Tag Archives: Foreign Labor

This recent photo is taken at the Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH), Orthopaedic Surgery Clinic B1A, Medical Centre. While every doctors and staff nurses are busy with their work and diligently serving the patients, this Pinoy cashier is happily shaking her legs and surfing the internet (personal and non-job-related – surfing cars advertisement) while at work.

Whilst the research study is on Chinese immigrants who are PRs – it may throw up the contentious issue of “foreigners’ first policies, which may arguably tilt the playing field in the favour of foreigners viv-a-vis Singaporeans.

As written in this article, welders, forklift operators and panel fitters earn between $1100-2500/mth. Are you telling me that given such "high" salaries, especially with the current job market for S'poreans, that S'poreans are unwilling to be trained to take up jobs for these positions? $2500 is the starting salary of an Engineering university graduate (ten years ago and still now)! Poly graduates earn less. PMETs may also have to work overtime and long hours (ok, in the air-con and not under the hot sun). Student-care teachers earn $1500/mth. Child-care teachers earn $2500 or less per month. These are teachers who work with students. (Of course the wages are suppressed due to foreign labour).

Opposition parties look set to raise the hot button issue of immigration and the visibly large numbers of foreigners working in Singapore in this General Election campaign, analysts say. This follows a heated forum shown on prime time television yesterday, where opposition and incumbent People's Action Party (PAP) representatives traded views on problems such as the rising cost of living, foreign labor, and the future of politics in Singapore.

Responding to a question from MP Gan Thiam Poh (Pasir-Ris Punggol GRC) in Parliament on Tuesday, Manpower Minister Lim Swee Say said that foreign labor would be capped at the current one-third of the population in Singapore today. Mr Lim told the House that overall annual foreign workforce growth has moderated from 144,500 in 2007 to 34,000 in 2014. The slowdown, he says, was across all sectors.

I saw this online ad about a placement for North Eastern and North Indian nurses for a new nursing home here. In the first place, this is blatant discrimination against Singaporeans. Aren't employers supposed to go through the government jobs portal to hire Singaporeans first? Singapore has not enough qualified nurses for you that you have to import from India? It's bad enough that Singaporean nurses are underpaid and unappreciated, now these unethical foreign hiring companies want to import more foreign nurses to push down our wages?

Company bosses have are complaining about the lack of foreign manpower in Singapore, They say they have trouble filling vacancies in their companies and cannot take on new projects. Economists warn that slowing growth in the local workforce may be due to the tightening of the government's foreign workforce policy. Although some companies have restructured and become less reliant on manpower, others did not make the cut and have moved elsewhere to countries like Malaysia and China where cheap labor is more easily available.