Thanks to Janice for the link
After writing “The hunt for MOM labour data” (theonlinecitizen, Aug 23), a reader, Janice Heng was very helpful in pointing out (through her facebook posting) the link to the Ministry of Manpower’s (MOM) web site which has the listing of the occupational wages data.
Harder to do analysis?
However, unlike the now discontinued Annual Report on Wages, I had to first figure out which of the many tables was the right one to find the median gross wage for the eight occupational categories.
Then, I had to scroll down and go through the whole list of occupations, in order to extract the data for the eight categories.
In the previous annual Report on Wages, these data were all in a single table, for easy historical comparative analysis.
6 of 8 categories negative real wage growth?
Anyway, to my horror, in comparing the data (June 2012) which I found now to the June 2011 data – Six out of the eight occupational categories had negative real wage growth from June 2011 to June 2012.
1 of the 2 positive wage growth only 0.3%?
Of the two categories that had positive real wage growth, one of them grew by only 0.3 per cent.
Inflation from June 2011 to June 2012 was 5.3 per cent.
The 8 categories’ real wage growth
The real wage growth for the eight categories from the lowest to the highest are as follows:-
-8.1% Service and sales workers
-7.4% Cleaners, labourers and related workers
-5.3% Clerical support workers
-4.3% Craftsmen and related trades workers
-1.7% Professionals
-1.6% Associate Professionals and Technicians
0.3% Managers
9.0% Plant and machine operators
Service sector created most jobs?
As I understand that the trend has been that most of the new jobs created were in the service sector, which had the lowest real wage growth of all the categories, at minus 8.1 per cent – does it mean that most of the jobs created belonged to those job categories that had negative real wage growth?
Why change, disappear?
As I had asked in my earlier article, does the above disappointing data have anything to do with the change in format of the presentation, easy access, easy historical comparative analysis and discontinuance of the annual Reports on wages?
Considering the above mentioned – how many people would have gone through the trouble to do what I have done in order to analyse the wage statistics – and therefore how many people would know how bad the wage statistics are?
leong Sze Hian
P.S. In Part 2, I shall be talking about propaganda – how four stories in one newspaper in one day (24 August) that may have something to do with the subject “wages” analysis in one way or another, may be debunked by statistical analysis – and also why Singapore’s 149th Press Freedom ranking may be unjustifiably low?
