singaporeans which appeared to contradict what was said by PAP MP Halimah Yacob in Parliament two weeks ago. When asked by fellow MP Inderjit Singh on a detailed study conducted by Swiss banking giant UBS last year which showed that the gross wages of Singaporeans had decreased by 8 percent between 2006 an 2009, Madam Halimah refuted the results and claimed that “anecdotal evidence” showed that there is a “significant” jump of about 20 percent in wages over the same period of time. “The discrepancy could have come from the limited sample of firms in the UBS study. The study’s figures do not give statistical averages as it covered only a few companies for each profession and city,” she suggested. [Source: Straits Times, 9 March 2010] However, the Labor Report 2009 released this Monday by the Ministry of Manpower showed clearly the real earnings of Singaporeans had decreased in the last two years. “Nominal earnings decreased over the year by 1.6% in the fourth quarter of 2009, easing from the 3.0% decline in the preceding quarter. Earnings in 2009 declined by 2.6%, after rising by 5.4% in 2008. After adjusting for inflation (2009: 0.6%, 2008: 6.6%), the decline in real earnings was 3.2% in 2009, deeper than the contraction of 1.2% in 2008.” [Source: Ministry of Manpower] A puzzled netizen emailed Madam Halimah to seek clarification on the apparent discrepancy between what she said in Parliament and the findings of the Labor Report: Madam Halimah did not answer the question directly and asked the netizen to "look at" Finance Minister Tharman's explanation instead: We all know that Madam Halimah is a busy person, but surely it will not take her too much time to explain why she thought that the wages of Singaporeans had jumped by 20 percent when the statistics suggest otherwise. Furthermore, Finance Minister Tharman's "explanation" was equally vague and weird as well. He claimed that the influx of foreign workers has helped to "offset" the decline in wages for lower-income workers without substantiating it: “The healthy growth of wages for low wage families from 2006 to 2008 corresponded with the period when the foreign workforce was growing most rapidly…….It was how we were able to offset the decline in wages for our lower-income group that had taken place in the first part of the decade,” he added. [Source: Straits Times, 3 March 2010] Perhaps both Mr Tharman and Madam Halimah should read the explanation provided by Mr Kenneth Jeyaretnam from the Reform Party on the inherent discrepancies in the official statistics: “The majority of these new residents did not have dependents (hence the much faster rise in the resident labour force than the resident population) and all of them would have had jobs so the proportion of working adults in the average resident household would have risen. As a result we would have seen an increase in real median income per household member without any real increase in the median incomes of Singaporean citizens who were already here before this period began, i.e., the majority of us. Another reason why the Minister’s figure is misleading is that it excludes households consisting solely of non-working persons over 60.” [Source: Reform Party: A complacent Budget] Mr Tharman once said in Parliament that the Singapore system is based on "trust". As the above example has shown, we must take the figures and statistics provided by the PAP with a heavy dose of salt from now onwards. How we can trust them when their ministers and MPs don't even know what they are talking about?  Read More →