10/18/2007

one flew over the cuckoo's nest

Employer or employee's market? Few months ago it was reported in the msm that employers are willing to pay many times more for good candidates. And employees can expect higher remuneration with more pay rises. Today it is reported that employees are asking for 10% more than employers are willing to pay and employers are unwiling to pay. It also said that Singaporean employees are now aware of their value because they were bilingual and can seek employment in China and Hongkong. Wow, bi lingual Singaporeans can now flock to greener pastures. And the vacant positions that are paying lousy money can go to the monolingual FTs. So Singaporeans can all fly away from their nests to earn big bucks in foreign soil and the their nests can be taken over by the cuckoos.

notable quotes - loh chee kong

One man's 'acceptable business practice' is another man's kickback. Loh Chee Kong This quote is quite universal and can be applied to many situations.

Super talents that are not

Our supertalents are at best good in names only. Or if not, the only skill they have is to hire consultants to do the job and thinking for them. But that surely does not require much talent. Most of the poorly educated Ah Beng bosses are doing the same thing, employing MBAs and PhDs to work for them. We are engaging consultants to study and find solutions to get out of the Brazil list of tax havens. And we know why we were in the list. Our tax bracket is below 18%. And the Brazilians need to include us there so that they can tax their own companies operating here and our companies operating in Brazil. The Brazilian Embassy said so. Do we really need to pay millions to consultants to study on this? Don't we have any local talents to do the same thinking?

Wrongful allocation of resources

One of the major strategic error of our education system is the allocation of university places to less financially rewarding courses. Every year thousands of fresh undergrads were admitted to the Arts, Social Sciences, or even Engineering Facualties and only a few hundreds to the extremely lucrative Law School. And when these students graduated and go into the job market, the law graduates on the average are going to earn 10 times more than the other graduates after a few years in the profession. What the system should do is to reverse the intake. Send a few thousand students to take up law and a few hundred for the other courses. Then we will produce students that are highly marketable and in demand. The legal profession will be happy, the civil service will be happy as there will be no shortage of lawyers, the parents will be happy and the graduates will also be happy. Now, why should we continue to send so many students to pursue courses that are economically to their disadvantage? And the students and parents knew but could not get them into Law School because of an artificially created small number of places available. There is no shortage of students wanting to study law and all of them will be very qualified for the course. Or are we underpaying the graduates of the other courses?

10/17/2007

Does CPF changes affect Malaysians/PRs?

I don't think all these Minimum Sum, Medisave and delayed withdrawal will affect Malaysians or PRs working here. Not very sure on this. Any one knows? Or would it mean that Singaporeans are now even worst off than non Singaporeans on this?