http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/2012/01/08/equal-pay-for-unequal-work/
Equal pay for unequal work
Elizabeth Peiris
January 8, 2012
After years of lecturing its people of the need for hardship and belt-tightening, it is now the turn of Singapore leaders to do what themselves have long resisted.
In a move that can be viewed as ‘historic’ all Singapore leaders will now take a pay cut beginning with the head of state, Dr Tony Tan along with premier Lee Hsien Loong and all his ministers.
The nation’s first Eurasian speaker of parliament Michael Palmer too, will see his annual wages slashed to $550,000 (RM1.32 million). Lee Hsien Loong will be poorer by 36% of his usual annual pay and take home RM5.3million whilst President Tony Tan will only get RM3.7million.
Even at the revised salary Lee is commanding, he is still considerably eight times richer than when compared to his counterpart in the UK or perhaps more of his other peer in Australia.
The pay revisions in 2012 reflect years of hard nosed complaints by the nation’s docile and widely-suspected, oppressed electorate of the celestial pay scales given to the nation’s leaders.
If history is any clue, it was the country’s most famous and controversial political dissident JB Jeyaretnam who first gave vent to unusually high salaries when he was then contesting the Siglap constituency in 1976.
“We are always asked to tighten our belts. Don’t they too need to tighten their belts” thundered Jeyaretnam in an election rally speech that year, only to be accused in latter years of arousing the politics of envy.
Jeyaretnam subsequently won a disciple in Chiam See Tong who helmed the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) in 1984 general election.
He too, in the elections of that year loudly complained of the RM1,400 every minister in Singapore was commanding on a daily basis.
When compared to what ordinary workers in the city-state who then drew RM900 every month, the figures were jaw-dropping, a bombshell and without prejudice, morally ‘unacceptable’!
Grouses on the ground
The situation only ‘worsened’ in the 1985 recession when the Singapore government of the day led by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew against better counsel overrode the remonstrations of his countrymen to give the entire government a pay rise; whilst simultaneously lecturing, admonishing and reproving its populace to settle for sacrifices in pay cuts and prepare for the headwinds of the then prevailing economic maelstrom.
The storm nonetheless did pass. And along with it a page in history turned.
That historical turn arrived on the May 7, 2010 when a pent-up populace incensed at the unjustifiably high salaries they were giving their leaders turned in a record number of opposition candidates into the state legislature.
The loss of six seats was a blow to the ruling Peoples’ Action Party (PAP). They were chastened. And in a measure they knew they had to make a pact with the populace and drive away the politics of apathy and arrogance.
The rude awakening happening as it did in the digital age of Internet and online media made that priority an even larger goal because it was no longer politics as usual, as how the PAP has always been inured to since coming to power in 1959. The Internet will take over ‘governing’ so to speak of.
Is equality quantifiable?
The heart of the question has never been what to pay the country’s leaders. It has always been how much is just too much, and just what should commensurate the tasks at hand.
Even at the salary that he is due to command after the salary review that himself ordered, Lee’s annual wages will still be larger than the US president and certainly also of the Malaysian Premier, Najib Tun Razak.
The only difference being is that Lee does not carry the responsibilities of leading a superpower that US President Obama needs and has to.
In the scheme of things in officialdom it would naturally follow that the one who has the larger responsibility has to deserve of what he has been asked to do. That unfortunately, is not the case in Singapore.
Singapore leaders led by former Premier Lee Kuan Yew (father of sitting Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong) have long argued that the paucity of talent in a small city-state makes it doubly essential to pay top dollar to lure talent away from the private sector and the armed forces into the government.
And according to him only monetary incentives will attract such talent. He entirely dismissed the notion of a missionary zeal in public service saying such philosophical stirrings are no longer valid in the modern contemporary world.
According to the elder Lee in a comment made sometime in 2007, the amount paid to the leaders is only a drop in the bucket and amounts to what he then called as “just 1.4% of the nation’s RM720billion economy”.
In absolute numbers that may appear as niggling. But in reality it is hardly any real comfort to the vast swathe of the population unimpressed of late, of MRT breakdowns, the escape of wanted terror mastermind Mas Selamat Kestari, the unbridled influx of foreigners who have been blamed for taking away jobs from Singaporeans, the sight of the old and infirm still waiting out at tables at coffee shops across the island republic, unusually high prices for public housing, high medical and transports costs, an inability to control the recent flooding and importantly of a sense of a loss of hope among the young and educated urbanites many of whom who chafe at whatever chance to emigrate.
Lecturing the lecturers
“People feel they should be getting better solutions for the top dollar that the ministers are making,” said Eugene Tan, a political commentator and assistant professor of law at the Singapore Management University to a foreign media agency.
“The government may have dealt with the ministerial pay issue but there will be equally hot- button issues that will again hobble their ability to make headway in terms of governing.”
As far as the economy goes it grew 4.8% in 2011 considerably smaller than the 15% figure it had in 2010.
According to the Boston Consulting Group the city-state has the highest number of millionaire households globally but that is hardly any soothing comfort for the multitudes who continue to labour under economically trying conditions of high prices and very little quality in living to show for.
Little wonder therefore that the cries for social and moral justice have rung out far and wide that it has now become the turn of the lecturer to get some lectures.
