What Exactly is the Singapore Core?

 One of the main discussion points in the last month or so has been the topic of jobs or more accurately the good paying jobs that are going to people other than the local graduates. It goes without saying that this topic has raised passions and the government has been caught between a rock and a hard place. So, as anyone tracking Singapore’s media will notice, there have been a lot of noise in the mainstream media about how we can’t afford to shut ourselves to the outside world but at the same time the government will always preserve the “Singapore Core.”

While it’s good to see the government talking about preserving jobs for the local population, I believe that there is a bigger issue at stake, namely the fact that Singapore’s business model is stuck in the 1960s and while the talk about a “Singapore Core” may make an attractive soundbite, it’s never been actually defined.

On the superficial level, the talk of a Singapore Core simply means that local Singaporeans will get priority in looking for jobs. While the intention of the powers-that-be is to placate the population, one should ask why this discussion is even necessary in the first place.

In most places, its assumed that all things being equal, it’s the natives who have the upper hand in looking for employment. There’s no magic explanation for this. It’s simply easier to higher the guy who doesn’t require you to spend hours on end in an immigration office to fill out paper work to ensure he’s allowed to stay and work in the country.

Yet, the experiences of the local population don’t seem to reflect what should be obvious. The sentiment on the ground is such that expats who once felt like a treasured part of the community are now being made to feel like they are less than valued and one has to look what is the underlying issue.

In the age of unthinking populism, the answer has been that there are too many foreigners in Singapore “stealing” jobs from the local population and to placate the voting segment of the population, the government has started making hiring people from elsewhere a little less easy.

Unfortunately, I believe that the issue at stake is not one of immigration. Rather, it is one of economic structure. In many ways, Singapore is the Playboy centerfold for Western Economist. Unlike the rest of the post-colonial world, we embraced our colonial past and welcomed Western and Japanese multinationals.

In fairness, this strategy worked brilliantly. Singapore developed rapidly, and our people got used to working at “world-class” standards. A growing portion of young and bright people were recruited to work in world-class companies and were well paid for it.

However, there was never really was a “Singapore Core.” Our bright young things understood that the boss would ultimately be a Western or Japanese expatriate who had the vital task of supporting our economy by paying overpriced rents, drinking overpriced alcohol and patronizing overpriced prostitutes.  We were not encouraged to venture out of Singapore (stay with family, don’t be a quitter and so on) and we were told by our Founding Father himself that Singapore simply didn’t have the economies of scale to produce anything world class.

In any other country, a “Core” essentially means the engine of wealth creation, which in most cases involved Small and Medium Enterprises. In the USA, there are several American cores, of which Silicon Valley is the most prominent. The “American Hero” is a kid who has a bright idea and succeeds in getting it off the ground. In Germany the “German Core” is the Mittelstand, or the small and medium enterprises that specializes in supplying small but crucial components to industries (in F&B, we think of the Rationale Combi-Ovens).

As far as Singapore’s government is concerned, this “Singapore Core” never really existed, which is unfortunate in as much as SME enterprises still employ the majority of people. As far as the Singapore Government is concerned, the sector that should be the “Singapore Core” is nothing more than an inconvenience that soaks up the best and brightest who don’t get hired by the multinationals or government linked companies. Let’s not forget that the closest that Singapore has ever gotten to a “Singapore Hero” was Sim Wong Hoo of Creative Technologies couldn’t raise funds in Singapore.

There is recognition that something has to be changed. There are noises being made about how we need to support home grown SME enterprises, particularly in the technology sector. However, as Covid-19 showed us, too many sectors still rely on good old-fashioned stuff. Any suggestion that foreign workers be housed in something other than a rat’s nest is met with resistance from the construction industry as cost increasing. Suggest that you can work from a caffe without going into the office and the real-estate industry gets on the defensive paying for editorials to remind us of the fun we have in the office.

We are not going to have a “Singapore Core” if we cling onto old fashioned economic models because too many of the “right” people have a stake in the status quo. If anything, we shouldn’t worry about not having a “Singapore Core” if we persist in holding onto these notions -there may not be a Singapore worth speaking about….