White Paper – Don’t listen to snake oil salesmen

The debate on the 6.9m population is getting heated up in Parliament. The position of the PAP is that without the more than 1m foreigners coming into the workforce, the city will sink and Sinkies will really be sinking. Our reputation will be impaired, MNCs threatening to pull out, hundreds of thousands of jobs lost, standard of living will go down, and they forgot to add that our women folks will all become maids in foreign countries. What else is new? Crying wolf to little children?

97% of Sinkies have said no to this outrageous scheme of turning our country into a foreigners hub. Are the 97% population so stupid and the handful of snake oil salesmen genius, the white knights that are here to save the people and country? I have written a piece about the restructuring of our economy in the early days when many of these wise men were still playing golies or flying kites. Didn’t they know that we have gone through a very critical phase of skills upgrading to high value added jobs to raise the income of our workers? When has this country turned into another cheap labour joint?

Restructuring the economy…if you can remember

Many seniors would remember how Jurong Industrial Town started. It was primary industries, some heavy industries and many were labour intensive industries. When we started to industrialise, labour intensive industries were the only thing available even if the pay was low. There were plentiful of not well educated workers available and needed jobs. We were competing for investments by being cheap and good.

This went on for a decade or two before China opened up. Our immediate neighbours too were encouraging low cost industries to locate there. The writing was on the wall. We could not compete based on cheap labour. Productivity was the key to lift the economy and industries to the next level. The Govt consciously allowed, or no choice, when many labour intensive garment and electronics companies uprooted to cheaper sources of labour. We have the National Productivity Board, famously known as NPB, to boost productivity.

The Govt went on to attract high value added industries here. We promote ourselves as a hub for knowledge based industries. Highly educated and high quality workers and higher pay. We have to compete at a different level to survive. No more cheap labour!

Some years ago the NPB’s name was changed to Spring. I am wondering what the hell that word meant. It cannot be an Arab Spring or Singapore Spring. But what was clear, Productivity is no longer the key word. And the productivity of the industries and economies actually got buried and forgotten. Productivity has gone to sleep. Whatever GDP growth there was is now directly related to the number of workers, skilled, unskilled and low skilled, that are brought into the country. There is nothing to do with productivity but low cost.

Since when have we become a low cost production centre and cheap labour joint and trying to compete with our neighbours and giants like China, India and Indonesia, and even Malaysia? And why are there so many low cost industries here today and now trying to blackmail the Govt not to restrict the inflow of cheap labour? Why is the Govt not doing the same as in the early 80s, to shift out the labour intensive and cheap labour industries? Or how did so many of these industries creep into this knowledge based economy in the first place?

Would the Govt got weak knees and beg the MNCs to stay put? Please don’t go, we will obey and let you have whatever you want. We will import more cheap labour?

What is happening?