If Big Business Diversifies Income, Why Can’t You do too?

I’m going to side track and shock my more liberal friends by defending a member of the ruling party in Singapore’s General Elections. The member is Mr. Murali Pillai, the Member of Parliament (MP) for Bukit Batok Single Member Constituency (Bukit Batok SMC), who apparently said that he didn’t see why MPs were expected to serve the people full time and couldn’t keep their day jobs.

This call has given the opposition plenty of opportunity to accuse PAP MP’s like Mr. Murali of being greedy opportunist who are more interested in extra money than in devoting their lives to serving the people. On the face of it, being an MP is a wonderful money-making scheme. If you’re elected into parliament, you get a monthly allowance of some $15,000 (three times the national average) and you are only work one day a week when you meet your constituents and even then, you have an army of grassroots volunteers who are so eager to please, they’ll do all the heavy lifting for you. Given this scenario, it’s only logical for one to take on another job as this job officially pays you to do not very much.

When the Worker’s Party made Singapore’s electoral history by winning a single GRC (Group Representation Constituency – a concept unique to Singapore but it’s basically a case of voting for a single MP but getting four) in the 2011 General Election, the first thing that the Workers Party did was to announce that their MPs would only be MPs and live off the single income of an MPs allowance.

It was a brilliant political move that was designed to show that the Worker’s Party MPs were going to be dedicated servants of the people as opposed to the ones from the ruling party, who were made to look like they were treating the MPs job as a summer getaway on the tax payers dime.

While I get the political master stroke that this move is, I believe that the concept of making people work only one job is faulty. This is especially true in a time where innovations like artificial intelligence (AI) and robots are changing the job market in ways that we never imagined possible. Jobs that we thought of are no longer going to exist. Gone are the days when you joined a single department in a single company for the next fifty years.

Tying people down to a single employer at any given time made sense when people worked for a large organization that would take care of them for life. However, in an era where organizations can dump you at a drop of a hat and be praised for creating “shareholder value,” this does not make sense. The only thing this does is to create a sense of insecurity among people and create a generation of neurotics who will do anything to keep onto that ever-precious job. It works beautifully for big time employers who haven’t exactly been good about raising salaries to keep up with inflation.

I take the example of Singapore’s migrant worker population as an example. Thanks to the explosion of Covid-19 cases among are migrant worker community, the world became very aware of the sub-human conditions that our migrant workers were being housed in. It took a global pandemic for people to even pretend to understand that there was a gross mismatch in the power between the employers and the employees, which led to a national health crisis.

One of the reasons for this mismatch in power between the employer and employee is the fact that the migrant workers are tied to the employers by law. The employer controls their right to stay in Singapore and the migrant worker has to put up with it. An employer can easily terminate the pass of migrant worker for the smallest infringement and choose other workers. By contrast, the migrant worker faces plenty of legal hurdles designed to give jobs to emasculated tin cans sitting in an office jacking off over spreadsheets, should he want to change his (they are mostly men) his employer because the current one is screwing him. I speak as someone who once had to fire 30 of them in a liquidation scenario.

There are of course arguments that one has to be careful about conflicts of interest. For example, you cannot expect someone working in Human Resources at Coke to moonlight in the same role at Pepsi. Doing this would put most employers at risk – trade secrets would no longer exist.

However, as long as you avoid such situations, there should be no reason why any worker should not be allowed to take a job on the side? I think of one of my best friends, who is a Nepali chef. He used to work for a hotel but on his spare days would cook at other restaurants. Didn’t please his HR but he had a reasonable argument, which was – “I can knowledge when I work other places, which I bring back.” It assumes that the knowledge of an employee is a monopoly of the employer. Contrary to what you might be told by the Singapore government, knowledge is not a static block but a flowing river and when people work in many places and in many different roles, they learn and share best practices.

I had a relatively enlightened employer, who allowed me to keep working at the Bistrot.  At first it was a little uncomfortable for him when common friend did point out that I was clearly happier in the Bistrot environment than in the office one. However, I had the chance to repay his kindness when I could introduce potential clients to him through people I had known at the restaurant.

No sensible businessman who will depend on a single customer, so why should human beings depend on a single employer?

The issue with our MPs is not so much a case of them having two well paid jobs. It’s a case of one of the employers not being willing to ask for more value. Mr. Murali is right, why can’t an MP hold down another job. The key here is that in return for the $15,000 monthly allowance, we should make Meet the People sessions every night. The MP can finish his day job at 6pm and then deal with constituents from 8 to 10 at night. That would be worth the money.

Making people get tied down in an age of mobility and fluidity is to create slavery to an organization. The last time I checked, slavery was the antithesis to a normal society.

Growing Too Old

I’ve been unemployed for a good portion of my working life and when I got a “corporate” job in my late thirties, everybody told me that I had to hang onto it because it was probably the only job that I would have. The reason for it was very simple, I started “working properly” in my late thirties and by the time I reached a certain level, I’d be “too old” to be employable.

Like it or not, one of the worst of the “isms” in Singapore is ageism. While “racism” (particularly with the riots in the USA) and “sexism” make media headlines, ageism affects far more of us and in an age of shorter working life cycles, is perhaps a larger and more serious issue. Singapore is filled with too many stories of people in their mid-forties who have been retrenched and unable to find work but still stuck with mortgages and children whom they need to send to school.

In a way, the down and out situation in Singapore is the mirror opposite of London. When I lived in London, the tramps camping at my door were inevitably young and white, who had fallen into a drug habit. In Singapore, by contrast, the old are inevitably old. In the pre-Covid-19 world, all you needed to do was to sit in any outdoor eating area and you’d find that the people doing the “heavy stuff” like carrying dishes were inevitably old as were the people desperate enough to go round tables trying to sell you tissue paper for a dollar or so.

What makes this scene particularly sad is the fact that Singapore claims loudly and proudly to be an “Asian” society that “respects” elders. Ironically, the biggest proponent of “Asian Values” was the late Lee Kuan Yew, who grew up with a disdain for anything Chinese until he entered politics and realized that it was the Chinese Educated who demonstrated in the streets. The late Mr. Lee was a poster boy for “active aging,” working well past his ninetieth birthday. However, while he was busy ensuring himself jobs in the cabinets of his successors, it was a singular act. All his cabinet colleagues, including Goh Keng Swee, his loyal deputy who did the work, retired in what was called “leadership renewal,” or the process of getting the old to give way to the young.

Mr. Lee was in theory right to focus on “leadership renewal.” There is such a thing known as hanging on too long and letting the things that made you great become a total liability to the people you once cared about. “Arab Spring” old folks on top who didn’t know when to let go.

However, a good idea has been taken to an extreme, where old folks who never had salaries of our well-paid ministers are pushed out of work once they hit a certain age. In many cases its usually at an age where people still have mortgages and other hefty bills to pay. How did this happen?

I believe that the heart of the problem is ideological. Singapore is famous for being the world’s “nanny state,” with the government behaving like a stern parent. For the most part, the parent has been wise in many of its decisions. However, the parent has been unable to listen to the realities on the ground. There’s been an ideological conflict at the heart of our governing philosophy. On one hand we’ve told the people that the only viable source of employment is foreign investors and the government. On the other, hand there’s also a message of “non-welfarism” where the government claims that it does not give out cash because it wants people to be self-reliant.

This was perfectly fine when we had multinationals coming in and hired people for life. However, this isn’t the case anymore. The multinationals may still use Singapore as a regional base but the real markets are in other parts of Asia, with more to offer.

Hence the situation became such that the “big” growth drivers were not hiring the way they used to and people were stuck with rising expenses and less stashed away.

Like it or not, our CPF system, while useful, is inadequate. My ex-boss at Citibank, Mr. Eddie Khoo, told me, “Ask Singaporeans about a retirement plan and they’ll tell you there’s CPF. What they fail to realise is that most of your CPF is used for housing, it doesn’t give you enough cash.”

Mr. Khoo was correct in that most of our forced savings was tied up in housing. What he didn’t add was that the government’s solutions to the “aging” problem has been to tie up CPF monies in CPF. First, they’ve been raising the minimum sum requirements along with the retirement age.  Then they’ve capped the limit of what you can use it for.

If I take myself as an example, the only thing that CPF has helped to do has been to defray my mortgage payments. However, beyond that, it’s become like a mirage, where I see more money being added to the account but with further restrictions on withdrawal, it is money I will realistically not be able to utilize as I age no matter how much I have.

In addition to increasing the retirement sum, the other method has been to raise the retirement age. Like everything else coming from the Singapore Government, this sounds good in theory. Yes, people are aging but they’re healthier than they used to be and can remain useful.  As Senior Minister, Tharman Shanmugaratnam has said, “No one is too old to hire, too qualified to adapt.”

Unfortunately, the practice is rather different and getting Mr. Tharman’s words into practice will take time. You cannot change a culture of age discrimination overnight, even if the problem needs to be solved urgently.

Again, I take myself as an example. I am turning 46 in November. I left my corporate job last year between my age and a Covid-19 ravaged economy, I’m challenged to think of what I’ll do next to feed myself. I’ve psychologically accepted that I am unlikely to ever go back to full time corporate again.

So, what does someone like me do? Effectively, my only assets are the fact that I’m relatively healthy and I’ve met a few interesting people and done one or two things.

So, to ensure I have enough money to pay for my bus card, I take up a bit of blue-collar work here and there. It’s not going to make me rich anytime soon but a few dollars in the pocket here and there. In addition to this, blue collar gigs allow me enough time to look at other things.

I write more and I look for a bit of PR work here and there, which I can put aside to pay down debts and to set aside for the day when I’m a bit too old to do very much. Hopefully, I’ll be able to do things.

However, the question remains, while I ever be able to earn enough remains on my mind and the answer for many people my age, is ironically, to look at other places to live. A lawyer I know is looking at Manchester as a retirement venue. An old editor believes that home may be in India. My kid, is telling me that we should look at Vietnam as a possibility. My Dad moved to Thailand and has a decent enough life. His point being, at 70 plus he gets the odd job here and there and he can afford a comfortable life style, which he cannot in Singapore.

Perhaps the government in Singapore should consider this. If the aging are not allowed to contribute to Singapore, why should they stay there and spend retirement funds there?