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.