I am not sure how unionism is linked to the topic
Anyway, I
disagree with trade unions primarily because I am convinced that
free-market provides the fairest value to the labor. My opinion is
that there are just too many disadvantages in unionizing the labor
to justify it
What has tripartism achieved for our Workers in Singapore?
Higher wages, lesser employers' exploitation of the powerless and
defenceless labor?
Just go back to all the reasons given by ministers about what the
unions have accomplished and see for yourself who benefited?
The workers sad to say, have practically lost all their basic
rights and been taken for granted by the government who are able to
do so because of putting unions in their right pocket.
Today, under the excuse of tripartism, unions have ignored the
plight of workers. The average employers could break contract, fail
to pay their contractual 13th month when 13th month supplement are
liberally paid to all civil servants without question as a
supplement. Despite writing to ministers, trade union chief and our
Ministry of Manpower, in one case I personally know of, there is no
reply to such plight brought to their attention. The employee
himself has to take his own action to claim the 13th month
supplement from the court.
You are not answering the issue. We were discussing the role of
government in shielding its citizen against economic depressions.
Now you brought in the issue of pay. I havent formed my opinion on
the ministers pay. Frankly, I dont know what pay is fair. But you
seem to be rather sure that the pay is unfair, because you are
already labeling them as criminals.
The problem is caused by a fundamental flaw in our system -
autocracy where one man is making all the decisions or major
decisions. Since years ago, he had already ordained that ministers
are talented people who should be paid the world's highest salaries
in order not to become corrupt or be taken away by private sector
like Wee Chaw Yao at higher salaries.
Ask how many private sector employers have poached our ministers to
join them after they have resigned or left service and got higher
salaries or turned around companies as Iaccoca had done? In fact in
one interview, Mr. Wee Chaw Yao openly said he would not employ
those million-dollar CEOs as practised by government banks and was
he worse off for that decision.
As you can read from the various posts, we have not heard of any
confirmation in the ministers' salary benchmarking proposal that
any ministers in service were in danger of being poached by Wee
Chaw Yao or someone else but no matter what no voting will be
allowed by the MPs and so the ministers unashamely assumed they are
the talented and took their taxpayers' monies to reward themselves
in such an arrogant manner.
People are now asking whether our ministers indeed have the talents
like restructuring our basic foreigner-begging economy to
value-adding technology-driven restructuring plans since these were
announced over the last three recessions.
Instead of being true-blue talents which could lead us all to
overcome globalisation problems with motivation and practical
knowledge application by all, they have consistently blamed
economic recessions on people's failures in retraining knowing full
well it was the government ministers who failed in their various
plans and workers' training programmes and not the people.
Thus when you said that the issue is only about "government's plans
in shielding its citizens from economic depressions" and had
nothing to do with ministers' salary issue, these are in fact far
from separated and were deeply interconnected. Probably you could
not understand or you are too partitioned being one of their
connections who naturally have to defend their mistakes or
wrongs.
:
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(Maurizio)You don't see too much nepotism and
inefficiencies???
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User_0
No, really, I dont.
How was our chief justice appointed? How was our CPIB chief
appointed? Were their appointments tabled to parliament so that
they could be passed with a majority votes properly taken to signal
to the world we are running a good country without hidden agenda to
cling on to power and with full democratic processes,
accountability or transparency to prevent malpractices?
Lets put it this way, if they are capable people, should you
disqualify them just because of family ties? To me, nepotism is
when the person is incompetent, and yet put into a position of
power because of family ties, and then he/she screws up big time
because of being incompetent.
On the face of it, Singapore is presented as if it is without
talents but on closer examinations did the so-called talents among
ministers or MPs even understand simple issues like people's
struggling for a living with dropping wages due to government
failures in restructuring the economy as posted in the
foregoing.
We only see good people leaving the government citing reasons like
personal reason in order not to hurt the feeling of autocracy
because autocracy does not give them the opportunity to excel or
contribute their good ideas to the government. So monies are not
the only issue but it has been made to be the sole and primary
issue. So under such hypocrisy will million-dollar salaries really
attract many potential good leaders who are simply not given the
leeway to serve with their ideas and talents under autocracy
?
It is time now for the government to accept feedback and make big
changes to a system which involve all citizens as far as practical
in participating in the running of the government. To do so, MM Lee
must stop the assumptions which long ago were no longer working and
his persistent asking for higher salaries to his ministers is one
fundamental error.
He will have to recognise all talents including practical talents
in implementing all tasks at lower level and not give undue
weightage only to the elites and those at the top.
Only with such major changes to our leaders by way of good examples
will our citizens respond to leadership claim to meet greater
onward globalization challenges posed by China and India.
Had our talented ministers who are being paid world's highest
salaries really cared or understood all these and many other
problems.
I really cant comment on what you say. Im ambivalent on the
ministers pay increase, and I take a wait-and-see stance on that
issue. You seem to be pretty sure that because of these two
reasons, the government is inefficient. Well, the prevailing view
in the world is that Singapore has an efficient government. In
fact, Singapore government has been so successful, it is being
observed and emulated by many countries in the world.
To be efficient, it is essential to set up a competitive
manpower structure to avoid over-spending people's taxes on
ministers', MPs' and civil servants' salaries, life-long pensions
and double-salaries for certain ministers (one for retirements who
did not take place and one for full minister posts)
So it is right for people to tie the number of posts of ministers
and MPs to the population. Do our talented ministers who are paid
million-dollar salaries understand such an objective assessments
which were not mentioned in the ministers' salary benchmarking at
all, just like their life-long pensions which were conveniently
left out in the benchmarking.
The environment you refer to is the societal environment. You
can put the blame on the society. You can even blame the government
for that. You are probably right too
Fine, now that you know that
you live in an environment that is difficult to motivate yourself,
what are you going to do about it? Are you going to shake your
head, admit your fate, stand down and blame it on others?
Such rebuttal as this has too often been used as a last triumph
card when ministers meet with more logical arguments to debunk
their wrong policies. They will say "what can you do about it, we
have received 66.6 % of the popular votes" or stuff like "why don't
you stand for election" If our ministers want to receive feedbacks
they have to show their sincerity that they will address problems
caused by their wrong policies such as wrongful benchmarking of
their salaries equivalent to asking taxpayers to let them write
their own lottery winner pay cheques. Are they talented enough to
see that their recent policy to increase their world's highest bill
collector salaries is immoral and sinful and not just wrong. To rub
salt into the wound when after they forced their way through
autocracy to fill up their own pay cheque they quickly turned down
the Alpha-S pilots' benchmarking of pilots' salaries to
cosmopolitan pilots in other airline without allowing them to quote
the ministerial benchmarking criteria.
The last time I looked at Singapores historical economic
growth, unemployment rate, GDP, standard of living etc., it was
doing well. Well, I just dont know how you come to a conclusion
that Singapores growth is anything short of spectacular
I will reply to Robert next time...
This was the reason given by Danabalan - the last time we had a
peek at our investment we saw it was still performing pretty well -
when asked to be more open and accountable to taxpayers in spending
their monies on shin corp etc which did not benefit the citizens in
lowering medical costs or their eventual retirements.
How are our talented ministers going to convince citizens that they
are not losing their hard-earned savings on careless investments
like the Shin Corp with this sort of "holier than thou" attitude or
the unspoken craze of power like "we will do as we like because we
are voted by 66.6 % of the popular votes" when they are making
decisions without accountable implementation processes in running a
government.
