GE2011 Part 3
I will like to touch a bit on minimum wage. There have been calls to implement minimum wage in Singapore. This is an intrinsically attractive option. It means that no matter where I go, I can be assured of a minimum wage without regards how well trained I am, or how poorly educated I am. It ensures that I can pay a certain amount of money, as governed by the law.
Of course, we heard about opponents of these ideas to cite economic ideas and theories to argue why this is not feasible. Among those include it indiscriminately increases the cost of businesses and make them uncompetitive; it failed to take into account the training and development of the workers. Before I go on further to expand and add on one of these points, I would like to cite an interesting piece of news that I saw reported in the news yesterday. Hong Kong officially implemented the minimum wage system yesterday. Interestingly, the day it was implemented, the media reported an old security guard who was retrenched because they could not afford his wages now and decided to let him go to cut cost.
Let's look at one reality: businesses in Singapore are primarily not run by government and driven by profit. If my cost is high, I cut cost and try to beef up revenue. Simple business logic. However, minimum wage means that for a business owner, I not only have to adjust the wages for the lower end workers, I have to correspondingly adjust the wages of all the workers in the business. This is good HR practice, to ensure a parity of the different layers of workers and staff in the company. I recently learned that a simple adjustment in the wages of the lower end staff in hospitals may cost around a few billion dollars extra per year for one hospitals, just because an adjustment in wages has an upstream impact as well. This significantly increases the cost of doing business in Singapore. And this is HR sense, not just pure economic argument.
So I would like to ask the opposition back a question, would minimum wage be workable? Related to this, I have come to the conclusion that the opposition seems to like to bring up the possibility of using reserves to solve all the problems they identify. I have no doubt that they will one day come out with a solution to use the reserves to help businesses cope with the rising cost.
And it brings me to the second thing I would like to examine, can the opposition think of any solutions which will not utilise the reserve? Meaning to say, assuming the reserves are not there, can they find a way out or any other alternative solutions? I can think of one, which again have been sprouted by the opposition parties: that they will give a certain percentage of their allowance, if elected, to help the poor etc etc etc. Noble thoughts indeed. but what else?
Thinking about it, I will be interested in how creative the oppositions can get without the reserves, and I am sure that will make them much more credible. But till then, they are not, and it seems that they will never be, at least in my time.
Of course, we heard about opponents of these ideas to cite economic ideas and theories to argue why this is not feasible. Among those include it indiscriminately increases the cost of businesses and make them uncompetitive; it failed to take into account the training and development of the workers. Before I go on further to expand and add on one of these points, I would like to cite an interesting piece of news that I saw reported in the news yesterday. Hong Kong officially implemented the minimum wage system yesterday. Interestingly, the day it was implemented, the media reported an old security guard who was retrenched because they could not afford his wages now and decided to let him go to cut cost.
Let's look at one reality: businesses in Singapore are primarily not run by government and driven by profit. If my cost is high, I cut cost and try to beef up revenue. Simple business logic. However, minimum wage means that for a business owner, I not only have to adjust the wages for the lower end workers, I have to correspondingly adjust the wages of all the workers in the business. This is good HR practice, to ensure a parity of the different layers of workers and staff in the company. I recently learned that a simple adjustment in the wages of the lower end staff in hospitals may cost around a few billion dollars extra per year for one hospitals, just because an adjustment in wages has an upstream impact as well. This significantly increases the cost of doing business in Singapore. And this is HR sense, not just pure economic argument.
So I would like to ask the opposition back a question, would minimum wage be workable? Related to this, I have come to the conclusion that the opposition seems to like to bring up the possibility of using reserves to solve all the problems they identify. I have no doubt that they will one day come out with a solution to use the reserves to help businesses cope with the rising cost.
And it brings me to the second thing I would like to examine, can the opposition think of any solutions which will not utilise the reserve? Meaning to say, assuming the reserves are not there, can they find a way out or any other alternative solutions? I can think of one, which again have been sprouted by the opposition parties: that they will give a certain percentage of their allowance, if elected, to help the poor etc etc etc. Noble thoughts indeed. but what else?
Thinking about it, I will be interested in how creative the oppositions can get without the reserves, and I am sure that will make them much more credible. But till then, they are not, and it seems that they will never be, at least in my time.
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