SG Complains

PM Lee urges S’poreans to focus on future during current recession

According to Channelnewsasia:

SINGAPORE: Singapore is in a recession, but Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong says Singaporeans must not sit idle and wait for things to get better.

He urges Singaporeans to seize opportunities to learn new skills to keep their jobs.

Mr Lee said that the Jobs Credit scheme also reduces the cost of employing Singaporean workers so that companies find it “more attractive to hire Singaporeans than foreign workers”.

But Prime Minister Lee cautioned against pushing out foreigners “because that would harm businesses, and also Singaporean workers.”

Read the full article at Channelnewsasia:

- Yes we should upgrade ourselves however it may be easier said than done, many companies may face more work load due to sudden “drop” in employees and had to work harder during these economic downturn.

Not all people can afford to “knock off early” to attend to night classes and the worst is those companies that work 6 days week instead of 5 days week…reducing the chances to attend classes to upgrade themselves.

Jobs credit scheme only pays maximum of $300 for the first $2500 per Singaporean employee that earns $3000 per month or more.

The savings is minimum compared to hiring 2 foreigners with half the pay the Singaporean gets per month or less.

Jobs credit may not be sufficient unless there is a cap on the ratio of hired foreigners vs Singaporean…maybe 1 local hired to be eligible for 1 foreigner in the company.

If Singaporean feels China is the next “big” lure for our multilingual abilities plus extremely well paid compared to here, more local will “move on” to greener pasture with the CPF money.

More can be done for Singaporeans.

Singaporeans is getting less babies and the influx of “temporary” talents may not be 100% permanent solution to solving the graying population problem.

In time of extreme crisis, most temporary talents might simply “fly” back to their homeland and abandon Singapore on moment notice, leaving Singapore high and dry with most of our old baby boomers stuck with a empty & broke country.

Of course, kindly make PR more comfortable and with equal benefits as locals as it should so that they can join Singaporean to fight for a better future.

One last thing about Singapore economy problems that I might want to add, property owners who rent shops, office & housing to others in current economic crisis should be mindful about potential problems with their extremely high rental charges causing hardship to tenants.

A quick survey on many coffee shop tenants will give you a sense of depressing response that they are unable to make ends meet currently due to high cost of operation.

For those wanting to rent a shop front or retail outlet, kindly calculate the total cost of monthly rental, expenses, raw materials, utilities bills, employee pay and compare with potential revenue per product sold & expected bare minimum productivity required to maintain the business before dumping 3 month deposit into a rental unit.

Imagine a small eatery unit cost $10,000 per month rental & another $5,000 on the rest of the cost per month means the boss should expect to earn more than $15,000 per month!!

That is a $500 per day considering 30 days month and considering the usual price of the food at $3 per plate, the boss need to sell at least 167 plates per day…to meet cost.

Considering the peak hours of lunch time & dinner time is about 6 hours to 7 hours per day, using 7 hours you need to sell about 24 plates per hour during peak hours.

And that is to meet cost of operation without any profit margin!!

Imagine you want to target $2000 per month profit, the number of plates per hour required to make this is 80 plates per hour and at least 1 plate per minute!!

That means the boss are making less than $2000 per month using the above calculation…making food retail a very miserable low wage long hours torture until the 1 year contract is over or risk losing the deposit.

If the boss decide to up the price of the foodstuff, he or she risk losing loyal customers to the competitors.

In fact many who cook “normal” to “unpopular” food will not survive after 1 year of operation and be forced to close the shop.

Solutions?

1. Property Owners to lower the rental at least temporary or semi permanently with immediate effects or risk an empty stall for a LONG TIME.

2. More Utilities rebates for stall owners & offices.
3. Government to open more cheap stalls on more locations with 24 hours operation to boost tourism & night life of the city or suburbs.
4. Special below $2.5k profit to enjoy no corporate tax.
5. All fish ball noodles in Singapore to form fish ball association to order raw materials in bulk hence ability to negotiate cheaper cost prices…same goes to other types of stalls.
6. Surrender to Food Court organization to take over coffee shop and let them hire you as employee instead.
7. Find other jobs which is not exactly a solution…

The above is my personal opinion and only target on the issue on hand and mean no harm to any ministers or their decisions now or in future.

Hopefully everyone will wake up to the future for sustainability development to self sustain.