The Magic Number : 6.9m

It is interesting to read about the debate on that magic number, 6.9m, as population of Singapore.  Interesting not in the least because I myself am an import - the result of the early stages of the policy currently being debated - as I was given a scholarship to study here in Singapore (I swear I made no sex videos nor did I disparage Singaporeans by calling them names).  A GLC was made to do national service to pay for my education, so I did not burden the tax payer.  I interned with the organisation that sponsored my studies where my reporting manager for some reason singled me out amongst my cohort while explaining that the ultimate hope was that we would sink our roots here.  "Maybe one day you will marry locally and become a dutiful wife," I recall him saying.  Although to date, I can't confirm if it was beautiful or dutiful - I bristled at both adjectives.  Well, I did marry, became a citizen and have two Singaporean children who proudly hang their flag out, come August. My son discusses the anticipated NS with his friends in school.  My daughter recently declared for a planeload of passengers to hear as we touched down at Changi, "I LOVE Singapore!”

Yet even I am beginning to feel there are too many foreigners in Singapore.  Without offending the PRs whom I count as my friends - while I rejoice that GV now shows Hindi movies, I am also alarmed when I hear so much Hindi in Raffles Link, I have to remind myself I am not back in Pune.  I too was enraged by the Chinese service staff at a Subway who scowled at me - presumably because she could not understand what I was asking for and I was not speaking Mandarin.  While some of my friends who are PRs feel a little miffed (ok, postively enraged) at the almost xenophobic tone this discourse seems to take at times - the point I am trying to make is, if a naturalised citizen like me can feel this way - try and view it from the point of view of a Singaporean.  This view point is what the government needs to be cognizant of too. 

What saddens me the most is the way the government has introduced this whole debate.  It seems to me that it is a major PR debacle and I cannot wrap my head around the fact that the best and brightest of the land could not foresee it.  Firstly, the PM had only 20 months ago apologized to the electorate for getting things wrong on matters pertaining to housing and transportation vis-à-vis the virtual explosion in population.  Clearly, this white paper could have been presented as a blue print to address the issues that arose from that mis-step on the government’s part and to highlight that they have also learnt from their past mistakes and have now incorporated a plan to anticipate future population growth.  This is what every Minister is now trying to repeatedly convince us of – why then lead with the 6.9m number? Had they not lead with the number, Singaporeans could well have recognized the need for a number for planning purposes and would have then put the number in perspective and focused on the real news that there will be a concerted effort to ease transport and housing woes.  There are two conclusions I can draw from this – the government and our mandarins in the Civil Service are so woefully lacking in EQ that they could only think of this White Paper as a means of CYA (cover your a**, in corporate parlance) in case the population does hit the target they used for planning purposes. In that scenario, they could say – I know Singapore is very crowded and trains are congested, but I already told you in 2013 that we are probably growing to 6.9m. So live with it.  The other, which most people would like to believe, is that the government has already decided that 6.9m is the target for 2030 (planning purposes, my a**, they might add sotto voce). Planning for infrastructure development while simultaneously increasing the load on it sounds to Singaporeans very much like business as usual despite the sound bites of "We understand your pain." Both conclusions point to a severe disconnect between the government and the citizens of Singapore which cannot be good for the country.

The next issue that arises is of the perennial bogeyman of economic decline should immigration policies be tightened.  Even mothers stop threatening their kids with the imaginary Pontianak when the child is older.  What I am dismayed about is that I am told time and again that if we curbed immigration then wages would go up, costs would increase and businesses would suffer.  Singapore’s economy would stagnate and even decline and we would all be doomed.  ST tells me of the numerous Chambers of Commerce that have written to protest curbs in importation of foreign labour.  Khaw Boon Wan threatens that should an increase in the foreign labour quota not be increased – then the 200,000 flats promised will not be built.  Who will suffer then, he asks?  Ok, lets analyse this.  Firstly, everybody recognizes that foreign labour is required for certain sectors like construction.  Can one not believe that despite a cap on foreign labour the flats could still be built, if priority was given to allocating work permits to the sectors that require them?  Could we not believe that it should be made more difficult for retailers to hire Chinese salesgirls (even though I have met some lovely ones in my shopping experiences) who are cheaper than Singaporean salesgirls?  Yes, the business will suffer due to the higher costs of hiring the Singaporean – but is it ok for the Singaporean salesgirl to not find a job that pays her a decent wage so that the Singaporean retail business can continue to profit?  What are the other cost factors that are impeding this Singaporean retail business from hiring a higher cost local? High rents? Cost of training staff? Productivity lags? How can we alleviate these expenses to make it possible for the Singaporean company to pay the higher wage and yet continue to flourish?  I feel I have not been given enough information on the alternatives and why they need to be discarded, for me to make an informed decision to support the government.

Here we need to acknowledge the fact the while we have fanciful schemes, I am not sure how far these schemes trickle down to the intended targets.  We cannot expect that just because we have these schemes they will reach the intended target and thereby work.  What is being done to improve productivity amongst SMEs and given the fact that they have largely operated independent of government aid thus far – what is being done to reach out them?  Please give me more information on these matters, so that I am convinced that enough is being done to address alternatives – and despite that, I need to support the 6.9m number.  Otherwise, one can only be reminded of how during the hustings Minister Mah Baw Tan repeatedly assured us that there was sufficient housing to meet Singaporean demand – yet his successor admitted to exactly the opposite and is now on a drive to provide housing to meet pent up demand.  Am I to always believe that the government has got it right, in face of facts telling me otherwise?  Mind you, I am not saying that I do not think this government can’t get it right – but there has to be some effort to win back my unwavering trust.

Let’s talk about MNCs and the impact wage increases will have on them.  Companies have been leaving Singapore steadily, despite our attempts to keep wages down through import of cheaper labour.  Can we effectively stem this tide?  Apart from labour we have become an expensive locale with respect to other costs as well.  Once tax holidays and other incentives expire, it would be foreseeable that these MNCs would move to the source of this cheap labour we keep trying to import.  Should we have not anticipated this trend to re-align our strategy about what industries attract and what type of incentive structures we provide them?  Is it not analogous to the housing scenario of we know what we are doing, there is nothing to be changed. Trying to feed MNCs through a tap of cheap labour is a strategy that is bound to fail at some time in the future – unless we keep subsidizing their operations with tax credits and other incentives.  Why can’t this spend be used to give credits to SMEs to employ more Singaporeans at higher wages? 

The other trend in MNCs and major companies is the importation of foreign talent at higher levels – in increasing numbers than the cheap labour that has been discussed previously.  While acknowledging the irony of me being one such “foreign talent” imported into Singapore and trying not to alienate my PR friends who possibly fall in this category, let me try and make my point.  Some banks in Singapore are known to be literally teeming with PRs from the Indian sub-continent – so much so that hiring managers at one point were given instructions not to hire from that demography to ensure diversity.  I can’t help but wonder if there really is such serious lack of talent in Singapore that these banks cannot function without importing PRs to do Relationship Management jobs.  I have great respect and admiration for the intelligence and drive of the people from the sub-continent, but really before their entry en masse into the Singaporean banking scene – it was on the strength of work done by Singaporeans within and outside the banking industry that made Singapore attractive for banks to locate regional/global offices here.  So what changed – why did the talent that was present in Singapore before suddenly vanish?  Ok, let’s say the advent of a new global era for the banks required talent that was hitherto absent amongst Singaporeans.  Does that mean that Singaporeans are not even trainable in this arena – that for the 20 years that these banks have operated in Singapore they could not have a structured training program to ensure that there is a big enough pool of Singaporeans to fill these positions at potentially lower cost than an expatriate and to reduce reliance on imported, even if top notch, talent.  Perhaps the argument is that global operations need multicultural talent - agreed. But why is there a surfeit of non Singaporeans in country level positions in these banks?  This might be a contentious point, but I can’t help but empathise with some people who lament that hiring often gets done on cliquish lines – because of course, comfort and the lack of cultural differences might make it easier for birds of a feather to flock together.  While I do not wish to paint of picture of a conspiracy of sub-continental takeover – one does wonder if enough is being done to show no suitable Singaporean exists for a job and on lines of what Inderjit Singh mentioned – it should be made mandatory for the companies to start doing so. 

There are difficult issues to be settled in this regard - no one is denying that.  My husband describes how it is difficult to hire Singaporeans to work in the building materials industry - despite the offer of higher wages.  They even approached former convicts under the Yellow Ribbon project - who declined these jobs.  Some objections are as frivolous as "Wah, the place so ulu one. I don't want to travel so far to work." But can this be a reason for us to perennially turn to foreign labour to bridge the gap?  My husband says yes, no choice.  But would a better transport network eliminate this frivolous excuse of insurmountable distance.  Maybe Sugei Kadut IS really difficult to travel to from Tampines - hence maybe the objection is valid.

Have we really examined the underlying reasons for people's lack of interest in certain jobs - apart from the expedient one of Singaporeans are spoilt and lazy and do not have fire in their belly.    

Clearly there will be trade-offs and discomfort if policy decisions were realigned - but the current argument seems to the citizenry to be that - "Look everything else will be too painful for businesses and our economic growth - so ultimately it’s you lot that needs to bear with higher cost of housing and the great MRT rush hour crush."

For the average Singaporean who is being jostled at the Jurong East train platform as he rushes back to the home he can barely afford, to coach his child with the homework which the tuition centre that he sends her to doles out in addition to her school work, it seems to be too high a price to pay.  He will naturally get more ‘spoilt’ as he is not certain he sees the effects of the GDP growth he is expected to make this sacrifice for reach him as directly as it does the PR he possibly reports to.  Who, by a virtue of the fact that he is a higher educated import, earns more and lives in a condominium and he sends his son to an international school on a long term visit visa so that he has the option to send him back to his home country before the NS call comes through.  Or the housewife, who when her child is in full time school wants that sales assistant job, but merely due to the fact that she needs to be paid CPF she is more expensive.  I say this not to paint people, Singaporeans and non-Singaporeans alike, as evil, good, nasty, lazy, stupid etc – but just to say that sometimes one needs to try and understand where the frustration comes from.  In formulating policies, as much as policies need to be intelligent, the government needs to understand the frustration of the populace.  And maybe sometimes the government needs to make hard decisions to set aside its cherished KPIs – to listen.  As Inderjit Singh said in his speech, maybe the government needs to take a breather.  There may be hardships that arise from this breather, but maybe Singaporeans would then feel that they are valued enough in this country to work hard, to innovate – to look for that fire that their fathers and grandfathers had to bring the country to where it is right now.  Today they probably feel merely as tools to meet the KPIs of Singapore Inc.  If we cannot compete with NY or London as a top notch city if we did this, perhaps we need to reconsider Ngiam Tong Dow’s words to even review if we want to compete with the top tier cities in the first place. http://newshub.nus.edu.sg/news/1301/PDF/HYPE-st-12jan-pD17.pdf

I say this also because my experience of Singapore has been a pleasant one.  I have never felt unwelcome here. I would like to believe that when Singaporeans complain about the influx of foreigners they do so because they are tired of not being listened to.