Copypasta good comment on socmed:
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I don't think this isn't your usual tired 'class warfare' issue that fills social media. The problems isn't that the Centurion corp owners are rich. Of course they are. The problem is how they are getting rich, are they subject to the same rules and what problems they are externalising on to everyone else.
In Singapore, if you want to hire a foreign worker, you don't have great degree of choice as to where to put them. There are regulatory barriers to companies seeking house them, say in HDB rentals and other accomodation in light of the little India scandal. Centurion is the largest dorm provider in Singapore. They are able to acquire land from the government and build dorms on them under highly advantageous terms. IIRC, the government basically provides them leases on this land for less than the fair market rate on the understanding that this land would be developed into dorms to solve a national worker accomodation problem. It is readily apparent that the subsidy is not being passed on to consumers. In 2019, almost 2/3rds of the group's revenue came from construction worker dorms. The company as a whole reported a net profit margin on this of 72% from their core operations and from one off items. Their profit margin from their student and worker dorm business is likely less less eye-popping, but appears to still be almost 29%. Either figure implies basically drug cartel levels of profitability. If you doubt this, I would ask if any of you can go find me a REIT or property investment firm that can consistently earn 29% excluding one off items and 73% including them. If you can find me one, I will quit my job and cash out my retirement savings to go invest in that firm right now. This is earned off of an undue, government supported position in the market, making use of limited consumer choice, and conflicts of agency.--the people paying for the dorms are not the people who have to survive living in them. This is before we consider all the exemptions and lax enforcement to our building code, HSA and SCDF fire safety regulations that allow them to stuff dozens of workers into an under ventilated room, thousands into a prefab building and feed them maggot infested food.
https://centurion.listedcompany.com/misc/ar2019/34/index.html#zoom=z
I am an older engineer who is doing pretty OK for himself. I don't care if you are rich so long as you add value to our economy and compete to offer a service that people mostly voluntarily choose. These rent seeking people are taking value that is given to them in order offer a shit service to a huge captive market that often must lan lan patronise their business. How these people are getting rich is at minimum problematic.I think one of the biggest social problems to come from Covid centers around this differential treatment. This is a country where we had months of baotoh kings running around filming everyday Sinkie peasants for not being sufficiently obedient. We jail people, some of whom were suffering some very desperate circumstances for not following covid management rules. We have come to expect that as private individuals, our behavior will be hyper scrutinized by a very motivated wide eyed subset of our fellow Singaporeans and by the authorities.
https://www.straitstimes.com/singap...ted-stay-home-order-while-infected-with-covid
Yet through all this, it is only on certain parts of the internet that you even occasionally see any scrutiny of the people who have disproportionate ability to cause damage to our society. You see how the powerful and politically connected are treated favorably by the rules. Exempt from URA guidelines on how to hygenically and safely house human beings. Even the rules they are not exempt from they routinely break, like by feeding workers unhygenic maggot infested food. Their dorms can produce hundreds of thousands of cases. In less whipped countries, people would be baying for their blood. There would be a parliamentary inquiry about this. Instead, what we see here is that the negative societal consequence that comes from this behavior is brushed of as 'impossible to forsee'. We have state newspapers covering for them by writing racist editorials blaming the 'dirty' Indian construction workers. Any remediation of the situation is going to come from taxpayer money. So on top of all the problems mentioned above, we also have socialised losses, privatised profit. These people are even taking on the full risk of their enterprise.
Getting rich this way is not right. It is not good for the economy or our society. But it is part of a bigger problem that Covid has exposed.
