Singapore's union says no to equal pay for all nationalities

I am referring to this report from the Business Times dated 15-Dec-2012.

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[Extracted report from The Business Times dated 15-Dec-2012.]

NTUC says 'no' to equal pay for all nationalities

'Same job-equal pay' rule will put local workers and families at a disadvantage

BY ONG CHOR HAO

THE labour movement has rejected a call for workers of all nationalities to get the same pay for the same job, and recommended instead "fair and reasonable wages" for all.

Labour chief Lim Swee Say, addressing a range of labour issues at a press conference, said: "We are highly uncomfortable with this idea of 'same job-equal pay', because we feel that this will actually disadvantage our local workers and their families, and we think this is not the way to go."

The "same job-equal pay" clamour arose when a group of SMRT bus drivers from China held an illegal strike last month to signal their unhappiness about their pay being lower than that of their Malaysian counterparts, among other things.

Mr Lim, the secretary-general of the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC), said it was a sensitive, complicated issue but noted the issues to consider.

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See what Lucky Tan and Kristen Han (#spuddings) wrote about why that million-dollar minister's logic is flawed. IMHO, even an 18 year-old A-levels economics student would probably have a better grasp of basic economic principles of running a business than that million-dollar minister.

On other note, I am glad my foreign-talent friends ZS and JX (both from PRC and worked in Singapore for years) decided to give up their Singapore PR. They are indeed better off in Canada, given such government-endorsed discrimination in Singapore. In other words, with such government-backed discrimination, the kind of foreign workers that Singapore would attract and retain in the long-term are the rejects (at the bottom of the barrel) rather than the crème de la crème.

As for the nurses in Singapore, brace yourself that relational aggression resulting from such inequity will continue within the multi-national nursing workforce -- either until you retire/quit from nursing in Singapore or there is political change in Singapore.