- Minister of State for Community Development, Youth and Sports Halimah Yacob and opposition politician Nicole Seah look on as fellow panellist Leong Sze Hian explains a point during a forum on solving the income …more gap. (Yahoo! photo)
Calibrate foreign labour policies. Continue social transfers. Invest more in education and healthcare.
These were among the ideas put forth by a financial expert, a minister of state and an opposition politician, the three panellists at a forum on how the income gap in Singapore could be addressed.
Leong Sze Hian, statistician and former president of the Society of Financial Service Professionals, said current foreign manpower policies are a key reason for the depression of wages among the lower rungs of the workforce.
“We need to calibrate and review a lot of the foreign labour policies because currently most of them are applied across the board,” he explained. “They need to be more targeted to different sectors and industries… you cannot have a system where 72 (working) hours a week becomes the norm for everyone. No one can continue working that kind of environment, and wages will continue to go down.”
Citing the example of cleaners in Singapore, whose real incomes he pointed out fell 38 per cent over the past decade after adjusting for inflation, he said even though some of them earn about $1,300 a month, their shifts last 12 hours at a stretch and take one day off every two weeks.
“So we cannot focus solely on increasing wages. We must also look at the work conditions (they are dealing with),” he said, noting also that Singapore continues to be the country clocking in the longest working hours in the world.
Leong also called for greater social spending, in particular in mitigation of rising health insurance costs for the poor — pointing out that some of them have experienced a more than five-fold jump in the cost of their MediShield premiums since 2005.
