After a 5-day stay-home medical leave and with phase 2 re-opening of the Circuit Breaker, the journey continues.
This morning, it was attending to the daily cooked food distribution, now at three locations across the Marine Parade GRC, followed by a visit to a market. In the evening, it was house visits.
For the evening, I chose the spot right outside my house, within the now-defunct Joo Chiat SMC and in the Marine Parade GRC, to start off the daily visits to come.
Back where it all started in March 2011
I recall in 2011, I joined WP and was assigned to take on Joo Chiat SMC. I was new to political campaigning. I was new to the Party and did not know anyone well. I was assigned just one member, Shaun to be my Elections Agent.
And so I started, at this spot where we did our visits this evening. There were only Shaun and I on day 1. I did not even know what to say to the residents.
As the campaign of 2011 went on, I started to polish up my presentation to keep it short. I treated each person I meet as a 20-second elevator pitch. I wanted to explain why they should vote for WP and me, and to hopefully generate enough reasons from them within 20 seconds to consider giving us their vote, especially the swing voters. From just Shaun and I, we eventually grew to more than 40 people regularly helping when the campaign ended on 7 May 2011. Friends and relatives came along to help in the campaign. Then friends of friends and strangers, most of whom we met while on the campaign trail. Several stayed on even after the campaign had ended with a narrow 1% defeat. One of them is Dennis Tan, now a key member of the Party.
GE2020 will be so different. It is likely to come and go too quickly. There cannot be large numbers when we visit. We will not have time to visit many households given no visit was allowed during the two and a half month of the Circuit Breaker. Even the way we engage will be more distant than before. There will not be physical rallies.
But it will be an important GE. I joined in 2011 because I believe there must be a strong alternative. In business, we are told that we need anti-monopoly laws to keep companies innovative and responsive to the consumers. We want to prevent profiteering and exploitation. Yet in politics, we are told there can only be a team A. We cannot just rely on a team A and wish things will go well with Singapore forever. It takes a long time to build up a respectable, rational and responsible alternative. It takes many people of commitment and courage to take the difficult route. The PAP speaks of the ‘sacrifice’ their handpicked high flyers will have to make to take a pay-cut to join, or the loss of their privacy. After a long uninterrupted and very dominant rule since independence, they have forgotten what it is like to be on the other side; what it really means to take sacrifices and what loss of privacy means for some who had to face with smearing of their character.
The ruling party has said this is about the 4G and about Singapore’s future. Sure, it is important. It is also about defining the alternative, about the continuity of the alternative, about whether good men and women will continue to join the alternative, and about whether we can have a Singapore where we can thrive even with diversity of views.
Are we prepared to go back to the days with 100% PAP’s monopoly of parliament? As an ex-NCMP, I can tell you that the contest is not about having the alternative only as NCMPs. Being an NCMP means you have lost in the elections. You have no ground to sink your roots in. Constituencies that are narrowly lost can be reconfigured just before a GE with the snap of a finger. You face big hurdles in how you can serve the people who have voted for you. The PAP will definitely wish for a parliament with 12 NCMPs. It will mean a total loss for alternatives, yes even Hougang and Aljunied can be lost. The PAP came quite close to achieving that in 2015. A pandemic GE is now a good opportunity for them to push for that scenario.
The journey towards a first world parliament that began in 2011 continues. What Singapore do you envisage? The choice is for Singaporeans to make.
A long walk into this houseDeciding on the alternative
He made several strong points. Here is an extract from his piece on one part which I wish to follow up on:
“President Halimah Yacob’s in-principle approval was sought and granted for past reserves to be used. …
Approving the use of the reserves is an important task, but it is also equally critical to make sure that it was used for their intended purposes.
Do the elected presidency (EP) and CPA have these monitoring powers? I could not find anything in the Constitution regarding this. But it seems to me that some review has to follow.
If you approve funds for a particular scheme, you should want to know its result, and what action was taken if it did not achieve its objective or fell short. …
The EP’s primary role as a second key safeguarding the country’s reserves is intended to prevent a future rogue government from raiding it. To do this job well, it should have some review powers over whether those funds were used for the purposes which it had approved and if they had achieved their objectives.”
The government’s reply? “I am surprised that both Mr Faisal and Mr Dennis Tan had to ask. It is public information that under our Constitution, the President has access to information about the size of reserves. Under Article 22F of the Constitution, in the exercise of her functions under the Constitution, the President is entitled to any information regarding the reserves. In addition, on the MOF website, it is already mentioned that the President has full information about the size of the reserves.”
Well done then. So it will not take the Accountant-General “52 man-years” to produce the list of physical assets of the Government, something which our first (oops, second – things are sometimes confusing in Singapore) Elected President, the late Mr Ong Teng Cheong had to struggle with the Government on. I am not sure if he ever got his answer.
The mystery of the size of our reserves aside, Mr Han raised the important question of accountability in the way money is spent. No one will question that we need an extraordinary budget to deal with a major global crisis that will impact jobs and lives. Speed is important as the crisis is immediate and widespread. All four budgets were approved in quick time. The combined size of our response to Covid-19 is nearly double the annual government budget. How well will the money be spent? How effective have they been to address the situations they were intended for?
These are important questions because we will need to know for better response to a future crisis on this magnitude. Could the Jobs Support Scheme (JSS) be better designed? Companies that continued to do well or even better during this period, such as the supermarkets, got the JSS too. Some companies have stepped forward to return the money or donate them to charity. Yet, many companies continue to close even with JSS. Jobs continue to be lost. There is no perfect solution. Some form of JSS is necessary, but some post-mortem certainly can be done. How well did the major recipients of the funds respond? Mr Han cited the aviation sector. Yes, they need help for sure. How did they use the money and were they effective? We do not know how much the government has and will continue to spend on fighting the explosive spread of Covid-19 in the crowded foreign employees dormitories. Did we fairly apportion enough of the huge intervention costs to the dorm operators? Did we let off too easily the operators who have not done well in implementing measures to manage epidemic which they should have been doing? Did we execute the rent relief properly such that the money did flow down fast enough to tenants? The list goes on.
The President approved $52 billion from the reserves (the balance are from budget surplus and from borrowings which have to be repaid by the next government). What roles will the President have in scrutinizing how well the money have been spent and how effective the schemes have been. I hope it will be a big and important role. ‘Ownself check ownself’ is not always the best.
Prime Minister Lee addressed the nation yesterday on Singapore’s future in a post COVID-19 world. His speech is the first in a series of national broadcasts with five other Cabinet ministers laying out future plans for the country.
I have a few areas which I’d like to see for Singapore post Covid-19.
(1) First is on domestic wage reforms. Business leader Ho Kwon Ping brought this issue up in an IPS talk in 2012. He presented data in a refreshing way. Ho asked IPS to compile data on the wages of various professions across 9 of the most developed economies in the world.
The finding? Singapore is the MOST UNEQUAL of all developed nations. On average, we pay doctors about four times more than nurses and 11 times more than construction workers. Doctors represent the top end of professional work, nurses the middle range and construction workers represent the low wage. In other developed countries, the disparity is far smaller. Doctors and lawyers were paid slightly better in Singapore than the average elsewhere but the startling fact was how badly we paid the low wage workers. In Germany and Australia, a construction worker is paid HALF that of the average doctor! Hong Kong, a small and open economy like ours, paid nurses a third that of doctors. Construction workers earned a quarter that of doctors!
Ho called it the incomplete wage revolution. It began in the 1980s as we reformed the export-oriented industries. Factories that relied on low wage workers shifted out. We had to move up the value-added chain with higher wages. Today, we have high value-added export and services industries that pay decent wages. The trouble was with our domestic industries. There are some industries that cannot be shifted out – we will need to have cleaners, gardeners, security guards, construction workers and retail assistants in Singapore. Instead of also increasing wages gradually and allowing companies to figure how to make workers progressively more productive, we had large-scale import of low wage migrant workers. The situation started to explode in the 1990s where we grew from 311,000 migrant workers in 1990 to over 1.42 million by 2019, the vast majority of whom are low wage. Foreign workers account for 38% of our workforce today, stretching the limits which a small country like Singapore can take.
The large influx of migrant workers over such a sustained period depressed the wages of local low skilled workers who had remained in the domestic industries. Employers continued to fill with migrant workers as the demand went up. Levies started increasing when the government wanted to force companies to hire locals and be less reliant on foreigners. I believe many of the measures were done too late. We were already having many low wage migrant workers willing to work for very little. The better and more experienced migrant workers can find better paying jobs in other countries. The higher levies and accommodation costs made businesses look for cheaper workers, never mind that their skill levels are not there and that they do not speak much English.
Today, Singapore face a rapidly changing world with lots of technology disruptions and with our neighbours also hungry for success. We are now presented with the disruptions due to the pandemic. We have China and USA on hostile relationship that is impacting world trade. These are all known facts. Even before the pandemic started, we were already seeing higher retrenchments amongst PMETs and challenging operating environment for our companies. There is mismatch between training and employment opportunities. With the pandemic, more jobs will be lost. More companies will close down.
We can use this current period of job stresses to transform certain domestic industries. It will take big government interventions but we can make certain jobs more viable for Singaporeans, to progressively pay better for technical skills like in other developed economies, and to gradually move the industry up the productivity path. We should seriously state our intent by setting Minimum Wages. We want to match the Swiss standard of living but our model for growth had so far been that of Dubai’s and not Switzerland’s.
(2) I am concerned as to our strategy on low wage migrant workers. This is an old issue, raised by experts from time to time. Even our founding leaders such as the late Dr Goh Keng Swee and the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew had warned about becoming over-reliant on migrant workers or having too many of them. We have blown past all the numbers they had warned about. In the 2013 Population White Paper debate, we were told to accept 1-2% increase in migrant workers each year or face economic decline. The numbers continue to rise after that debate. We could reach 6.9 million population in 10 years’ time and far more after that. This would result in a society with much higher income and wealth inequality, higher pandemic risks, as well as probably much higher xenophobia, social divisions, overcrowding, less social well-being and less social capital and national solidarity.
Beyond providing better accommodation, we need to look at how to bring in more productive foreign workers so that we can have a better starting base and can pay them better. I am not an expert. I suspect there are lots of low hanging fruits we can pluck by first recruiting better. Currently, the middleman makes big bucks bringing able-bodied workers in from low wage countries willing to pay the huge fees to come to Singapore. Many may not have relevant skills. Many come saddled with debts, desperately afraid of being sent back home.
Singapore has done some small scale setting up of ITE-type of training in neighbouring countries on government to government relationship. I think if we can look at places where we recruit large number of migrant workers. We can put our vocational training expertise to good use. If we can have more productive workers already trained at source; familiar with the tools, processes and automation needed in Singapore, I believe we can jump start productivity. Having such institutions at source can also offer better transparency and links for recruitment. The implementation may need more thoughts and strong government backing to be workable. I think this can uplift productivity and wages at the low end, and allow us to do with fewer numbers of workers. And I believe that if we can build up a strong pipeline of skilled overseas workers, coupled with aggressive investment in better construction processes and automation, we might even be able to create globally competitive Singapore construction companies.
The welfare of workers can also be better taken care of. We can think of careers for them to move upwards while in Singapore. A few months ago, I came across a former foreign domestic worker who did part time studies in early childhood when in Singapore (she had a very supporter employer), and is now a trained preschool teacher here after finishing her domestic helper contract. Such stories are few and far in between. Most come, work hard with outdated and low productivity methods and return home with some savings to do other things. I believe few low wage migrant workers make it up the career ladder in Singapore. Many years ago, Singapore thrived because we provided opportunities for our low wage migrant workers. The innovative and hardworking ones climbed in their career and even start businesses in Singapore. Many of our big local institutions had started that way.
(3) We need to free up the Singapore spirit. We are victim of our past successes – we have grown risk averse. We celebrate innovation only when it meets the government’s agenda but clamp down on alternative views. I wrote about this last month – Monopoly of wisdom will cripple Singapore. I cited Sonny Liew as an example.
Be open. Be free spirited. Be bold. Our past leaders were so. PM Lee’s speech yesterday recounted how Singapore had overcome. Yes, we did. We overcame the lack of an armed forces with a modern force built on national service and modernisation. We overcame housing problem by being socialist – mass land acquisition from the rich and building HDB flats for as many Singaporeans as possible. We cleaned up the Singapore river, and more. Sure, we can do it again. There was boldness in the early leaders. There were no past successes to safeguard, only a future to aim towards. Bold ideas had to be tried.
These days, I noticed that many have become afraid to take risk. There are tried and tested ways to succeed. Just follow rules. Leaders in the government service or political office bearers are rotated frequently. We become wary of projects that may take years to see results or that cut across ministries or are seen as ‘risky’. We become afraid to let smaller start-ups have a go at projects in case we have to answer if projects fail. We award at higher costs to companies with big names so that if they fail, it will not be the fault of the evaluation team.
If we are to build world leading companies, to pioneer big brands that can fly the Singapore flag all over the world, we need to free up our spirit, not mute it. Our reforms cannot start only when Singaporeans enter the workforce. It must start from school. In education, we are again victims of our past successes. Our schools were earlier reformed to make the education processes more efficient to train up workers for incoming investments and to fill up jobs. We thought we had figured out the formula for sorting out students by abilities and then fast track them along career paths. We cannot rely on model answers, for the new world economy may not conform to known models. We need to celebrate ambiguity in education. We need students to be bold to ask questions. We need them to create.
(4) I believe Singaporeans are resilient. In recent years, with the growing mismatch between jobs and training, more have switched to the gig economy. Food delivery and private hire driving are not easy work. Yet PMET Singaporeans, many retrenched or in low paying jobs, turned to these trades to find a way to make a living. We will need to reclaim PMET jobs for Singaporeans and to work out viable career paths for Singaporeans in domestic industries, many of which are too low-paying to sustain the high costs of living in Singapore.
Being more resilient also means better preparedness in food and other supplies. Yes, it is great that we have Polish eggs and Arabian shrimps. MTI is doing right by seeking new sources of food and essential supplies. I think it would be just as great if Temasek takes the lead to invest aggressively so that we own critical food sources overseas. Sure, we might still be hit with supply restrictions such as what had happened over masks in Taiwan recently. To overcome our smallness in size, we may need to expand more aggressively into ownership of critical resources outside of Singapore.
Let’s look forward to a more resilient, more creative, more productive and more egalitarian Singapore post Covid-19.
Note: The views are that of the author. I had an earlier discussion with Ku Swee Yong where we found that we share similar ideas about having some ITE-type institutions in countries with large number of migrant workers bound for Singapore.
He explained his calculations as follow: Singapore now has 300,000 construction workers. IF a Singaporean is three times as productive, then we will need 100,000 Singaporean workers. And over a 40-year period with Singaporeans replacing the foreign workers, we will need 2,500 a year, or about 8% of our babies each year.
He argued that therefore Singapore cannot cut down on foreign workers as other countries had because of our small size and lack of natural resources.
The Minister seems to suggest that this high reliance on foreign workers situation is inevitable. A few weeks ago, I wrote about Singapore’s journey to nearly 1.5 million migrant workers detailing the 30 years journey we took that saw this rapid explosion in number of foreign workers, especially the low wage workers. I will leave you to read that and will focus on looking at the construction sector in response to the Minister’s statement.
Let’s look at the Minister’s reasoning.
(1) The Minister has a way of exaggerating. His mathematics is based on 100% replacement of all workers in the construction sector by locals. Singaporeans are practical people. We are not calling for total replacement. We are calling a stop to this over reliance and ever-increasing number of migrant workers. We are calling for deliberate steps to correct the process and to seriously make careers in construction viable for Singaporeans so a more sizeable number can be in the industry.
The Minister’s question and the tone of it seems to make construction as a shunned career. It sadly adds to the poor image the industry is already having because we can only think of the low wage and low skilled migrant workers. The reality in many places is that skills in a strenuous job can pay well. Many of these jobs are not shunned by the locals in say Japan, Australia, Switzerland or Finland. And some aspects of the construction sector do include skilled specialists and trained experts.
(2) The Minister assumed that Singapore construction workers can eventually be three times as productive as currently. This figure is probably arrived at by looking at the best in class, where in places like Australia and Japan, the locals are indeed three times or more productive than a construction worker in Singapore currently.
It is a big ‘IF’. We are currently so far off the chart in productivity compared to other developed countries. Why are we not even attracting Singaporeans into this industry?
Singapore took a different path from other developed countries as we started to prosper in the 1990s. Entrepreneur Jack Sim shared some interesting observations in his Facebook post recently. Jack shared that when he started in the construction industry in 1979, there were very skilled Master Craftsmen, trained Skilled Craftsmen and Apprentices. Jack lamented that ‘the Shanghainese Masters have now passed away. The Singaporeans Master retired. The Malaysian Masters have returned home. The Thais who replaced them also returned home. The Japanese and Korean have also returned home.’ He observed that Singapore started to bring in many who ‘have never done a day of Construction work’. Jack Sim’s presentation involves some generalisation but we can all relate to our present-day situation. The salaries of the migrant workers in construction are low but the cost to employers is not low because of huge levies and accommodation costs. The effect of such a large-scale replacement of skilled craftsmen with low wage workers effectively made these jobs unattractive to locals.
Today, it is a fact that the productivity of construction workers in Singapore pales in comparison to locals in developed countries. We can only compare ourselves with our ASEAN neighbours. It is one thing to say in theory about how productive Singaporeans can be but another thing to do so in practice because what Australia and Japan have achieved took tremendous efforts. Where are we in this process today?
(3) Next, let’s examine the effect on construction cost in countries with high local participation and high-productivity. The Minister noted that ‘in many other countries, a proportion of local workers is allocated to the construction industry. In some cases, this leads to these workers becoming more expensive, and in other cases, projects take much longer to complete due to the lack of manpower.’
In the Turner & Townsend International Construction Market Survey 2019 (report available upon submission of request to company, relevant figure extracted below), we find that the construction cost of comparable projects are quite similar between Singapore, Australian and New Zealand cities and Tokyo. In another report by Rider Levett Bucknall on the international construction market 2016 (figure extracted below), the cost per sqm of gross floor area shows that total cost is quite similar between Singapore and Australian cities. An Australian construction worker earns an average of AUD$63,830 per annum. How much do construction workers in Singapore get?
Source: Turner & Townsend International Construction Market Survey 2019 (pg 17)Source: extracted from Rider Levett Bucknall International Report on Construction Market Intelligence (3Q 2016). Note that prices are in local currencies AUD, NZD and SGD when comparing across Australia, NZ and Singapore.
If we look at Japan, their processes in construction are highly integrated and efficient. According to the Japan Construction Information Center Foundation, there is tight integration in the industry. When the construction specialist for foundation works is done, almost without delay the next team doing structure can be onsite the following day to start work. Their planning and project management tools can talk across companies. They also need to construct to withstand earthquakes and typhoons, which makes it a lot more challenging than construction in Singapore. Yet their overall construction costs are comparable to Singapore as well.
Higher wages local workers may not lead to much higher overall costs. Top local businessman and hotel magnate Ho Kwon Ping shared in an interview in 2011 that his company has construction development experience in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and so on. He was shocked that when they built their hotel in New Zealand, the number of workers they had to engaged was about 10 percent of what they did in Thailand — because the workers were well trained.
(4) The Minister is correct to say that Singapore has a small population. Well, so do New Zealand, Switzerland, Finland, Hong Kong and other small developed countries with high local participation in construction. The Minister also said, “If we lose out in that relative game compared to other people, then unfortunately, I think the future of Singapore will not be what we expect it to be.”
Some of these countries are globally competitive too despite relying mostly on locals for their construction industry. Some are in fact competing fiercely with Singapore to be regional hub and to be a financial centre.
Having said all these, what can we do now? I believe we cannot leave it to the market to correct itself. I recently shared in my Facebook about the preschool sector which I am more familiar with. I will use this as an example.
I recall in the 2000s, the preschool sector was shunned by young Singaporeans. In 2007, I was invited to be on a national workgroup on education and human capital. At the first meeting, we were discussing possible areas for the committee to focus on during our two-year term. Many topics from K-12 and higher learning were discussed.
Then I shared a story. My wife met by chance a former staff of a preschool we had previously operated. The teacher had already attained diploma in teaching and in leadership and was a senior teacher with us until we sold our centre. My wife had not met her for several years and asked where she was working at then. She had become a masseur and her basic pay as a rookie was already higher than what she commanded as a senior teacher after more than 10 years in the industry and after having gone for the training required for the industry.
Those who were not in the industry in the committee were shocked. They probed further about pay and prospects in the sector. In the committee, we had another long-time leader in the industry. She confirmed the situation and added her own stories. Staff turnover was high and it was tough to attract good locals to the sector. There were increasingly more foreign teachers in the sector as employers could not find locals. That sharing decided what we were to focus on for our committee’s term. Several bold recommendations were made after extensive research into the sector. Unfortunately, the government was not ready then for these changes. It was only after 2011 that a national drive was put into the sector, including the government running their own kindergartens, massive training and scholarship opportunities for pre-service and in-service teachers, merging of MOE and MSF preschool sectors into an agency (ECDA) and lots more funding. All these were actually recommended by our committee earlier and the boldest and what we felt were most necessary of our recommendations, were then turned down.
The effect of the massive government push is that the preschool sector today attracts young Singaporeans. There are now good career prospects. My daughter for one, decided to take up early childhood on her own when choosing what to study at the polytechnic. She was attracted to the scholarship for her studies and the security of the job. She found that she liked the industry and has stayed on and even went for further studies in the same field.
My niece is a nurse. She had excellent A levels results but she chose nursing. This was another industry that used to suffer from poor image and low pay. After much concerted effort at developing the industry at the ITE, polytechnics and universities level, added with scholarships, better pay and improved career prospects, coupled with aggressive marketing, young locals are moving into this industry once more. Even the SAF used to be unable to attract people until it was rebranded and career prospects became better.
Today, when there is talk that we have become too reliant on migrant workers, the industry associations quickly responded to say that cutting down on migrant workers would kill businesses and destroy the economy. They are not totally wrong. The situation has become so bad that we cannot just leave it to the market to correct itself. We cannot just tell employers to be more productive with their workers, cut staffing and to find their own ways to hire Singaporeans. The companies that try to do this now may find themselves priced out of business in the short run. We will need to tackle sector by sector, those sectors with low productivity, mostly untrained workers and low take up interest from Singaporeans. Many aspects of the whole system are broken. We need to fix it at the national level with a big push from the government side, including perhaps to take the lead in several areas. The recruitment and training aspects for foreign workers is messed up. Middleman make huge money and the workers coughed up large sums to come here, laden with debts. Many have not even worked in construction or the trade they are recruited for in their own country. Dormitory operators make huge profits housing migrant workers in what many consider as crowded and relatively poor living conditions.
Singapore had taken a different path from other economies as we started to prosper. Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Finland, and many other developed economies do not have this huge reliance on low cost migrant workers, such as in construction. There is decent pay for their locals in the sector and they are better trained, more productive and manage automation better. These have evolved over the years because their government had decided that they cannot rely on low cost migrant workers from the start. To correct decades of neglect in Singapore, we cannot just ask the market to correct itself. Private companies are forced to accept the current market situation because each by itself cannot correct the industry. For years, the preschool sector could not correct itself and was moving towards the path of large number of foreign teachers, poor pay relative to peers, and low interest by locals to be preschool teachers. Painful and difficult though it might be, the situation has to be changed with major government interventions.
In case I am being accused of simplifying the problem, I acknowledge that this is a monster of a problem to solve, way more difficult than the other sectors I had cited. I am not an expert in this industry. I am gleaning data from around the world to look at the problem we have created for ourselves in order to offer my views. It will take many years to correct the unfortunate path we had taken to become too overly dependent on low wage migrant workers. We pride ourselves to pay the best in the world to have the Team A in government (and with constant reminders that Singapore can never have a Team B). We pride ourselves to plan 20, 50 and even 100 years down the road.
But the experience of other developed countries like Japan, Australia and Europe shows us it is possible to have a higher skilled, more productive, largely locally-manned construction industry that pays decent wages and where construction work is a skilled and respectable profession. While we may take years to get there, it is clear that it will take a concerted industrial upgrading effort by government to do so. If anything, this Covid-19 crisis has underlined the important strategic need to do so both in construction and in other industries which have through our misplaced labour intensive growth policy, created a low wage industry far too dependent on migrant foreign workers and low wages for working class Singaporeans.
We need to start somewhere and start it in a massive and decisive way. Let’s not use mathematics and rhetoric to brush the problem aside for the next generation to solve.
Note: Written by Yee Jenn Jong. The views expressed here are that of the author.
——— Additional notes ——-
In response to some online comments on my FB post, I decided to summarise the solutions. I am posting them here for those who are interested to follow up on what solutions we can have. As mentioned, these are purely my personal views on a topic I had become interested in since the 2013 Population White Paper Debate when I had the chance to look deeper into the numbers and speak with experts.
(1) Recognise we have a deep and urgent problem that requires immediate attention.
(2) Market cannot resolve this mega problem anymore. Not even the industry association can solve this.
(3) As what had been done in other industries, it has to be a big national effort. This is way more complex than preschool or nursing.
(4) Make construction viable as a career for Singaporeans again – start at the schooling level. Make pay decent enough, and even support with scholarships, career pathways, some sort of wage subsidies for Singaporeans in initial phase, etc.
(5) government may need to intervene in some of the processes at national level such as recruitment, training (even at source countries), dormitories, etc. Learn from the Japanese how they integrate the whole project management processes for swift handover between teams and companies on a project with technology.
(6) Lastly, the gravity of this situation due to decades of neglect is so bad that it will take years to solve and has to be across ministries and with specialised agencies to drive the initiative. The worrying thing from the Minister’s statement is that the government does not seem keen to want to start in a serious manner. It is such a big problem warned by experts from years ago and will have to be a mega national effort. The earlier we start, the better for our future.
Yee Jenn Jong 