Foreign labour

That day I was in Charles & Keith, a homegrown shoe label, idling my time away when I overheard the store manager training their new employee. The manager had a piece of notebook paper, with the numerals 1 to 10 written on it, and she was reciting the numerals out to the staff in English, and making the staff recite it back.

I nearly died of shock. They employed a staff who clearly doesn’t speak enough English to even know the names of numbers. How justified is that? They must be paying her miserable pay, say 10% of what they pay a local Singaporean, right? If not I really don’t see the merit of employing someone like her calibre. Is it because she’s willing to scrub floors and kiss patrons’ smelly feet, among other things Singaporeans refuse to do? This really reminded of the recent Labour Day speech by the upperlings, about how we should appreciate foreign workers and not be antagonistic towards them, and not to think that they are “snatching our ricebowls” (i.e. stealing our jobs.) Well, taking things into perspectives, sure, we should appreciate foreign workers who toil at jobs Singaporeans refuse to work in, say the building industry, or dirty jobs like clearing gabbage. But this Charles & Keith example is really pushing the limit of foreign workers not stealing our jobs. Clearly, I’m sure Singaporeans wouldn’t mind working retail. So I don’t see why these foreign workers are favoured over our local community, since there is so much hassle in settling work permits. So I’m sure it can be inferred that these foreign workers must have been taken advantage of; given a lower pay and working more.

So is this still “appreciating” our foreign labour? Or are we giving industries the green light to employ foreigners for shit wages and increasing profit margins?

And retail is not an isolated industry. Recently too, I came across a few Chinese National bus captains. I was really miffed at that fact because these people can’t possibly know Singapore’s geography better than someone born and bred here. Being a bus captain is more than adhering to your bus routes and making sure people pay their bus fares. You need to be able to tell people the route your bus takes. I’m sure if I went up to these Chinese bus captains and asked them if a bus went to “Plaza Sing” or “Palais Rennaissance” (with the due French pronunciation) or “Dua Poh” (Hokkien for “big slope”, which is somewhere near Clarke Quay area), they wouldn’t know shit.

So while I understand it’s good that we have foreign labour willing to toil at menial jobs Singaporeans refuse to take up, and the expat professionals who are presumably able to contribute much innovation and intellects to Singapore, the examples I myself have encountered above aren’t justified at all. The only reason that I can think of remains at “low wages”. Is this conducive for the job market? Is this being fair to Singaporeans? Are the industries trying to force Singaporeans to push down their minimal wage to compete with these foreigners?