http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/opinion/2013/03/12/the-emerging-%E2%80%98invisible%E2%80%99-underclass-in-spore/
The news just did not surprise anyone, simply because it
could not! The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in a report
last month labeled the ‘economic oasis’ everybody knows as
Singapore as the nation with the greatest income
inequality.
The report did not mention the city-state’s income
inequality was the worst in the world, but a sensation is steadily
gaining that eroding income levels have accelerated a slow and
painful process of societal alienation, thus in the process
increasingly fostering class divides.
Not since one-time political dissident and erstwhile
gun-blazing firebrand of the Workers’ Party, J.B. Jeyaretnam (JBJ)
first complained of “pockets of poverty behind gleaming office
towers” to a Western newspaper in 1982 has a more salient focus
been once again turned on the city-state.
Those remarks from Jeyaretnam, needless to say, earned him
some of harsh and most withering of barbs from the then and late
education minister, Tan Eng Soon.
Yet after some 30 years, an ‘invisible’ Singapore underclass
is hardly indistinguishable. The sight of the old and infirm
waiting out at tables, clearing rubbish in the streets or
scavenging into trash bins to eke out whatever living that is
sanely and remotely possible is not just commonplace.
It has now lead to strident calls to temper the very harsh,
forbidding facets of Singaporean-style meritocracy with a
compassionate edge replete with a welfare system even as that maybe
ideological bugaboo.
That call is almost certain to grow louder as the nation
continues to age brought on firstly by a birth rate that remains
stubbornly low and the lack of any favourable measures to reverse
the decline in falling birth rates.
According to the BBC report which cited the United Nations,
the income gap in Singapore is the second biggest among Asia’s
developed nations, which again given the lack of a minimum wage
regime, is excruciatingly unsurprising.
The report did not say which Asian nation had the biggest
income gap but there leaves nothing to doubt what a Far Eastern
Economic Review (FEER) said several years that Singapore’s ruling
Peoples’ Action Party (PAP) is “quick to tax its people but slow in
granting privileges”.
Do you think its true? For myself, I'm still not used to
old people clearing the tables in food courts.
