A New Measure Needed

 

I know it’s not cool to admit to it, but I’m doing well. I am the official owner of a flat that, once you minus the outstanding liability (ie the outstanding mortgage), leaves me with a sum of at least S$200,000 plus. I have a main job in professional services (accounting) and statistically speaking, I produce around US$103,181 worth of value every year.

Yet, despite my statistical wealth, I am economically unsecure. My best hope is that my main job will keep me on for at least another 20-years and a significant number of you who are reading this will support the advertisers on this blog so that I can afford to buy an extra cup of coffee every month. If, God forbid, I have any serious ailments in the immediate future, my best bet is to die instantly so that I don’t become a burden to my family.

What I’ve expressed would seem strange to anyone living outside of Singapore. However, anyone from Singapore will understand because what I’ve mentioned reflects the disparity between “Statistic” Singapore and “Real” Singapore.

As part of “Statistic” Singapore, I’m doing well. There’s a property to my name (I avoid using the word own as there is a mortgage to my name), and property prices in Singapore are generally higher than in most places (logic of small land area and many people living in the area) and therefore my paper worth is comfortable. Singapore also has a relatively high Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”) for a small island with a limited number of people and if you look at the GDP per capita, the only nations with a higher GDP per capita are Luxemburg (Tax Haven for wealthy Germans), Macao (Gambling Haven) and Qatar (gas station). So, as part of “Statistic” Singapore, my share of the national wealth is US$103,181 a year. This makes me better off than my friends in Western Europe or the USA. Measures of our GDP success cab be found in the following links:

https://tradingeconomics.com/singapore/gdp#:~:text=GDP%20in%20Singapore%20is%20expected,according%20to%20our%20econometric%20models.

https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/richest-countries-in-the-world

It goes without saying that my reality in Singapore is less rosy than what it appears to be in “Statistic Singapore.” Yet, despite this fact, the government has spent countless times talking about our economic statistics and leaving aside the economic devastation brought about by Covid-19, our government inevitably goes back to our GDP statistics.

In fairness to our government, it’s not the only government to fall back onto various economic indicators as how well they are doing. Donald Trump for example cannot stop talking about stock market highs whenever someone talks about his government’s record.

You could say that it’s only natural for everyone to want to show themselves in a good light and economic statistics are probably the best way to do it. So much of our lives are based on economics and I guess you could say that when governments talk about the economy, it’s a way of showing that there’s money to give us goodies.

However, as the differences between Statistic Singapore and Actual Singapore have shown, GDP is a flawed measure of how well a country is doing as it only looks at one aspect of life in a nation. So, could there be another way of measuring how well a country is doing?

I think one of the best ideas comes from the small Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, which came up with the concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH). To a certain extent, there are aspects of this measure of happiness which one could say are unique to the Bhutanese situation. We also need to remember that Bhutan is not the idealistic Shangri La that is portrayed to be and looks to India as a centre of economic assistance. There is also the problematic issue of having to conduct surveys on a yearly basis.

Having said that, the basic idea of GNH is right. The Bhutanese has qualified happiness into several aspects, which include things like the environment, health, cultural diversity and community vitality in addition to the usual economic measurements. A graph of what GNH comprises of can be found below:

Now, admittedly its harder to measure GNH with its various aspects than GDP. However, as argue, GDP is a flawed measurement as it only acknowledges the fact that life more than just economics. If you look at the situation in Singapore, you’ll find that our government is obsessed with GDP. All you need to do is to ensure that enough people are employed and nobody actually starves to think that you’ve done a good job. There is, for example, no need to look at the type of jobs that people are getting and whether things like whether I’m worrying on whether I might be able to afford to send my kid to school or whether I get sick or not.

Let’s go back to my personal example. As GDP indicates, I’m doing well. I have a job and a property in my name. The government can claim that it’s technically done well. People like me are producing USD100,000 plus a year and so on and so on.

However, GNH forces those in power to see that people are not just economic digits. Under the GDP measure, you’d be successful if you see that your people have a job even if that job pays $500 a month. However, under the GNH measurement, you have to ensure that people not only have jobs, but they can afford to send their kids to school, live in normal conditions and don’t have to breath toxic air as part of daily life.

Our traditional method of measuring things is too narrow and doesn’t portray things accurately. Isn’t it time we look at trying to measure things more accurately so that we can build a more livable society for the greater number of us?

Who Says We’re Not Creating Jobs?

 

The main and longest feature in Singapore’s portion of cyberspace is focused on one single issue – namely the issue that foreigners, specifically those from India have been unfairly allowed into to Singapore to rob our local population blind. The grouses on the net comes can be summed up as “This government cares about everyone except the local Singaporean.” If you explore enough websites in Singapore, you will inevitably run into someone with some horror story about this or that company discriminating against nice hard-working Singaporeans in favour of nasty, cheating foreigners from what Donald Trump would call “Shitholes.” The question that people inevitably ask is why is the Singapore government creating an economy that in turn creates jobs from people from everywhere else, except Singapore. The pressure has reached a stage where there is an equal amount of gibberish being sprouted about the importance of building a “Singapore-Core” in the economy.

I’ve described this as gibberish because, well, if you look at Singapore’s political system, you can’t accuse the government of not creating jobs for Singaporeans. The structure of our governmental system would indicate that Singapore has created a number of high paying and highly secure jobs, which can only be filled by Singaporeans.

However, given that I work in corporate restructuring and insolvency, the question that I would ask is whether these jobs are actually producing any value for the Singapore Inc as a whole and whether these jobs could be, well for want of a better term – better utilized. Let’s remember the basics – Singapore is a tiny island, or a small red dot. 

Let’s start at the top. We have a Head of State, who functions pretty much like a combination between the English Monarch and the House of Lords in as much as the President is primarily ceremonial but does have the reserve power to say no to the government, should the government choose to tap on the reserves. Our President was paid in excess of S$4,000,000 a year until 2011, when the public felt that there was no reason for a ceremonial figurehead to earn more than the “Chief Executive” or the “Prime Minister.” The salary of the President was slashed by three quarters, which is still a fairly respectable million plus a year and the question remains, what do we get for a million dollars?

Well, the president does wave on National Day and once in a while they do host a dinner or so for a visiting dignitary. Former President SR Nathan, did spend a good deal of time trying to organize charity events. However, that’s pretty much it. Can anyone think of a President who used their time in office to create nation wide projects? Mr. Nathan was criticized in some quarters for being a laky of the government. However, in fairness, he did initiate the President’s Star Charity, which raised money for charitable organizations.  As a prominent member of our local Indian business community (one of the few local Indians to have made it to a regional role in a multinational) said, “At least we knew we had a president.”

Then there is the management committee or the cabinet. Where we have a grand total of some 30 over appointment holders. To set this into context, we have a similar amount of people in the cabinet as some of our larger Asian neighbours, or should I say countries that are faced with issues like poverty and social unrest. By way of a quick comparison, Singapore (population of 5 million and few problems) than Japan (population of 120 plus million and nasty neighbours with nukes) and slightly less than India (population over a billion and an equal amount of problems). The links of the respective cabinets can be found at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_Japan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Council_of_Ministers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_Singapore

Furthermore, if you look at the Singapore cabinet list, you’ll notice a few interesting facts. We have two senior ministers. The post of senior minister was used to give Lee Kuan Yew a consultancy gig. The post was later abolished in 2011. So, why do we need to revive the post and give it to our two former deputy prime ministers? If memory serves me correctly, the senior minister was the second highest paid person after the Prime Minister.

Then there is the fact that our Ministries have one minister, a second minister (ministry of finance has two), and a minister of state (several grades) and senior parliamentary secretary. Let’s not forget Singapore is a small island with limited resources, so it’s not unfair question to ask why our ministries need so many appointment holders.

One might argue that there are a number of names that appear more than once. Josephine Teo is both Minister of Manpower and Second Minister at the Home Affairs Ministry. Mr. K Shanmugam is most famously in the “non-conflict” position of both Minister of Home Affairs and Law. The valid question here is, are they getting more than one salary per ministry or if they are only getting one salary, how do they divide their time between ministries (At a million dollars a year, exclusivity is a fair demand).

Let’s not forget that Singapore’s ministers are the world’s best paid. The lowest paid one gets a million a year. A cabinet of 30 plus ministers is 30 million a year.

Then if you go down the food chain, you’ll come to the interesting fact that Singapore has five mayors, each one earning around $600,000 per person per year. Mayors in the Singapore context run Community Development Councils (CDCs), which is a collection of several constituencies. Mayors are supposed to run social programs on the ground.

I stress the point that Singapore is a tiny place. We are like the “City-States” in Ancient Greece and our geographical size (or lack of) means that the most appropriate comparisons are not with countries but with cities, and even then, we’re still pretty small. Our Prime Minister’s job is not like his global counterparts, it’s more like the mayor of other big cities. Think of London, for example, as a separate from the rest of the UK. Sadiq Khan would then be called “Prime Minister” instead of Mayor.

Yet, the City of Singapore has five mayors and the question that should be asked is “Why?” What value do our mayors bring to the table. Are they doing something beyond the scope of ordinary members of parliament?

Covid-19 has screwed up the global economy. Companies round the world are downsizing to save costs.  Given that Singapore’s leadership likes to compare itself with the best of enterprises, isn’t it time we started looking at slimming down unnecessary layers of bureaucracy? Unless that is of course, this would ruin the chances of certain Singaporeans to stay in high paying and highly secured jobs.   

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.

Happily, Non-Essential

The Straits Times, Singapore’s flagship newspaper has got itself into the crosshairs of Singapore’s professional classes, thanks to a survey it conducted and published in its Sunday edition (14 June 2020), which revealed what Singaporeans thought about certain professions and their necessity to the rest of society. The now infamous infographic can be seen below:

Essentially, the graph showed that what the 1,000 odd Singaporeans surveyed thought of as essential, included people like doctors, cleaners, garbage collectors and deliverymen. The people who topped the list were the artist, social media managers, PR specialist, Business Consultants and Human Resource Managers. It was clear that the with the exception of doctors, the “essential” professionals were primarily blue-collar workers while the “non-essential” guys were what you’d call “working-professionals.”

The survey has royally pissed off our professional classes. There have been snide remarks about how the Straits Times conducted a crappy survey, thus showing why it’s becoming less relevant. There have been a few remarks from professionals that can be summed up as “if you think I’m non-essential, wait till you need this,” and I even read someone complain that society was being selfish because people were sitting at home watching Netflix but not respecting the work of the artiste who produced the movies they were consuming. There was an accusation that the Straits Times was dividing society into the essential and non-essential.

As someone who has made his living by selling “non-essential” professional services (advertising, public relations, legal and liquidation and accountancy), I was actually delighted to see the results of this survey. For far too long, Singapore has been a society that has literally spat on people in “blue-collar” jobs (I never tire of talking about the horny aunties who thought I was a reforming convict based on the fact that I speak the way I do but worked in a restaurant) and we’ve worshipped the “professions” to an over the top extent. I remember my oldest friend who had given up a lucrative legal career to be a primary school teacher. She told me that she had to sweep floors as part of her job and then said, “Remember how we were told that we didn’t study hard, we’d end up sweeping floors for a living.”

She was right. People of my generation (I’ll be 46 soon, so it’s Gen X) were told that the punishment for not studying was a bright career in sweeping streets. Parents, who had worked humble jobs like sweeping streets, would sweat blood and tears to ensure that their kids would never follow in their footsteps.

I think of my ex-wife’s family. The one person in her family that I admired was my former father-in-law who drove a Mercedes and put two kids to university by selling eggs (he literally picked up from his wholesaler and drove around his clients, the industrial cafes of Singapore). However, all his hard work was meant to ensure that his kids would never deliver eggs. The hero of her family was my former brother-in-law, who ended up working for Defense Science Organisation (part of the government) after getting all sorts of fancy degrees. For me, the tragedy of her family was that it abandoned something valuable (years of building up a network of relationships and physically demanding work) for something that produces very little value (with all due respect to my former brother-in-law, do we really need to think of more ways to exterminate people, especially for a country that is unlikely to face war?)

Our worship of the professions, which worked alongside with our disdain for blue collar jobs has helped us create one of the widest pay differentials. A working professional with at least five-years-experience in Singapore should be able to draw around S$4,000 plus (based on an averageaccountant pay). By contrast, blue collar worker with a similar number of years of experience would be lucky to make around $2,500 a month. This hit home when I got once paid $800 for drafting and disseminating a press release, which took me all of two or three hours. That was exactly what I took home from a month of working in the Bistrot (based on four hours a night for 26 nights a month).

Well, whatever one might say about Covid-19, I’m glad that its finally made us realise the importance of the guys doing the menial work and the lack of importance of the “high-flyer” jobs.

As a matter of clarity, I’m not suggesting that there’s no value in anyone’s work. Lawyers, for example, are important when it comes to contracts. You need an accountant to help you keep track of where your money is going. I’d always stress to clients in my incarnation in PR that you need someone to ensure you look good to the public, even when things are bad. Advertising professionals help drive sales.

It’s good that the working professionals are getting upset in as much as it shows that they take their profession seriously and have enough passion to do a good job. However, the question at stake here is – whether your job is “essential,” which is a word often associated with the break down of things.

I take myself as an example of a remarkably unremarkable person in these circumstances. I’ve never had much money to begin with, so why do I need an accountant. Since I don’t have much money to begin with, it’s highly unlikely that I’ll need a lawyer and let’s not talk about my need for a PR or advertising consultant to promote my non-existent image.

However, when we have a situation where I could easily come down with a nasty bug, I definitely need a doctor. I happen to take clean streets as a given and I expect the trash to be collected. Being clean has become especially important as it reduces the likelihood that I’ll get a nasty bug. Are we surprised that the average Joe (or Ah Beng, Mutu and Ahmad) think that these jobs are the “essential” jobs to their lives?

What’s heartening is the view that Singaporeans are willing to pay more for these services if it means the workers get more and it’s also heartening to see that the majority of people understand the difficulties of these jobs in as much as while they’re jobs that are regarded as essential, they’re also jobs that people don’t want to do, even if more money was offered.

Let’s hope that the understanding of the importance of blue-collar work leads to people backing up their new found understanding with their wallets. Let’s not accept excuses that improving the lot of blue-collar workers is harmful consumers. Singapore needs to move beyond being a place for “cheap” this and that, when cheap means keeping people poor so that a group of middle men can get rich.

At the other end of the scale, I would suggest that it’s time to relook at how professions look at themselves. If I look at the industry that I grew up in (advertising) and the industry that I work with on a regular basis (legal and accounting), it’s reached a stage where groups which were initially advisors have to industry have become industries themselves.

While this is for the most part, a positive thing, its also had an unintended consequence of getting the respective industries to treat themselves too seriously. In the case of advertising it came from the complaint that advertising people became too focused on making ads for themselves at award ceremonies rather than on selling products, while in the legal industry, it became about keeping problems alive. People in professional services became guilty of falling in love with being professionals. The profession becomes a mystic art and practitioners indulge in titles like “guru.”

Look at the way these industries bill – through the time sheet, where they charge by the hour. This system encourages professional services to think of themselves as a mystic art, where the customer has to pay for wise counsel. It goes without saying that this system does not encourage efficiency.

I never saw an issue in “results” payment. I’ve billed clients based on coverage obtained and been ticked off by fellow professionals for taking a risk. Lawyers in America charge on their ability to win cases. This is the way things should be. The client comes to you for advice because you are an expert at this or that. Your payment should be based on how well you achieve the objective rather than on your ability to delay the problem.

Unfortunately, in places like Singapore, you end up having “champerty” laws, which make payment by results illegal and encourage the professions to view themselves as “cults.”

Covid-19 should be a social changer as much as an economic one. Respect and increased value for blue collar work should accompany a desire by working professionals to remember their original purpose of using knowledge to serve rather than to turn their knowledge into a cult.

There are hopeful signs. The example that comes to mind is a friend who named his law firm after an ice cream flavor His argument was thatlaw should be a simple process and used to serve businesses and not the otherway round. To put his money where his mouth is, he developed a document assembly system that reduces the time a client needs a lawyer to draft documents. It goes without saying that this has upset his fellow professionals (drafting documents is a major money spinner for lawyers). However, his argument is simple – he’s there to serve the businesses rather than his fellow professionals and he’ll do what he can to demystify his profession, which in the end is good for the profession.