You have to hand it to Singapore’s Ruling party for having a
sense of impeccable timing when it comes to releasing information. It waited a
month after the General Election to release the news that Singapore had entered
a double-digit recession and more crucially there was an announcement that 47 employers
had been put on a watch list for unfair hiring practices. The report can be
found at:
The report was focused on the PMET (Professional, Manager,
Executive and Technicians) class and it focused on the financial sector, where
it found that there were remarkably few local Singaporeans occupying top jobs. There
was as the report states quite clearly that in many cases there was a
concentration of a certain nationality (since I don’t need to be politically
correct, the report meant Indian national).
As a matter of full disclosure, my main benefactors have
been Indian Nationals and if I look at my three proudest moments in what I have
as a career, two of them were as a result of dealing with Indian Nationals. I’ve
also taken the view that being a “professional” is not what it’s cracked up to
be. I am happy to talk about cricket, find it perfectly natural to eat with my
hands, understand that Diwali and Deepavali are the same festival and appreciate
the beauty of spoken Hindi and Bengali. For years we were happy with expats
that were white and accepted being told what to do by that lot and only changed
our tune when the said expats were a little darker.
Having said all of that, this report is rather striking. I
cannot think of any other country where there is an issue of discrimination
against the local people. In most places laws on discrimination are aimed at
protecting minorities. The “native” born is usually the one with the advantage.
In America, affirmative action is designed to ensure that women, blacks and
Latinos can get jobs and that companies don’t turn into exclusive places for
white men. In India, the discrimination is based on cast and Indian law makes
it such that certain jobs are reserved for people for “Dalits” or “Untouchables.”
Our laws by contrast are there to protect the “native” born Singaporean from being
discriminated against. Isn’t there something wrong here?
The next question is why do we need laws to protect our
locals in the job market? Is it because the job creators are inevitably from
elsewhere or is it because our locals don’t have the skills for the jobs available?
If the answer to either of these questions is yes, the government has some explaining
to do. This is after all a government that prides itself in being much better
at planning life than anyone else. As I was once told, “Why worry so much, the
government will take care of you?”
When it comes to the first question, the answer is that
Singapore has inevitably positioned itself as a haven for foreign companies. We
are often told that our economy is dependent on foreign investment and with
that, we were to understand that a god part of our economy would be run by
foreigners from elsewhere. Things were relatively comfortable when the expats
were primarily the white variety. Companies had to pay extra to move people
from the West and there were simply not that many professionals from the West that
were willing to move for love of money. As a result, the multinationals had to
hire and promote locals.
This was comfortable (both materially and psychologically)
for all as everyone knew their place. The expats got the life they’d never get
back home and the locals were happy to rise up to the level that didn’t require
them to be expats elsewhere. The government also made a point of drilling it
into the minds of the locals that it was bad to be a “quitter” and good to be a
“stayer” (even if they were happily getting other people to quit other places).
Things were a little different when it came to the Indians,
who had more than enough people who were willing to relocate out of India and
the natural balance of things got upset.
Leaving aside the multinationals from elsewhere, there are
the GLCs or government linked companies, which are the local and increasingly
regional behemoths. Many are looking at expansion in the region and this means increasingly
looking at top management from elsewhere. DBS Bank started hiring former
members of Citibank. Piyush Gupta, the current CEO is an Indian National and
former CEO of Citibank’s Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand operations.
He succeeded Richard Stanley, an American who ran Citibank in China. His predecessor
was Jackson Tai another American who had previously worked for JP Morgan. The
only Singaporeans who seem to get hired in the GLC sector are the former military
men. Think of the SMRT Corporation which famously did a global search and conveniently
found that the most talented replacement for the former Chief of Defense Force
that was the CEO of SMRT to be – his successor as Chief of Defense Force (they
were probably telling the truth; the global search may have involved spinning a
globe).
So, if the multinationals and the GLC’s are closed for our local
PMET’s, who will create jobs for them? The obvious answer is in the SME sector.
While the government has been more generous in the name of promoting entrepreneurship
(for disclosure sake, I am working with a government linked institution to promote
a start-up accelerator), the truth is that SME enterprises are regarded as inconvenient
insects and should the SME enterprise have the audacity to take market share
from either a multinational or even worse, a GLC. As far as officialdom is concerned
start-up enterprises are acceptable to meet quotas but unacceptable should they
take a sliver of a market that a GLC takes for granted.
As such, Singapore’s start-ups need to understand that
government help will be of minimal use and they will need to work in consortiums
with other SMEs from Singapore and beyond if they are to survive. Then, as my
favourite data analytics entrepreneur (who is incidentally an Indian National) said,
“You’d get better returns if you gave some of the money that you spent on
foreign investors to local start-ups.” Unlike the multinational, the local
enterprise has no choice but to operate in the country and hire and promote
local.
The second question relates to the skill set of the locals.
In the report, it was said that the employers found that the locals did not have
the right skill set. Apparently, the government has told them that they need to
“cast their net wider” (that’s coming from an organization that cast its net so
wide it inevitably finds the same people).
The main question here is what exactly are the skills that
our locals seem to be lacking? Our local universities are highly regarded and
with the exception of particular technical skills, its hard to think of our locals
lacking any real technical skills that most jobs would require. So, why aren’t
they getting hired?
The answer might come from a reader of TRemeritus, who made
the point that most workers in Asia are still factory-workers at heart. The entire
Asian continent built its prosperity on the floor of the sweats shop and this
particular reader pointed out that our workers are still thinking like sweat shop
floor workers.
This mentality needs to change particularly in the more
developed economies like Hong Kong and Singapore. Unfortunately, to move away
from the sweat shop floor, you need a worker with a different type of mindset
and that mindset doesn’t gel well in a social system that requires you to
question the status quo. Unfortunately, Asian governments find it easier to pay
Westerners more to move here and do the thinking that to train their own people
to think.
There are some positive signs. China, which had positioned
itself as the “workshop of the world” has produced technology innovators like
Jack Ma. There is more worry about China Technology than China manufacturing
these days.
If a communist dictatorship can produce people who think, why
can’t Singapore? Unfortunately, the thinkers are usually brought in to work for
the government and the need to think is removed. For example, Ministry of
Education Scholars are sent to schools where the kids will succeed regardless
of what you do. They didn’t get sent to schools where the kids barely show up.
Our most notable ones, the military ones, are inevitably placed in war games
centres to play chess rather than being in places that might see anything
resembling combat. This needs to change. If you can spot intelligent people and
spend money on sending them to the world’s best universities, surely you can utilize
those brains by setting them to solve complex problems.
I don’t believe in shutting borders and as a small trading
nation, Singapore needs to be open the world. However, expecting foreign
investors and foreign “talents” to get our economy and society moving is not a long-term
solution to anything. Building a competent local core is the real backbone of
building a strong society that will endure. The answers are clear, its now up
to the powers that be to decide if this is what they want.
No comments
Post a Comment