Who Are They?

 

The story of what happened to Zakir Hossain, the Bangladeshi worker whose work pass was not renewed has reignited the usual storm on who are the foreigners that living and working in Singapore. Mr. Hossain is regarded in some camps as someone who has worked hard in the jobs that Singaporeans were simply not willing to do. However, there are a group who think that Mr. Hossain is an ungrateful SOB who had the audacity to complain about not wanting to live in a place where the Minister of Manpower was only willing to enter if he was in a hazmat suite.

So, given that the topic has ignited a few interesting views, I thought it might be worth asking ourselves who these chaps are. It’s a question that needs to be asked because as with passionate debates, both sides become so focused on the debate and their point of view, that they forget that what you’re talking about is a human being. It’s easy to blame your problems on a group when you label them as “illegals” or “criminals,” especially when that group has less than you. However, when you fall into that trap, you lose something important – your basic humanity.

I look at the issue of “foreign labour,” from the sad reality of being a “loser” in the capitalist system. Didn’t get a foothold to build a corporate career in a field that I would excel in. When I freelanced, I had a few lucky breaks but couldn’t quite build on it. So, at the age of 38, I ended up waiting tables so that I could pay basic bills and you could say that I should have become the prime target for unscrupulous snake oil salesmen wanting political power (graduate member of the ethnic majority needing to take subsistence job to survive).

I didn’t go down the dark path for a simple reason. When I became a “loser” in the economic system, I became a “winner” as a human being. My fellow waiters for Pinoys and the chefs were primarily Tamil chaps from India and Malaysia. These guys became my work mates and I got to know them as people who had things like families. The guy from that period of my life that comes to mind is Rafey, the Pinoy chap who did all the “real” work at the Bistrot for seven-years. He became invaluable to me. I was the one that customer liked but I could only be liked because Rafey did the work. Poor guy had only one problem – he was a bloke and when a little Minx got hired, he suddenly found himself surrounded by rumours that he had made attempts to molest her (which were not true) and he was eventually fired after seven years of loyal service.

Working in a restaurant was an eye opener and I remember there were people in Singapore who thought that Trump’s rhetoric in Mexicans was great. For me, I couldn’t understand it because in the Singapore context, it was like saying people like Rafey had “stolen” jobs from me and from my experiences with the guys – this line of thought, simply did not make sense. The guys I worked with, saw an opportunity to earn a bit of money to give their families a better life.

The Pinoy and Indian chaps I worked with in the restaurant were just ordinary guys trying to make a living just like me.

Then I went to work in the insolvency trade and saw that the “screwing” of the downtrodden wasn’t a text book exercise. If anything, it was perfectly legal and, in many cases, encouraged. One of my early cases was a construction company which had 30 over workers who hadn’t been paid for over five months. As the Company had been liquidated, we had to fire them.

A few of the Tremeritus crowd get very upset with me for being “pro-Indian” and “anti-Chinese.” The truth is, I’m particularly pro or anti anybody but the fact remains, many of the people who have blessed me, have inevitably been Indian (and in many cases, Muslim). I’ve mentioned that I was lucky to be on the receiving end of guys in the IIT and IIM Alumni associations. However, you could say that what transpired between myself and the guys with corporate jobs was part of my “good” fortune.

My real blessing was dealing with the workers that I sacked and couldn’t help get money that they had worked for but could not claim. These guys have every reason to hate me. I was the public face of the end of their livelihood. Every time they called me to ask for the money they were promised, I was the one with the story. I didn’t believe me half the time, yet the listened to my “excuses.”

I did encourage them to harass me. I did tell them they had the right to attend creditor meetings. I did extend loans from personal funds to a few. This last point in particular is “controversial,” in as much as I was violating professional rules of favouring creditors and as a colleague kept saying “You know you can’t trust Bangladeshi Workers,” (her judgement was based on working in a law firm that had to defend workers whom she believed were screwing insurance companies.)

It wasn’t easy. I got calls at the most in appropriate moments on a regular basis I had to psychologically write off the pennies I was giving out. Thankfully, humanity won the day. When we finally paid the workers what was due to them, I got most of what I had lent out.

Here is a message from Bangladeshi Worker I had lent some money to during that period:

 

 In another case, the guy actually called me up to tell me his wife had given birth to twins. I was officially the first person outside his family whom he told. Met him on the day that he was flying back to India and he paid me most of what he owed and I got dinner out of it.

 

It’s like this, these guys were just trying to make a living. They were willing to clean our crap because it pays better than the professional jobs available back home. They’re willing to put up with a lot of crap so that they can get that opportunity to provide for their families (I still get text from these guys asking if I can help find jobs in Singapore).

They are, what you would call just acting out like how normal people would react in certain situations. They aren’t passive victims nor are they active criminals. They are merely human beings trying to earn a living and if you look at the instances where they have “rebelled” and “complained” about, its inevitably been in situations where most of us would probably act in that particular way. Think about it, in 2013, when they went riot, they did so because the police seemed more interested in protecting the guy who killed their friend than in solving the problem. The latest instant with Mr. Hossain, is merely a case of a human being stating that he' doesn’t think people should live in a place that causes disease (a fact which the minister in his hazmat suite confirmed). The start of any policy towards our foreign workers should be based on remembering that they’re humans like us who were in a certain situation and will behave accordingly.

An Image of What It Should Be

 

This weekend’s YouTube Binge was a particularly interesting one. The video that struck me was an interview of a US Marine who had served as in the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) as an officer. This young man was born in Singapore and after serving his obligatory national service in Singapore, decided to join the US Marines. The interview can be found at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_MwNbWGUAo

 

What makes this interview so insightful is the fact that instead of comparing the training and equipment in the US Marines and the SAF, he talked about his personal experiences in the SAF and the culture of the two organisations. One of the most striking things he said was the fact that in the SAF, there is an “Ideal” of what the military should be and everyone trains towards the ideal. One of his most striking examples is in field training. He mentions that in the SAF, there’s a lot of emphasis on getting things ready for parade (keeping your uniform spick and span), which also carries onto the field. On the other hand, in the US Marines, there is emphasis on parade appearance when you’re on base and not when you’re in the field. He also gave the example of being in the field whilst training in the SAF and being punished because he instinctively threw a smoke grenade when his platoon came under attack because smoke grenades are controlled items and expensive and he needed to ask for permission to use the smoke grenade.

The SAF is a conscript force and what goes on in the SAF is pretty much a good guide as to what goes on in the rest of Singapore. It was good to see this young man touch on one of the most pressing issues in Singapore – namely the fact that we’re a society that prepares our people for a text book ideal of what the world is rather than what the world actually is.

 I think of another national service story, which comes from a lawyer friend who was a combat engineer officer. The story he tells is that in Singapore, the only way to determine if an area has been occupied previously is if you radio HQ. By contrast the Israeli (field experience) doctrine tells you to check if there are birds in the area cause the birds would be feasting on leftovers by the humans.

OK, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with having a vision and working towards it. This is supposed to be the one key thing that all great leaders are supposed to have. However, having an idea and putting it into practice are two separate things. There are many cases in life when the text book does not provide an example of how things should be and the man in the centre does not know what to do because he’s far removed from the ground. These basic facts are probably the biggest fault lines in how Singapore is run. Our system only seems to cater for text book answers (text books written in the 1960s) and the centre always knows best.

Singapore is run by people trained by a text book written in the 1960s. In fairness to Lee Kuan Yew and his team, that text book worked brilliantly. Singapore is pretty much what a place should be – clean, green and rich. As things stand, things in Singapore look pretty good. I get funny looks from Americans and Europeans whenever I suggest that Singapore is less than paradise, the look of “What are you complaining about?”

However, as I’ve argued, the problem in Singapore is not so much that its in danger of imminent collapse but that it’s bound to slowly rot away from the inside and while things look quite ok at the moment, it won’t always be the case. In the 1960s, the centre held under Mr. Lee because he and his team admitted that they didn’t know everything and were willing to learn, adapt and get things done. Mr. Lee in his early days had the good sense to keep the politics off the backs of capable people like Dr. Goh Keng Swee. He took care of the politics and they took care of the work.

Unfortunately, things changed. Dr. Goh Keng Swee retired in 1984 and was only heard off again at his funeral. Singapore’s success then became all about one man in the centre. The centre was all wise and knowing and only the centre could get things done.

This was OK, when the centre did have answers. However, the internet happened and things started loosening up. In Singapore speak, being on the periphery is for losers and nobody cares what people on the ground think. Classic case is the explosion of Covid cases in the dormitories. Activist spent years raising the issue of unsanitary conditions in the dormitories. They were ignored or sued. Then, Covid happened, thus proving the activist right (the activist being on the ground), which resulted in the government bailing out dormitory operators so that they could go back to suing and deporting anyone who suggested that management was not doing a perfect job. Think of the deportation of Zakir Hossain as being the Singapore version of Trumps “Sporadic for you but not for others.”

This would indicate that the object of doing anything in Singapore is about maintaining the status quo rather than on trying to improve the status quo. This won’t work forever. The world is moving in such a way where it will be impossible for the centre to know everything and guys in the periphery will need to be able to act and improvise according to the situation.

Unless you value the guys on the ground, or the guys doing the actual work and fighting the actual battle, you’re not going to achieve very much. So, instead of tying up the hands of the people, the government should allow people to get on with it, if Singapore is to have a future at all.

Ungrateful Bastards

 

One of my Linkedin contacts managed to get a clip of a conversation with Ms. Kirstin Han and someone who was a little indignant that Mr. Zakir Hossain, the Bangladeshi worker whose work permit that the Ministry of Manpower chose not to renew. Mr. Hossain’s “crime” in this instance was the fact that he had the audacity to express views that were less than complimentary about his situation.

 

While people are entitled to their opinions, the views expressed in this conversation confirm my statement in the last blog posting that the problem with Mr. Zakir Hossain was the fact that his words only “could have” incited a riot instead “actually caused” a riot. As argued previously, whilst I generally disagree with violence, our inability to think accept the fact that people like Bangladeshi and Indian workers have the right to human emotions places us in a position where we are begging for a revolution.

I grew up as an ethnic minority in the UK and to be fair to Singapore and Singaporeans, you’ll find that the “majority” in any given country tends to have the attitude that the “minority” owes the majority for being gracious enough to let them live side-by-side. It’s a case of, you’re alive and doing well here rather than dying in wherever you came from.

Now, to be fair, I get that. It’s like being a guest at someone’s house. You have to be a good guest and do what you can to make sure your host in comfortable. Hence, when in the decade that I lived in the UK, Chinese New Year was inevitably what I celebrated in private (calls to relatives) and dinner with family but it was never more than that. I had no right to demand a day off school because, well Chinese New Year isn’t a public holiday in the UK and I had no right to demand that it was.

As a guest, you need to communicate in the language of the land you live in. I learnt German because my family lived in Germany for a while (stepdad was a senior executive in a large ad agency and so we lived in Germany on expat terms). While my German isn’t great, whenever I visit Germany, I communicate in German outside my mother’s place. When I go shopping in Germany, it never occurs to me to ask people to speak English because, I’m in Germany.

So, I get that minorities should be grateful for the life they lead and they should fit in with the mainstream and to keep certain things to the private sphere rather than insist that it becomes part of the public domain.

If you look enough ethnic minority communities around the world, you’ll find that they are actually are grateful to the host country. I’ve argued that people from “s**hole” countries are the best people to have in a country because whatever you offer them is inevitably better than what they had.

I know, I live with a Vietnamese woman who thinks of Singapore as paradise on earth. My better half doesn’t understand my interest in keeping my tax bill low. As far as she is concerned, we should pay more taxes to the “best government” around. I have another Linkedin contact, who is born British and became Singaporean. He tells a story of how he went to see our national football team and found he was the only one wearing a “Lions Shirt” whereas all the native-born Singaporeans preferred to wear English Premier League jerseys.

If you look at our migrant workers, you’ll find that they are grateful for their lot in life. Every dollar they earn here is 40 to 60 times more than what they’d earn at home. As one of my Pinoy colleagues pointed out – a maid here earns more than an engineer at home. Migrant workers do put up with far more than the native-born because its better than the alternative.

However, just as guest should show some gratitude to their host, it also important that host exhibit some hospitality. In the case of migrant labour, there is an obligation on the host not to screw the guest over and in the case of our migrant labour, the point of screwing is quite obvious.

Sure, construction workers from India or Bangladesh are happy to work the jobs that we won’t do because its better than what they left. They generally don’t complain about accommodation because a roof over the head is better than non at all. However, when you place them in a situation where they are at risk of getting a nasty disease and you confine them to that space, you are actually screwing them over. You are not doing them a favour.

If you look at what Mr. Hossain was “complaining” about, it was specific instances. He lived in Singapore for 19 years and while he did comment on the conditions of migrant workers, there was nothing to suggest that he was telling the workers to rise up in arms. Think of Mr. Hossain’s writings as more like “feedback.” I take my own example. I lived in the UK. As a “guest” I had no right to make demands on British society but as a user of certain services like the train service, I had every right to provide feedback for something I was paying for.

Again, we need to look at specific instance that got Mr. Hossain kicked out of the country and that relates to the incident at the Westlite Tukang dormitory where the riot squad was to be called in. He is accused of “inflaming” emotions in a situation where the workers should have been emotional.

What exactly do we expect migrant workers to be grateful for? Do we expect them to be grateful for their jobs? Let’s be honest here, they are grateful for the jobs we provide but they are not jobs that we would do ourselves. They are here because we brought them here and we have an obligation to ensure that they can live here under reasonable conditions. While we may not want to do their jobs, we should not expect them to live in a place where we would only enter if we covered in a hazmat suite. Would you thank someone for the privilege of living in place where they would only enter in a hazmat suite?

Do We Really Need a Revolution?

 

One of my friends sent me a copy of an article, which announced that a migrant worker by the name of Zakir Hossain had been sent back to Bangladesh. Under normal circumstances this isn’t news. Migrant workers get sent back all the time for all sorts of reasons all the time. However, this case was very special because Mr. Hossain refuses to be what Singapore’s system on migrant labour expects him to be – he is a brown skinned person from what Donald Trump would call an “s**hole” country who wasn’t afraid to voice his opinions.” According to the Ministry of Manpower, Mr. Hossain was making false statements which could have “incited migrant workers at Westlite Tukang and elsewhere, inflamed their emotions and possibly caused incidents of public disorder.” More of the story can be found at:

https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/migrant-worker-zakir-hossain-work-pass-not-renewed-mom-1930891

 

 I have only one issue with Mr. Hossain. My issue is the fact that his writings merely “could have incited” instead of “actually incited” a riot. Don’t get me wrong, I am a proud Singaporean and for all my complaints about things, I love the fact that Singapore is a wonderfully safe and orderly place.

However, while I love the fact that Singapore is an orderly place where people like me, educated working professionals can jerk off in front of a computer in an airconditioned office on a daily basis, I don’t believe that the privileges should come at the expenses of other people.

I can except that a certain amount of exploitation is required for the capitalist system to function. We all want to maximise profit and will try to look for avenues to maximise revenue and minimise cost. People have the surprising ability to tolerate crap and by and large people from the “S**holes” of the world have a bigger amount of tolerance for crap than most. A dollar earned in Singapore is 56.32 Indian Rupees or 66.56 Bangladeshi Takka or 39.21 Philippine Pesos, so it’s worth putting up with crap in Singapore if it helps feed and uplift the family at home. I get that and I have no issues with the concept of “cheap labour,” in as much as it is a “win-win.” The labourers get work and earn more than they could back home and the employers get people willing to work in jobs that need to be done but no one else is willing to do the work (let’s be honest, Singaporeans can bitch about foreigners stealing jobs but they’ll suddenly discover that there’s more dignity in begging your friends for food than in waiting tables or working in a construction site or shipyard.)

However, this clearly isn’t the case. In between employer and employee there are plenty of parties getting rich off the system. As mentioned before, a GM of stevedoring company once made the point that “foreign labour is not cheap.” Employers pay for insurance, accommodation, transport and meals and most importantly they have to pay a protection fee known as the “foreign workers levy,” which can amount to over a thousand dollars per worker per month. On the other hand, the workers have to pay people like agents in order to get the jobs and that can take several months of wages and whilst the Singapore dollar may be higher than the home currency, let’s remember they actually have to live in Singapore for the duration of their employment. The main parties are perpetually screwed.

Again, I have to accept that as disgusting and screwed up as I find the system, it is what it is. Who am I to complain when employers and employees accept it? The system has helped put a lot of money into the economy and it has also helped rise up families in poorer parts of the world in an honest fashion.

However, a line has to be drawn somewhere and Covid-19 drew a pretty sharp line. Up till April 2020, Singapore was giving the world a master class in how to manage the pandemic and then cases exploded in the dormitories. It was, what you call one of the worst examples of exploitation. People like me mattered so the government had some “sensible” restrictions but otherwise life continued as normal. However, the government forgot that people like the workers actually existed and only remembered that they existed when they started getting sick.

Providing accommodation to manual labourers from “S**hole” places is big business. Enough to finance the lifestyle of the well to do. So, when cases exploded, the government rushed to pump tax payer dollars to help the dormitory owners make the dormitories fit for human habitation or at least less likely to cause the spread of a dangerous airborne disease.

A year later, we found that despite pumping tax payer dollars to bring the dormitories up to standard, the same issue broke a year later. Workers were forced to sleep outside their dormitories because they were terrified of getting Covid and the situation reached a point where the Straits Times reported that the riot police (the guys who travel in red metal vehicles) had to be on standby when the dormitory operator and employer had to “address concerns.” My blog entry of the issue can be found at:

http://beautifullyincoherent.blogspot.com/2021/10/crazily-entertaining-creepy-aholes.html

This is where Mr. Hossain comes in. He allegedly wrote and complained about this situation even though he was not living in the dormitory in question. The Ministry is taking issue with the fact that Mr. Hossain gave the impression that the military were called into contain the workers. While the military wasn’t called in, how exactly does one expect people not to form this impression when you see a group of these guys?

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/westlite-jalan-tukang-dormitory-migrant-workers-mom-2242011

 

 Copyright Channel NewsAsia

Mr. Hossain has been accused inflaming emotions among other workers. How exactly did he do it? His crime was to suggests that conditions in the dormitories had the potential to cause disease. Now, the key issue here should not be on whether Mr. Hossain is shooting his mouth of or whether he’s Tweeting his fingers off. The key issue is whether people believe him or not and in this cause it’s the guys staying in dormitories.

Now, if the dormitories were places that didn’t cause diseases, chances are, most of the guys staying there wouldn’t entertain Mr. Hossain. So, here’s the question, what exactly is the ministry and dormitory operating business afraid of.

Well, I can’t answer that question but I can surmise that the Minister of Manpower, Mr. Tan See Leng is terrified of getting Covid when he steps into a dormitory. Despite making a song and dance about how much has been done for workers including vaccinating them, Mr. Tan will not step into a worker’s dormitory without being dressed from head to toe in a hazmat suite:

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/community/beds-set-aside-for-foreign-workers-recovering-from-covid-19-more-than-97-of

 

 Copyright – The Straits Times

I’ve blogged about this before and the blog entry and can be found at:

https://beautifullyincoherent.blogspot.com/2021/10/hey-bro-f-you-bro.html

Singapore is a wonderfully safe and peaceful place. I like it to be that way. However, it cannot remain like that forever if we persist in stepping harder on the downtrodden when they tell you that there are limits to how much crap they can take.

Mr. Hossain is not a revolutionary or an activist. He is merely trying to tell us that there are limits that he and other workers can take. We need to listen to guys like him. They do the crap that makes our life pleasant. We are at the same time not obliged to support the likes of the Centurion Corporation, the largest dormitory operator with ruling party grass roots members on the board and owner of the Westlite Tukang dormitory, who saw a 198 percent increase in after tax profits in the 12 months ending 31 December 2021:

https://centurion.listedcompany.com/newsroom/20220224_224459_OU8_Z3XFVMG496FMSYGX.1.pdf

 

 If we cannot understand this basic concept, then a revolution may be what we need to wake us up from our slumber.

Just Do Your Job

 

The big TV event coming out of the USA is the congressional hearings into the January 6 2021 attacks on the American Congress. The hearings have the elements of a good drama. There is the central event. There is the obvious villain in the shape of the former president who conspired with others to overturn the election. Then, there’s the question of the hero.

One of the most unlikely heroes appears to be the former Vice-President, Mr. Mike Pence, who refused to reject the electoral votes at the request of his former boss and was the target of the mob’s anger. People have testified that Mr. Pence was verbally abused by his former boss (who called him a wimp and other interesting names) and yet chose to do the “right thing” at the end of the day.

 

 Should he be a hero for merely doing his job? Copyright – CBS News

There’s no doubt that Mr. Pence played an important role on January 6, 2021 and being able to withstand the pressure from being close to the wrong end of a mob’s anger was commendable. Thanks to Mr. Pence’s courage, American institutions prevailed and the system of checks and balances survived.

However, there have been arguments against Mr. Pence’s status as a hero of the moment. The arguments rest of the fact that Mr. Pence was effectively his former boss’s poodle until that very day. He stayed silent when the theory of the stolen election, which the former attorney-general described as “BS.” This effectively implied that he had no issues with what has been called “The Big Lie” and this helped motivate the mob. It’s a case of why are we making him a hero for doing the right thing when he could have prevented it from reaching that stage. There is also the point that he was probably OK with doing his boss’s bidding until his lawyers told him that he would be implicated.

Mr. Pence’s behaviour does suggest that self-preservation had more to do with his actions than actual principle. Whilst he has told his former staff to cooperate with the Committee, he himself has not volunteered to speak up. He has only mentioned once that he thought his former boss was wrong. In normal speak, most of us would be pretty f** off if someone sent a mob after us and kept bragging about it. Instead of keeping silent, most of us would be vocal about it at every available opportunity. Mr. Pence, it seems, is more of calculative operator rather than the man of principle that he portrays himself to be. Its for this reason that many of Mr. Trump’s detractors used to say that whilst Mr. Trump was loud and awful – Mr. Pence was arguably worse because he’s quiet and sneaky.

Having said all of that, I am actually sympathetic to Mr. Pence, even if I don’t agree with him on most issues. Sure, he was probably just doing his job on the day when he refused to be brow beaten into rejecting an election, he had no right to reject.

The reason is simple – doing your job is sometimes the most difficult thing in the world. Think of the medical professionals around the world who have been working through the Covid Pandemic. They have spent their days dealing with death and disease. They watch people die despite their best efforts and they themselves end up risking death, away from the presence of loved ones. In places like the USA, health care professionals have faced additional risk like verbal abuse from conspiracy nut cases who believe that the virus is a hoax.

Yet, despite everything that the healthcare professionals faced – they were effectively “just doing their job.” The same is true for active-duty personnel. As horrible as a war may be, a solider is just doing his or her job. They’re just doing their job but when you consider what doing the job means, you got to accept that what they’re willing to face for few pennies is commendable.

Then, there’s the question of what exactly is the job. There is the official job description and the actual job. Mr. Trump probably selected Mr. Pence for Vice-President in the same way that Singapore’s president’s get selected – to execute whatever the selector expects them to do.

When Mr. Ong Teng Cheong, our first “elected” president left office in 1999, he held a press conference, which went down in Singapore’s history books as one of the most controversial. Mr. Ong’s sin in that conference was to complain about his former cabinet colleagues being uncooperative and one of the most famous moments that he mentioned was the fact that when he asked for a figure as to how much was in our reserves, he was told by civil servants that it would take an exceedingly long time to come up with a figure. The following day, the government dismissed Mr. Ong’s complaints as if they were a fiction.

The problem here was that Mr. Ong believed that he was supposed to follow the official job description, which was to look after the reserves. The entire point of making the presidency an elected office was so that it had the political legitimacy to question the government over the reserves.

However, the government’s dismissal of Mr. Ong’s claims suggested to most of us that the problem was that Mr. Ong didn’t understand the “real” or the “unspoken” job description – which was simply to smile and wave on national day. This was further compounded by the fact that the Mr. Ong had a very quiet life after leaving office and when he died, he had the funeral of a private citizen rather than a formal head of state.

So, in such a situation, the question is – which job do you do? Mr. Ong’s successors have all followed the “real” job description of being president. The two from minority communities (SR Nathan and Halimah Yacob) were effectively appointed (all challengers were disqualified) and were allowed to appear as if they were looking after the reserves and the only other president who had to fight an election, somehow vanished and only appeared once a year at National Day.

All of these presidents have been lionised. However, the chances are, if you were to ask a random Singaporean which president was the most significant, chances are they will say Mr. Ong. Let’s be clear, Mr. Ong was not a rabid antigovernmental figure. He was, however, keen to do the official job and appeared that he was willing to stand up to his former colleagues in the government.

Doing your job his very tough. Sure, Mr. Pence’s behaviour before and after January 6 would indicate that Mr. Pence is anything but a decent character. It’s likely that his motives to “do his job” were based on self-preservation rather than principle. However, let’s not run him down for “doing his job” for one day in four years. This was the most crucial of days and the fact that he did it and took leadership when it was needed most is something that we should be grateful for. There are times when “just doing your job” can be the hardest thing in the world and we should be grateful that Mr. Pence was willing to do his when it was needed most.

The Paradox of Happiness

 

I’m about to lose three house guests (relatives of the wife), who had stayed over for the last two weeks and I’m feeling their loss. The reason for this is simple, they’ve been exceedingly pleasant. When I leave the house, I leave people who are smiling. I come home and we eat dinner together. I get called up by people I barely know who ask me when I’ll be back and they say they’ll wait to eat until I get back – and they actually do.

I’ve been living in a strange world. It’s a world where busy is a given. It’s a strange world where people take pride in spending their time chasing for all sorts of expensive stuff. Time, that most precious of commodities is meant to be devoted to only those who can give you something in return. Having lunch with colleagues is seen as a distraction and competition. The concept of marriage ends at the wedding dinner. Instead of bonking themselves silly, bride and groom quickly return to their busy lives. Sitting on a chair in front of a computer screen becomes the only acceptable form of existence. Sitting down with friends and family, with no agenda is strictly frowned upon.

When you’re living like this and everyone else is living like this, it seems normal. However, when you leave that environment or you interact with people from that environment, you suddenly realise that the life you’re leading isn’t exactly normal and its not exactly pleasant.

Funnily enough, I’m not against chasing the almighty dollar. The current economic system is designed in such a way where you will have to chase the dollar if you are to survive and much as the Singapore government might contest this – you will have to do so until the day you die. As an ex-boss at Citibank used to say “CPF is not going to cover the retirement needs of Singaporeans” and Singapore’s pension system is considered the seventh best in the world:

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/042914/top-pension-systems-world.asp

However, while having money is important, its not the only thing in life. In Singapore, the people who understand this basic concept are ironically the people who earn the least. If you walk along Orchard Road on a given Sunday, you’ll find domestic workers happily turning every nook and cranny into a picnic spot. Some of my happiest times come from hanging out with a friend who used to meet with the domestic help on Sundays and going to the odd picnic was fun. I mean, how often can any of us working professionals say that we had time to lie on the grass with a can of beer and look at the sky?

https://pride.kindness.sg/why-do-foreign-workers-here-picnic-by-the-roadside/

 

 Copyright – The Pride, Singapore Kindness Movement

I think of my Nepali friend who used to bring me into Mount Vernon Camp to meet with his relatives. Again, they were warm and welcoming and I leaving the camp felt sad because you were leaving pleasant people.

It goes without saying that unhappy people cannot stand the sight of happy people. The unhappy people, are ironically the ones employing the happy ones. You’ll read enough articles on the news about how the government needs to curtail people like maids and construction workers from “loitering” on the streets (what they really mean is not become an eye sore for unhappy people).

OK, I’m going to get a few bricks thrown at me, but I’m going to have a go at our local Chinese graduates’ women. This is the group that complains that local Singapore men are basically not up to standard and a group of male chauvinist pigs who aren’t as good as their Caucasian counterparts who appreciate their beauty and academic achievement (I’ll make it a point of distinguishing between brains and academic achievement). This group will bitch and moan about how men can’t meet the standards they set so they go for girls from third world countries like China, Vietnam and the Philippines.

To be fair, Singaporean men aren’t the world’s greatest. However, the real reason why we enjoy the company of girls from China, Vietnam and the Philippines is the fact that they’re much better and creating pleasantness. The Filipina girls are especially good at providing no stress entertainment. Our girls are obsessed with appearance and attainment to the point that they really forget that who really cares about what you’ve achieved in life unless it affects them.

I work in Shenton Way, Singapore’s financial district. It is “Wankers Paradise” because everyone is exceedingly presentable. However, the “beautiful” people don’t smile and have something to get worked up over. So, it looks good on the outside but it’s probably toxic to deal with:

https://www.herworld.com/life/are-you-getting-recognition-you-deserve-work/

 

 How many of these beautiful people looks happy to be out and about? Copyright – Her World   

It’s not just the women. Guys in shirts are probably miserable. I think of the time I actually started to envy Bangladeshi workers who were probably earning less than what I was for considerably more “real” work. It was supposed to be a career high point for me, helping comb through the books of someone I would only describe as an evil bastard, though an admittedly wealthy one. I literally camped in the office for the sole purpose of ensuring that the world would know that the Evil Bastard was on paper (legally) clean. The experience was such that I took to social media to ensure that I would get fired and would never work in the industry again (which obviously didn’t work). Staying in an office for longer than an hour at a time and looking at spreadsheets and documents in files makes me want to vomit.

In a way, I’m lucky because I’ve had several breaks from the awfulness of normal. First it was going away to Bhutan, a country that understands that economic growth for the sake of economic growth doesn’t serve anyone. Then, it was the lock down, which made me realise how much more valuable I was away from the misery of corporate existence and now its my houseguest.

I’m not saying that one shouldn’t work long hours to go the extra mile. Its good to be competitive and let’s make no mistake – having money is nice.

However, if you look at the biggest fortunes in the last decade or so, you’ll notice that it wasn’t people who were slaves to chasing the dollar. It was people who wanted to serve and found happiness in creating things that made the world a better place.  

What Are We? – Welcome to the Hyphenated World

 One of the main things that I did in my degree course in anthropology was to debate the issue of identity. We tried to figure out what made a person a part of a particular group and we explored things like ethnicity, culture and language.

This was a discussion that had become complicated. In the days when migration was less common, the answer was simple. You belonged with the group that looked like you, sounded like you and prayed at the same places. Europeans, for example, were predominantly blonde and blue eyed and went to church on Sunday. Arabs for the most part were tanner, had dark hair and went to the mosque on Friday. Things like race and religion were key identifying factors.

However, things have changed since the early part of the last century. Migration has become a fact of life. I am from Singapore, a place where the citizens pledge to be “regardless of race or religion.” I am an ethnic Chinese who has served alongside Malay and Indians during National Service.  I have family from the US, which is filled with hyphenated people (African-American, European-American, Asian-American etc) and I grew up in the UK, where people who were obviously of South Asian decent and went to the mosque on Friday were as British as the Anglo-Saxons in the same village.

So, I’ve grown up in a world where race and religion were not defining factors of belonging to a place. Sure, Singapore’s population is predominantly ethnic Chinese, but as our Prime Minister recently had to clarify, Singapore is not China and the Prime Minister of Singapore is not a China whisperer. If anything, our Prime Minister has shown that when push comes to shove, we probably have more in common with the West than we do with China (hence the propensity to crack uncalled for jokes about Beijing whilst in Washington):

https://mustsharenews.com/pm-lee-beijing-whisperer/

 

So, if race and religion was no longer the marks of identity that they were, what else is there. One could say that there’s language. I remember telling my Finnish friend about a step uncle who was proud of his Finnish roots. My Finnish friend’s initial reaction was “Na, he’s not Finnish – he’s American.” However, when I mentioned that this uncle gave a speech in Finnish, his reaction changed to – ‘He speaks Finnish – OK, he’s Finnish.”

In anthropology we say that “language is culture,” because each language is different and when you speak a different language, you a new mindset. One of the examples being at the pharmacy. In English you ask for something “for” your ailment, but in German you ask for something “Against” whatever you are having.

Language is a powerful form of identity, particularly amongst Europeans. I remember a Caucasian and an Oriental Lady who used to visit the Bistrot. When they paid and I noticed that the Caucasian lady had a German name, I asked in German if she was German. The oriental lady, whose name was Nguyen (a name that does not get any more Vietnamese) said in German “Yes, I am.”

My Singaporean mindset geared me to think that German had to mean someone who was blonde and blue-eyed and had to have a name like “Muller” or “Schmidt.” It took me a while to remember that someone who had dark hair and eyes and called “Nguyen” could also be as German as someone called “Muller” or “Schmidt.” The Ms. Nguyen I had served probably grew up in Germany and spoke German, which was the working language of her environment and learnt English as a second language (and spoke it well enough to function in the international arena) and Vietnamese was spoken at home if at all. Hence, while her name was Nguyen, she was as German as it got.

The power of language as a mark of identification is so powerful that language becomes a political issue. In America, for example, there’s an inevitable clash about teaching in both English and Spanish. In fairness to the American system, the latter groups of immigrants do want to learn English so that they become part of America’s hyphenated identity. The ability to deal with the hyphenation depends on the ethnic group and how long they’ve settled there.

European-Americans or specifically the Irish have no issue being both American and the hyphen. I’m old enough to remember the fact that Irish-Americans were the suppliers of funds and guns to the IRA because they grew up on stories of English oppression. St Patricks Day in Boston was as serious as it was in Dublin if not more so.

The more recent migrants would prefer you concentrate on the American part rather than the hyphenated part. I usually got around Chinatown because I could speak Cantonese to the waiters who were so happy that I was a young person who knew how to speak the language as opposed to their kids who needed to remind the world that they were “American,” “British” or whatever.

At the other extreme, you get Singapore, which officially tells its citizens that they’re Singaporean first and the hyphenated second. However, there’s also a compulsive need reinvent and define the hyphenated part. For example, the Chinese are told that they need to forget about their actual mother tongue like dialects and have to speak Mandarin. Indian in Singapore is defined as a Tamil (something which our late President tried to contest, something which disappointed the local Tamil station which was hoping to get a sound bite). Our language policy is such – English is the common language, we have the mother tongue given to us by the government and there’s a Malay, our national language used in the national anthem and drill commands, but not actually used for much else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWRvPqT2_m8

 

While official Singapore has produced a complicated series of language policies to define Singapore culture, there is an authentic Singapore on the streets, which is best exemplified by Singlish, our version of English, which is for the most part English but has words from Malay, Tamil and Hokkien.

We’re not the only example here. New Zealand had a native culture that gave the European settlers as good as they got. Unlike the “Native Americans,” or the “Australian Aborigines” the Māori People in New Zealand became a recognised part of the mainstream. New Zealand is as English speaking as it gets but the national anthem in New Zealand is partly in Māori and as every rugby fan knows, there’s the Hakka, a traditional Maori war dance performed with passion regardless of ethnic origins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKhx6Gy_-38

 

Human beings are wonderfully adaptable creatures and somehow, when placed in a situation where they have to communicate across barriers, they will do it. At best governments can provide opportunities to learn standard languages but trying to micromanage how people identify themselves, usually doesn’t end very well. So, the answer may be to let things happen on the streets with minimal supervision and let cultures evolve and flourish from there. Let people decide how they want to identify 

Bless the Homophobes for Giving Us the Pride

 

It’s Gay Pride month around the world and in Singapore, it’s the month that Pink Dot SG falls in. This is the time when the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) Community gets to celebrate being just that.

Pride is one of those events that stirs passions. As much as the LGBTQ community feels the need to celebrate being who they are, there is an equally passionate group of people ready to denounce the month as a symbol of everything wrong with society. I am, of course, talking about the more extreme religious community.

Homosexuality (for the sake of argument, this term will be applied to the L’s, B’s, T’s and Q’s as well as the G’s) has always been a contentious topic. The Abrahamic faiths of Christianity and Islam denounce it as a perversion of God’s work and if you were to ask most straight people what they really felt about homosexuals, you’ll find that they think of the homos as a little strange (as a heterosexual guy, I can’t imagine how any “normal” guy would prefer a guy’s anus to a girl’s c***t).

Feelings against homosexuality are such that homosexuality is illegal in any part of the world where the political class needs to show its religious credentials. Being a homosexual is for example, illegal in Saudi Arabia, a country which hosts the two most sacred sites in Islam.

Homosexuality was decriminalized in most parts of the Western world in the last century (from the 1930s onwards) but despite legalization, the topic of homosexuality still arouses passions and conflicts. In the USA for example, you had bakers who got sued for discrimination based on sexuality and then counter-sued for being discriminated against based on religious beliefs, all because they refused to bake cakes for Gay People who wanted to get married. More on the history of decriminalization can be found at:

https://www.humandignitytrust.org/lgbt-the-law/a-history-of-criminalisation/

In Singapore, the topic of homosexuality becomes exceedingly contentious whenever the topic of 377A, or the criminal code that criminalises anal sex between men comes around for discussion. The religiously inclined, lead by Professor Thio Li-Ann have argued fervently to keep the section, despite the fact that three former Chief Justices, a former Attorney-General and one of our most respected former diplomats have all pointed out that there are simply no sound legal arguments for keeping the section (What does it say that we give the weight of the words of a professor who has only practiced law in academic fantasy land to the weight of the words of three men who practiced the law at the pinnacle?).

The result of trying to keep the peace between these warring factions, the government, which prides itself in being about “Rule of Law,” has taken the view that “legal ambiguity” is best. The section of the penal code remains but the government assures the LGBTQ community that it will not actively enforce the law. Hence, Singapore, which takes pride in being the most secular and forward-looking society in the region, is the third most regressive place for homosexuals in the region (after Brunei, Malaysia and tied with Myanmar, a country that has been made famous by brutal military regimes).

https://theaseanpost.com/article/aseans-shifting-attitudes-towards-lgbt-rights

 

 The issue of homosexuality is going to be with us for a while and I’m going to leave the intricacies of the debate to intelligent people. However, what I will say is that, I struggle to see what the fuss is all. As mentioned, I am a heterosexual guy and I can’t imagine how any “normal” man would prefer a guy’s arse to a girl’s c**.

My personal preference is for the girl’s privates and that would remain true whether 377A existed or not. It does not affect me personally if a man preferred to f** a guy’s a** over a girl’s c*** and did it with another guy who was able to give consent in the privacy of the bedroom.

For me, there should be no need to have a “Gay Pride” month. Why do the LGBTQ community need a month to celebrate being proud for simply being who they are? As Professor Thio Li-Ann argued in her 2007 speech in parliament “As fellow citizens, homosexuals are entitled to expect decent treatment from the rest of us; but they have no right to insist we surrender our fundamental moral beliefs so they can feel comfortable about their sexual behaviour.”

However, while Professor Thio is correct in what she says, she forgets that she is making the case for Gay Pride. In her determination to keep homosexuals from entering sexual relationships with their chosen partners, she is denying them a fundamental right that the rest of take for granted.

Professor Thio has rightly pointed out that Homosexuals are in the minority. They are a minority that has been told for over and over again that they are a “perversion” or “shame” for just being who they are. This isn’t a case of minority being different, it’s a case of a community expecting this minority to feel awful merely for being who they are.

As anyone who has been a parent of teenagers will tell you – there come a point where the teenager decides that they’re going to be whoever they want to be regardless of what you think. Think of Gay Pride as something like this. People like Professor Thio Li-Ann give Gay Pride meaning to the Gay Community. Gay people grow up with Professor Thio and her ilk repeating the message that they are sinful and awful and when you have the audacity to disagree, you get called militant and terrorist like.

Unless you’re a repressed homosexual, the only way to make Gay Pride and Pink Dot is for people to look at the homosexual community and say “So What if you’re Gay.” It’s not a question of what you believe but how you react to people. The religious majority are ingeniously proclaiming that they are the discriminated ones and everyone gets upset with them for wanting homosexuals to be the repressed variety. What they forget is that as the “sexual majority,” they are the ones holding the power and they should ask what role they had in making Gay Pride so precious and necessary to the LGBTQ community.    

Need Thing Done – Offering Money – Where is Everyone

 

I’ve just come back from a night out with a colleague who had just come back from a trip in India. We decided to celebrate the evening as the “only boys” in the company and ended up at Hooters in Clark Quay to enjoy a few beers (buy two get one free).

While Hooters is best known for its very politically incorrect uniform for waitresses (the place is called Hooters for a reason), what struck me about tonight’s evening was the fact that the restaurant is suffering from one of the most acute issues facing businesses today – a shortage of labour. The situation was such that they had to close their indoor section and for the first time in my life, I saw this sign on the door:

 

 

 

While Hooters inSingapore is clearly an extreme case, its not the only place. The problem of finding staff is not limited to the blue-collar sector. I had to hold in the vomit when my current employer asked me to put documents in a file today because, well, even white-collar professional businesses are finding it a challenge to find labour.

This is strange in as much as one would imagine that current conditions favour employers. Covid restrictions have loosened and along with it, borders have reopened. Prices have started rising and “leaders” around the world have been talking about a looming recession. Geopolitical tensions like the Russian invasion of Ukraine and wider economic conflict between Russia and the Western powers have made people wonder if a recession will be the mildest of our worries.

So, you would imagine that with so much going on, sensible people will hang onto the jobs available for dear life (bad job being better than no job) and unemployed people would be rushing to the available jobs. However, this isn’t happening and instead of complaining about employees being spoilt and choosy, we need to ask why aren’t people choosing to work when market indicators point to a situation where people should be clinging onto whatever work they have.

While I am not an economist, I believe that the answer is fairly simple. The “normal” of the pre-Covid world was not actually working. However, instead of focusing on ways of building a more sustainable, less toxic system better suited for the 21^st century, everyone rushed to “return to normal.”

Since my primary income comes from a white-collar professional firm, I will start with the “professional” sector of the economy. In this way, this should have been the sector to lead a revolution in creating a new normal.

The information age has done for white-collar work what the industrial age did for the manufacturing sector. Things that required various departments can now be done with software and if you think about it, work can be done anywhere as long as there’s a working internet connection.

Some people would call be strange but I enjoyed life as a freelance media consultant, far away from the hustle and bustle of being in an agency. Worked of the lap top at home or in cybercafes. If I needed to bash out a press release when I was out and about, I’d just go into an internet café, pay a few dollars and bash it out within an hour or so (nothing like paying a few dollars for that hour to make you focus on using that hour or two productively). I could write emails to clients and reporters, chase for money, invoice and so on as long as I had computer access.

These days, life is actually simpler. I have a smart phone, which allows me to check whatever I need to check on line and the lap top is only necessary whenever I need to sit down and write something at length. I don’t need to be sitting in front of a desk staring at a screen and the only movement I get is from one cubicle to another.

Sure, there may be cases where you need certain documents but the truth is, these days documents can be accessed digitally and remotely.

I do get that there are times when you need to meet face-to-face but let’s be honest, how many face-to-face meetings are anything more than a session for ego maniacs to jack off over their self-importance. When you’re freed from the need to be stuck to one place for a third of your life, you also have greater choice on who you interact with.

The old hierarchical model of “me employer and you employee” will change. Rather than paying someone a set wage for set hours in a day in which you are obliged to do whatever your employer ask of you, the employee and employer relationship will be more like a buyer-seller relationship. For example, an employer will pay so much for certain task, which the employee will deliver. Outside those tasks, the employee would be free to look for other people willing to pay for those said task.

By freeing people from their desk, you can move the employer-employee relationship to being more like a buyer-seller relationship rather than a marriage. This is healthier for both sides. If you’re happy you stay, if not, you move on. When the relationship between employer and employee is like a marriage, you risk a situation where sides choose not to show each other love but then when it reaches the obvious conclusion, they have like jealous lovers, which is not healthy for the individuals or the organisation.

This hasn’t happened. Throughout the pandemic we got bombarded with all sorts of articles about the benefits of being a certain location for a set number of hours. You get organisations that think it’s a sign of intelligence to insist that people only have lunch from 12 to two. So, we’re back to traffic congestion, pointless meetings that are akin to masturbation sessions and unless you count greater pollution, stress, gossip, petty power plays and obvious limitations of the public transport system as positive, very little actually gets done. Instead of more productivity, you get more people masturbating over their self-importance.

 

 How is this beneficial to anyone?

Things are a little different in the blue-collar sector. Unlike the professionals, you actually need to be present to do the job on hand. Technology has not reached the stage where rubbish collection cannot be done remotely.

However, we’ve also failed to move beyond our “normal” thinking of shoving the people who do these jobs into a dark hole and then complaining about how ungrateful they are when they complain about getting diseases as the reactions to the following story from the Financial Times indicates:

https://www.ft.com/content/4c63dea0-9ebd-4170-b978-5dce0c5e7f99

 

 

If the dorms are so safe – why does the Minister of Manpower feel obliged to be in a hazmat suite when visiting?

If the people running the white-collar section of the economy are too fond of masturbating over their self-importance, the people running the blue-collar sector have lost their ability to feel human urges and thus their humanity.

Let’s look at the constant debate on the minimum wage. Singapore, a nation which thinks nothing of paying its ministers more than their global counterparts, has a problem even considering looking at what is the minimum a worker needs in order to survive. Apparently, there’s a fear that this will scare away foreign investors and cause inflation, which would negate the benefits of such a consideration. The government, instead, prefers to point to the occasional hand out as being beneficial to the poor (which they usually give just before raising taxes that have the largest impact on the poor).

The answer to the problem in this sector is twofold.  The first point and the one most likely never to be implemented would be to limit the number of parties benefiting from the system of labour supply in the blue-collar sector. It’s unlikely because the government has a stake here in the shape of foreign levy, which is in theory meant to disincentivise discriminating against the locals (as one MD of a shipping company says – “foreign workers are not cheap”) but is in practice a protection racket collected by the government on those that need to hire foreign workers.

The system, as it stands, ensures that the cost of the employers is high and the wages actually received by the workers are low. While employer and employee get screwed, a host of other parties like dormitory owners (a business that members of the ruling party do enter) benefit.

The second point would be to give workers greater freedom to change employer. As things stand, permission to stay in Singapore is tied to the employer, which means the worker is at the mercy of the employer. The problem is most visible in a liquidation scenario where the employer goes bankrupt and can’t pay the wages. However, the non-payment of wages has usually started six months prior. Unlike the professional employees who can move to a new employer the moment the current employer starts defaulting on wages, the foreign worker cannot. I’ve been involved in a liquidation of a construction company, which had left equipment on the site until plants were growing on the equipment, left the workers on a site with no running water, barely enough fuel for a generator, no wages and no food, while the directors sat in a private clubhouse drinking cognac on a daily basis.

Normal was not normal and the opportunity to restructure that was provided by Covid was wasted. Going back to normal will only lead to stagnation on an economic and social front. It’s too bad the pandemic didn’t bite harder.