The MOM announced today that it has revoked the work pass privileges of a PRC-owned company Prime Gold International Pte Ltd for discriminatory hiring practices.
According to the Ministry, Prime Gold was retrenching Singaporean workers and filling their positions with new foreign workers to curb problems like job redundancy and running losses.
But truth be told, Prime Gold is merely the tip of the iceberg and it is at most a medium size company with not much bargaining power with the PAP Government.
We know through market chatter and anecdotal evidence that many MNCs and banks in Singapore have been engaging in such discriminatory hiring practices for a long time.
This is especially prevalent in the financial industry, an example being Standard Chartered Bank.
A cursory check through LinkedIn uncovered that an overwhelming majority of its middle and senior management ranks are filled with foreign Indian nationals.
It is also common knowledge that once you hire a foreign Indian national in the Senior or Middle Management position, the entire department will be filled with their nationals, with locals being crowded out or leaving out of frustration at the “ethnic” glass ceiling that eventually manifests itself.
Lee Hsien Loong once infamously said that “foreigners create good jobs” but where are these “good jobs”? Operation assistants? Junior executives?
Foreign investments can benefit a nation in the long run only when the knowledge and expertise brought in are transferred over to locals who are then given the opportunity to take up leadership positions.
Otherwise, the country will become a quasi-banana republic with a stratified society dominated by a ruling plutocracy of business, political, and military elites while the majority of the population engage in production extraction at the lower ranks to prop up the economy.
The recent Fair Consideration Framework is a sham because it exempts jobs that pay a fixed salary of $12,000 and above from its hiring guidelines.
If the PAP is really sincere about addressing unfair hiring practices, it should start looking at turning these guidelines into laws and expanding their coverage to plug all loopholes
The Alternative View
*Article first appeared on https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Alternative-View/358759327518739