Government and HDB officers do not have to originate policies or
decisions and if the do they are only executing some mundane
decisions like spending monies paid by the taxpayers and not
something creative or entrepreneurial which will create jobs or
start-up new technologies.
However by fallacies and clever presentations, all of them look
like talents but are actually pen-pushers and bureaucrats who
mostly collect and spend monies.
Private sector's equivalent officers and managers have to solve
many many problems on their own and if there are no results they
will be fired.
However government and HDB officers are paid much much higher
salaries due to clever presentations about their talents or having
the talents.
An average department of government will have salary scales
boosting the whole government costs skyward worsened by a string of
hierachical structure from technical, intermediate professionals to
executive, senior, principal and senior principal and deputy chief
and chief blowing up public wages to three times that of private
sector for the equivalent posts and responsibiliies. A car park
chief will be paid superscale of $10,000 - $15,000 per month when
private sector car park manager is only paid $4,000 -$6,000
pm.
Lee Han Shih a ST journalist who reported the billion-dollar losses
suffered by HDB in 2002 was right. HDB officers were so grossly
overpaid even higher than the SIA officers.
If ministers cannot see what is wrong with government wage costs
then people will have ot suffer high costs of living and problems
in doing business.
