The unemployment and welfare benefit provides a certain level of minimum income. If a private sector job pays less, the person can decline and receive the state benefit.
Most countries also have a minimum wage policy. All jobs have to pay at least the minimum wage.
This social system is fair. It ensures that everyone can get a job or a benefit that can provide an income to meet the living expenses.
Unemployment and welfare benefits can be abused. People can be lazy. An alternative is to ensure that every person is allowed to get a job, provided by the state, at a minimum wage level. They have to work to receive this payment. There are many useful public services that the state can provide to the people, such as taking care of children, elderly, environment or safety.
These public services are flexible. If there are more unemployment (due to a recession), more public service jobs can be created. When the economy recovers, these services can be reduced.
If people are employed, they do not have to resort to crime or theft to make a living. They have the dignity. The society is more humane.
Tan Kin Lian
6 comments:
I support the concept of minimum wage. However my thoughts on why it is not implemented in Singapore are shown below:
1.) Singapore currently needs a huge resource of cheap labour for the construction, manufacturing, service and various other industries. Without this huge resource of cheap labour readily available, large corporations who's sole purpose is profitability, would not view the country as being competitive enough. Singapore is seen by many western organisations as being the easiest to copy and paste their manufacturing facilities or service centers due to its largely stable political environment, good strategic location between China and India, English as the main language...etc... the only missing link is cheap labour...which is now readily provided by the large influx of foreign talent ( = cheap labour ). I'm sure many of these organisations will deny this statement saying that Vietnam, Thailand, China or India would be cheaper...but i beg to defer as the other key factors far outweight the benefits of cheap labour that those countries could provide.
2.) Singapore wants to be a hub for every single possible key industry... in the early 90s it was electronics, semiconductor, and precision engineering, early 2000 it was bio-industries, pharma, chemical...and now its financial, green energy...etc... In doing so, the key problem is the lack of suitable workforce. No doubt you can slowly teach the nation, but there is no ready available pool of labour. In comes cheap engineers from China, Malaysia, Myanmar, Phillipines and the such to solve your problems. In doing so, it affects the mid income workers in Singapore as people from these countries are willing to accept a lower pay up to 20,30% lower as the exchange rate more than compensates the loss in basic salary. Same as point 1, having a minimum salary will has some effect on the basic salary of some mid income jobs too.
3.) Singapore has re-emphasized many many times that it does not want to be a nanny state...which is really ironic as they already nanny the citizens by providing free and unbiased education, money every year via special programmes, strict fines for various ungracious acts such as eating in the public mrts?! (if this is not motherly act then what is it?).
I think you can probably think of other reasons for no-minimum wage policies. In my opinion, without a minimum wage protection policy, the only people who will suffer are the citizens of Singapore (and i am not even one of you guys). Why? Hyper Inflation is the answer. I'm not talking about the inflation due to house hold goods, or food, or clothes...The inflation numbers you see are basicly a basket of items which are weighted according to some government economist. My inflation calculator puts more emphasis on the things which are basic and most important such as having a roof over my head. With the surge in HDB prices (lets not talk about private), and the introduction of BTO and DBSS, how in the world can some couple earning < 8k per month actually afford it? Going by the pace of Housing movements, your inflation (if you have yet to buy a house) is easily > 10% per year!
So please...please implement minimum wages...
The gov now have no incentive to keep Singaporeans employed. This would be a good disincentive to replace Singaporeans with FTs.
Base on wage vs property prices, today's young are much worse off compared to their parents time.
So using this important yardstick, quality of life for them has dropped.
The only thing that has improved for them are in the technical and consumer products, eg TV, mobile phones, computers, MRT etc. Cheaper and better.
Depressed wages have led to the rise in property prices. Here is the reason.
When wages are depressed, profits go up. The higher profits go to shareholders who use the money to invest property. Companies pay higher rental to get the space to do business.
The argument that lower wages will bring more jobs to Singapore is flawed. It brings the boom in property prices. It led to serious inequity.
Mr. Tan it seems that you are very socialist.
Thank you for the insightful blogpost. The Singapore Democrats have featured it in Blogs of the Week section - http://yoursdp.org/index.php/news/blogs-of-the-week
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