Are We Really That Useless 2?
So as Singaporeans put up with the relentless influx of foreign talent, one has to ask who is richer or better off for it.
As we see prices skyrocket, wages of the average Singaporean has not gone up appreciably. In fact, I would even say that our purchasing power may well be poorer than our parents and their generation. It is just that we are on the whole, better educated than that generation. Other than that, most manage to travel out of the country on holidays compared with the generation before. Seems good, right? Except we have converted from eating fresh to frozen produce, and are living in smaller apartments.
While we marvel at the ever rising GDP of the nation, we should still wonder just how much is attributable to the rise in population, and how much stays in the country.
Then there are the foreign talents, let us first put aside the bus-drivers, hawker assistants, manual construction workers, and other low-skilled workers.
How many of our highly-skilled foreign talent are truly needed in Singapore? Perhaps in newly-developing industries, where we do not have the expertise, but why do we insist on bringing in people for mature industries where we have many citizens familiar with the trade? Is a software engineer trained in SAP unable to pick up Oracle or vice versa?
Here, I have to blame our poorly-skilled human resource professionals, for they seem unable to differentiate hard and soft skills and seem to think that all skills are non-transferable. So a business development professional in petrochemicals cannot do business development for pharmaceuticals. While the networks may be different, can we not expect the individual to build those networks in double-quick time, knowing that he has the experience in business development? After all, that is what most relationship-agents are like, right?
So while our workforce becomes more specialized, and our human resource departments grow more rigid, the risk of structural unemployment increases. Here, I am not referring to the poorly-skilled who remain jobless, but trained-engineers and such. Having to face harsh realities of mortgages and sending children to school, many have ended up as property agents or insurance agents. Now, tell me that is not a waste of our scarce human resource, and reason why we need to import replacements.
Could it then be that we are risk-adverse? Or is it that we are too afraid to fail? Since when is failure such a terrible thing, as long as you pick yourself up and learn lessons from it? Yet, we in our twisted perception of manpower efficiency, cannot accept alternative routes to success other than the most direct one. Therein lies the reason why we are not able to develop a Silicon Valley clone, in spite of the billions of dollars poured into it.
So, we keep devaluing our own citizens, refusing to see their true merit, choosing to believe the tales of a foreigner whom we do not know. And humans, being humans, react. Singaporeans stop trying, since they know they are never taken seriously. Are they just a self-fulfilling prophecy?
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