Saturday, July 29, 2006

Unemployed workers refuse to work in retail industry

A report in the Straits Times said that there are 70,000 unemployed workers in Singapore, but they do not want to work in the retail industry. The employers have to look for foreign workers.

Why?

I think that they find it difficult to cope with the difficult Singaporean customers. Some customers are quite demanding. They have high and unreasonable expectation of service and are not forgiving of mistakes. It is quite stressful to deal with them.

Many years ago, NTUC Income had difficult to recruit people to work in the frontline to serve customers - i.e. at our call center, service center or branches.

We manage to solve this problem, and are now able to get people to work at these places and to stay there. We still have difficulty, but not as much as other organisations.

What is our strategy? If you are in Human Resource management and are interested to know, send an e-mail to me at tankl@income.coop.
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2 comments:

Dayspire said...

Dear Mr Tan,

It is possible that this could be due to mismatch of expectations, this is normal and occurs in almost every country.

Perhaps a centralized job counseling & service body can provide useful assistance?
Thank you.

August 01, 2006 6:24 PM
VivaRevolution said...

I think if you are unemployed and have no other job options it is best to take up any job which can help you pay your bills first.

However , I would like to say that the ST report also mentioned about why employers prefer to hire foriegners in retail with many citing the fact that Singaporeans snub the industry. I don't think so.

Employers in the retail sector will always like foriegn workers. You know why? You can pay them $1200 a month and they are very happy - why? Foreign workers are using Singapore as a stepping stone. Simple - cost of living difference between singapore and Manila is very wide and with the exchange rate , their families back there can live very comfortably.

For a Singaporean , if we pay him $1200 and he leaves for other jobs after a few years , the employer says ,"Lousy Singapore worker - we give him a job and he now leaves. Ok , let's hire more foreigners!" But remember , is it a crime to leave a job for better prospects in Singapore? The money we send home is spent in Singapore at the Singapore cost of living levels. So what to do? When a higher paying job comes along , people move. If the job pays too low a salary and there are other options available , why take the lower paying job unless you very passionate about it?

You see , MDs , CEOs and all the high flyers with large paychecks will always look down from above and say ." Oh you ungrateful worker you.Look at me , I am very happy with my $500,000 a year salary. I work hard. I am highly motivated.How come you are not?I work 17hr days. I eat ginseng and birdsnest and relax in my garden evryday and then I go back to work, how come you do not have the energy like me? Straight after my driver takes me home in my BMW , I eat my dinner cooked by my maid and I work and work!How come you have less energy after taking the 2 hr bus ride home? How come you have less energy than me??"

I think that CEOs and MDs should work for NO pay for 1 year or draw a $1000 a month salary for 1 whole year and not be allowed to use more than $10,000 of savings for that year and then I think they quickly understand things from the perspective of the ordinary worker. They should also move into an unfurnished 3 room flat during that year and take public transport on their $1000 a month salary. We can also add other factors to increase their stress level like having to pay for school fees for 3 growing children and hospital bills for a sickly family member.

August 08, 2006 4:32 PM

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