One of the best things about Covid-19 was the fact that we discovered a term called “Essential Workers.” I liked this term because it made us question the greater purpose of our existence. It became clear that many blue-collar basic jobs which required people to deal with dangerous and dirty things, were actually essential to our way of life. These were the jobs that enabled us to live in a clean and safe environment. We found that cleaners to ensure that our estates to ensure that our estates were livable, the rubbish collectors to ensure that the rubbish got collected and didn’t make our homes stink and the guys at the supermarket ensured that we had adequate supplies of food. The working professionals got upset that they were not counted as “essential” but life carried on quite nicely even though the bankers, lawyers and accountants were not in the office.
You would have imagined that after two months of this situation and the supposed new found appreciation of blue-collar work, you’d expect that there would be something of an interest in trying to readdress Singapore’s pathetic income disparity between the white- and blue-collar worlds. Singapore, being the place where we pay extra to people from London and New York to come over here to work white collar jobs and thus push wages up for the locals in the “professions,” but at the same time we bring in people from Dhaka and Manilla to work blue collar jobs at wages barely above their home city rates, thus pricing Singaporeans out of the market.
However, while Covid-19 might have shown that this system of high-income disparity was clearly unsustainable, the Powers-that-be in Singapore have worked to try and ensure the preservation of the status quo.
Take the argument about the minimum wage as an example. When Dr. Jamus Lim, Member of Parliament (MP) for Sengkang GRC, talked about not relying on “folksy” wisdom when debating the minimum wage, the union(s – theoretically we have many but they all work under one umbrella) took up arms against the fact that he used the word “folksy” rather than the suggestion that the minimum wage might actually benefit lower wage workers. Yes, ironically, Singapore’s union(s) are against the idea of a minimal wage.
The union(s) is against having a minimum wage because the standard argument in Singapore has been that a minimum wage actually discourages foreign investment and is therefore bad for job creation. While this argument may have had strong merits in the 1960s when unemployment was high and the strategy was to attract cheap manufacturing investment. However, in 2020, our economic strategy has to be different and our price structure has changed. Surely there is no harm in conducting a study on what constitutes a live able wage or and what companies can afford to pay (note, I’m only talking about conducting a study not implementing a policy). Yet, the idea of a minimum wage is such an anathema to a group of people earning millions a year that the mere suggestion that one should look into minimal wages is shot down like a national blasphemy.
It gets worse. I think of the liquidation of a major construction company that had been awarded government contracts. This particular company had become so cash poor that it had simply left its vehicles lying around the place because they had run out of money to pay for the diesel. They also left 65 Indian workers with unpaid wages and a group of them actually lived on a construction site for over a month with no running water and barely enough diesel in the generator to give them electricity. Not only had the company stopped paying their wages, they also stopped feeding them.
While there was no money to pay the people, who were doing the actual construction of the projects that they had been paid for, the finance manager continued to receive a five-digit salary and one can only assume that he was at the lower end of the pay scale of the people hibernating in the boardroom.
Rather than acknowledging that there was a fault in the status quo, which was proven by Covid-19, there’s been a rush to try and restore things to normal. You have lots of advertisements and articles complaining about the death of the office. Whenever you try and publish something different, it simply ends up being thrown out by the editors. You have people like the Fawning Follower aka Critical Spectator who went to great lengths to lecture Singapore’s cyberspace on how Singapore had benefited from cheap labour.
This is not helpful. It should be clear that we cannot sustain a system where white-collar professionals who spend their days quibbling over the wording of a street sign and then find ways to claim they spent hours on a problem that monkey could solve in 10 minutes so that they can milk their clients for more money to spend on buildings that add less than zero to the environment while we deny the guys who physically make the things that we need a few cents more.
We need to remember that life without these guys:
Copyright Singapore Press Holdings
This is what we'll find in our homes:
Copyright Mothership.
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