Lets get this very clear. Low wage workers are lowly paid not because of globalisation or technology. Our low wage workers are the lowest paid in the developed world as a result of the massive foreign influx in the last 10 years. Yet on Labour Day the PAP message to workers is they have to get their productivity up first before wages rise. Our workers have been underpaid for the current productivity level due to PAP policies. When the income gap, structural unemployment and low wage problems showed up a decade ago, the PAP insisted that skills upgrading and retraining was the solution to these problems - under these programs low wage workers were retrained to do one low wage job after another. After one decade of applying the wrong remedy, they now claim that increasing productivity is the key. However, we know this is not true, in the US where productivity has been increasing there was no corresponding increase in wages due to the wage-productivity gap. The increased productivity simply went to raising profit margins and CEO salaries. Singapore workers have far less power than Americans to bargain for better wages when productivity goes up because of the foreign influx. Also, as long as companies have access to cheap foreign labour, there is little incentive to improve productivity. I'm certain, based on the current set of policies, we are going to waste another decade and hundreds of thousands of low wage workers will continue to struggle in the coming years.
Lets get this clear : the large foreign influx of the last 10 years was not about maintaining our workforce due to declining TFR but to expand the workforce - the numbers of 100,000 (2008) is just too big to justify using declining TFR. Also, when you import an adult, you're compensating for lower TFR of 20-30 years ago when that adult should have been born in Singapore - our TFR was about 1.7 to 1.8 during that time. By expanding the workforce so rapidly in the last 10 years, we have a even bigger ageing workforce to replace in 2030 .....the PAP worsened the original problem through its liberal immigration policy now tells us that it needs to import people to fix it!
For the last 20 years productivity in USA has been rising and real wages has remain stagnant. This is known as the wage-productivity gap. Where did all the money go when productivity of workers go up? In a society where income inequality is very high, it goes to the top management as excessive compensation packages.
