9/01/2009

Foreign or local workers not an issue

I am tempted to agree with Lim Swee Say that foreign worker local worker divide should not be an issue. It is productivity. We need productive workers to do the job well at the lowest cost. This is like white cat black cat, no issue. Just catch the mice. I must clarify here that when Deng Xiaoping said this, foreign and local workers was not an issue in China. He was talking about Chinese workers only. And I believe Swee Say would also have said that whatever, citizens must come first. In our context, we may also claim that we are different. We are small and cannot be isolated. We are immigrants from the start. So living on the entrepreneur skills and hard work of foreign workers should be a part of our secret formula to success. And lazy and less productive workers cannot get away with it. They may be citizens, so what? They have done NS, big sacrifice, so what? They need to be competitive and productive and be better and cheaper than the foreign workers if they want to be counted. We have to be real and not be bogged down by citizens and non citizens. This is the real world. Singaporeans must work as hard as the foreign workers. There are many schemes to help them to be productive and to earn better incomes. But if they do not want to buck up, it is their own fault. We are competing in an international environment when all barriers to entry have been removed. Every country is buying talent. Our non talents can go elsewhere and be foreign talents and be welcomed. The above is just for discussion. It is meant to be provocative, to stimulate thinking out of the box.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Redbean;

"Every country is buying talent. Our non talents can go elsewhere and be foreign talents and be welcomed."

Me finds the above quote a good, practial and factual statement.

patriot

Anonymous said...

Oops, a little groggy this morning.

My apology! 'practial' should read as 'practical'.

patriot

Wally Buffet said...

Walk into a supermarket and you will see many kinds of shoppers. There is the astute old auntie. Looking at the products' labels, checking the net weight to make sure it's a good buy and comparing same products but from different manufacturers and country of origin and then make a buy decision. Then there is the speedy gonzales type. Just walk down the aisle and pick anything and dump it onto the trolley. Then out to the cashiers and to the car park.

Just wondering what type we are.

Chua Chin Leng aka redbean said...

oops, i was talking a little nonsense. ask yourself this question. if our supertalents can get more than what they are getting here, why are they still here? the americans and europeans are paying in the hundreds of millions, not ten or twenty millions.


i got this suspicion that none can get even half of what they are getting here. many will not have a single offer even.

Anonymous said...

But, the Angmohs(European/American) Talents that came to SIN, most got booted out before finishing their 'contracts'.

Based on the above observation, it will not be wrong to say our talents are indeed grossly underpaid for their competences.

Citibank has a Singaporean and maybe because of him, Citibank is so powerful.

SIN Talents are not ordinary talents!

patriot

Chua Chin Leng aka redbean said...

citibank is saved because they have many FTs from India. and it is doing very well.

Ⓜatilah $ingapura⚠️ said...

Capitalism is racially blind.

It IS productivity, not any "conspiracy" against a particular group -- in this case local employees.

Singapore can follow much of the rest of the failing socialist-style so-called western 'democracies' and start pandering to political populism or to please the locals, who then are automatically protected from competition, and the government in this case behaves like a huge and all-powerful labour union.

Get real redbean. The world doesn't owe anyone a living, and neither the state nor employers are obligated in anyway to employ locals "just to look good" and to appease a the whingers who should be "trying harder" instead of blaming others.

Chua Chin Leng aka redbean said...

that's right partially. but as long as one calls himself a citizen with obligations and responsibilities, one has the right to demand to be treated better than non citizens.

have you heard of these phrases,

govt by the people, of the people and for the people.

maybe this is crap today. irrelevant. then we should replace it with

govt for the rich and able regardless of nationality. and scrap citizenship altogether.

Ⓜatilah $ingapura⚠️ said...

> maybe this is crap today. irrelevant. <

Actually, it's more relevant today than ever. Otherwise it's totalitarianism.

> then we should replace it with <

"We" is not relevant anymore. The amount of totalitarianism is already quite high and pervasive through the society which is fat becoming a slave-society