Ong Ye Kung Joins Keppel Corp

[jw5]

Article from asiaone.com.sg


Ong Ye Kung joins Keppel Corp

Former PAP Aljunied candidate sidesteps queries on political plans. -ST
Janice Heng

Fri, Jan 04, 2013
The Straits Times

SINGAPORE - Former People's Action Party (PAP) Aljunied candidate Ong Ye Kung is joining Keppel Corporation, ending months of speculation on where he was going after he left the labour movement.

But the man once touted to be part of the party's fourth-generation leadership has left a bigger question unanswered - whether he will contest future elections, including a possible by-election in Punggol East.

On Tuesday, the 43-year-old sidestepped questions about his political plans, though observers say his latest move does not rule out his re-entry into politics.

He would only say: "This is a career transition for me.

"I have always admired Keppel as an internationally competitive company, and look forward to contributing to the team."

Mr Ong added that he will start work next week as a director looking after group strategy.

While his move to the government-linked marine and property conglomerate could be read as groundwork for political office, observers interviewed did not want to place too much weight on it.

"It's just another career move," said former Nominated MP Zulkifli Baharudin. "I wouldn't read too much into it."

But he did add that corporate experience would benefit Mr Ong if he was still being primed for ministerial duties in future.

"A future leadership with commercial experience would be good for Singapore," said Mr Zulkifli, adding that it would mean "more diverse talent" in Cabinet.

Former NMP Siew Kum Hong too said the move certainly did not rule out Mr Ong's continued involvement in politics, but did not attach special significance to his appointment at Keppel Corp.

"There are any number of reasons why people would join GLCs," he said. GLCs stands for government-linked companies.

Mr Ong's move was reported on Tuesday by Lianhe Zaobao. But he had also remained silent on his political future in an interview with the Chinese daily, saying only that he was "looking forward to turning a new page in his career".

He described joining Keppel as a "personal career move", noting that he had never been in the private sector before, and said that one of Keppel's main draws was its international competitiveness.

Mr Ong was a high-flier in the civil service, taking on posts such as the Prime Minister's principal private secretary and the chief executive of the Singapore Workforce Development Agency before leaving the elite Administrative Service to join the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) in 2008.

That paved the way for him to run as a PAP candidate in the 2011 General Election, when he was widely expected to be given a ministerial post. The loss of Aljunied GRC to the Workers' Party, however, appeared to have scuppered those plans.

Last November, Mr Ong stepped down as NTUC's deputy secretary-general, sparking much speculation about his next move. His name was also among several bandied about as a potential PAP candidate for a possible by-election in Punggol East.

The single seat was vacated after its MP, Speaker of Parliament Michael Palmer, resigned over an extramarital affair.

On Tuesday, Mr Ong told The Straits Times that he was maintaining his links with the labour movement as chairman of the Employment and Employability Institute and adviser to several unions.

"I continue to serve as a community and grassroots volunteer," he said, adding that all these were unpaid positions.

Just last Sunday, he ushered in the New Year with Kaki Bukit residents, in his capacity as adviser to the ward's grassroots organisations.

 

[jw5]

But he did add that corporate experience would benefit Mr Ong if he was still being primed for ministerial duties in future.

"A future leadership with commercial experience would be good for Singapore," said Mr Zulkifli, adding that it would mean "more diverse talent" in Cabinet.

"There are any number of reasons why people would join GLCs," he said. GLCs stands for government-linked companies.

He described joining Keppel as a "personal career move", noting that he had never been in the private sector before, and said that one of Keppel's main draws was its international competitiveness.

Extracted the funny parts.

Btw, next week company got test or not?

 

[GoldenDragon]

The only reason why people join GLCs is because no other reputable business entity wants them.

 

[jw5]

"I continue to serve as a community and grassroots volunteer," he said, adding that all these were unpaid positions.

Ooooooh, how noble and altruistic.

 

[jw5]

couldn't resist.

who kapitan will pick to replace hornypalm is now anyone's guess
the cream are all on board the ship so it won't be one of the best
could be that the former union man would be the pick from the rest
but first he's got to explain who told him in jc that there was no test


kapitan was wonderin' who he could bring in to man the fort
a hunky footballer perhaps someone who could help stop the rot
suddenly there was a cackle down below from the old seaman's cot
he wanted to know whether overboard crew's pa girl was chio or not

 

[batman1]

Why must an unsuccessful ex-PAP candidate always must get a GLC job ? No other job in the world except GLC job ? He's appointed to a GLC job in Keppel Corp by his pap topdogs and he said it is a "personal career move" .Sure it is a personal career move when your career is decided by some pap bigshots ? Why don't he join a non-GLC company such as McDonalds,DHL,Kopitiam ,KFC,Banquet,Courts,Harvey Norman,Pizza Hut......etc or he can start a business in the food court selling fried oyster or mee rebus or chicken rice or laksa ? or he can open a pub selling beer and liquor with big TV screen showing latest soccer matches with pool tables and pole-dancing ? GLC..GLC...GLC...If without GLC,all these unsuccessful ex-PAP candidates and and ex-Generals will be jobless and sleeping in the streets ? Wah Kow !

 

[jw5]

This move reaffirms the widely held view that he is still ready and available for elections.

Let's hope it's an upcoming by-elections and he won't need to resign from his corporate job after.

2016 can try again.

 

[Semaj2357]

He would'nt get the sort of respect from those non-GLC's and he may not have the requisite EQ's and commercial enterprise to last one month. So, what better way to moosy-on down into a GLC and keep his links with the pappies since it's also a reward. Afterall, membership does have it's benefits.

 

[brocoli]

[video=youtube_share;Bz4TiRuhFNU]http://youtu.be/Bz4TiRuhFNU[/video]

see my siggy

 

[jw5]

Interview with ST that was published in June 2012. Someone should pin it up on the company's noticeboard.


THE LONG INTERVIEW | ONG YE KUNG - 'The one who got away'

A year after losing an election, labour leader Ong Ye Kung says he remains active in politics. In fact, as Susan Long discovers, he was key in negotiating a recent pay rise for bus drivers.
Straits Times, Published on Jun 1, 2012


ONE year on, losing Aljunied GRC as part of the People's Action Party's team in the 2011 General Election still stings for Ong Ye Kung. He had described his campaign as 'jumping off a cliff into the unknown'.

But he's found the bottom.

'One thing you definitely learn is resilience,' the 43-year-old says, describing his failed political outing as his biggest professional setback to date. At his bleakest, he drew comfort from everyone from crooner Kelly Clarkson to boxer Muhammad Ali.

He cites the lyrics to Clarkson's What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger and a quote from the former world heavyweight champion which a stranger sent him on Facebook: 'Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come out with an extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even.'

Looking back, the deputy secretary-general of the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) says: 'I don't regret running. It was an experience of a lifetime.' The only pity, he says, was that he had to resign from his 18-year Administrative Service career to go into politics.

'But to fight in an election which was in 2011 and in Aljunied - win or lose, it's priceless,' he says, from his 12th-floor office at One Marina Boulevard.

Touted to be of ministerial calibre, Mr Ong is often spoken of as 'the one who got away' and unfortunate 'collateral damage' of GE 2011. People who have worked with him say it is Parliament's loss as he is a natural politician, with his ability to rally people.

The Confucius-quoting unionist is the ultimate cultural interlocutor, at home with English, Mandarin, Teochew, Hokkien, Cantonese, and both the dominant and alternative ideologies of his time, because of his family background.

He was born in 1969, the second of two boys, to the late Ong Lian Teng, one of 13 Barisan Sosialis legislative representatives elected in the 1963 General Election, who walked out of Parliament over National Service, then quit politics soon after.

His mother was a Chung Hwa Girl's High student activist who led a cell that boycotted the Government Secondary Four examinations in 1961 to protest against changes in the Chinese secondary education system.

By the time he was born, his father had traded in politics for an ornamental fish business. His mother had become a buttoned-down Chinese teacher. Home was a zinc-roofed house in a Lorong Chuan farm, then a Bukit Ho Swee three-room flat, followed by a Jalan Kayu semi-detached house as his father's business picked up.

From age eight, he worked most weekends, helping to pack fish into plastic bags for export.

For much of his early schooling life at Nanyang Primary, he struggled with English and, as a result, poor self-esteem. 'Fewer people talk to you and you've no chance of going after the girls,' he quips.
He eventually topped his class and improved his English, but remains painfully conscious of his meagre vocabulary. 'Even today, sometimes people will just use certain words and I have to go back and check it up,' he confides.

At Maris Stella High, he stuck mostly with Chinese-speaking friends. Values such as 'community, friendship, honouring one's word' were all-important.

He had a rude shock enrolling at Raffles Junior College. 'In a Chinese school, if we say 'This coming test is stupid, we're not going to study', we don't,' he recounts. 'At RJC, some Raffles Institution boys said no need to study for the first test of the year. I didn't, but they did. I came in second last.'

But today, he is thankful to have learnt Chinese, rather than English, as his first language, saying it has wired his brain differently. 'English is very analytical, linear; it's phonics with rules, whereas Chinese is a tapestry. It's not as linear but very holistic, and goes from left, right, top, down, back, forth, past, present,' says the Public Service Commission scholar who went on to study at the London School of Economics.

He shot up the ranks of the public service, became deputy chief negotiator of the US-Singapore Free Trade Agreement (FTA), served as principal private secretary to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong from 2002 to 2004, then went on to helm the Workforce Development Agency at 35.

Wherever he went, he refused to supplant staff belonging to the old regime with his 'own people'. 'That's perhaps a very Asian approach of respecting experienced elders who know the organisation better than I do,' he says.

In 2006, he was approached to run on the PAP ticket, forcing his father to confront his painful past.
'It was ironic,' he says. 'My father had never spoken to us much about his past. I think he tried to shield us from all the struggles he went through.

'I never knew him as someone who is against the system. I knew him as someone with a firm stand on issues like Nanyang University and the teaching of Chinese. I also knew him as someone who wanted to make a difference to the people he served,' he says, adding that his father served actively in village associations.

Up till his death in 2009, the elderly man of few words refused to weigh in either way on whether his son should enter politics. But sensing his reservations, Mr Ong sat out the 2006 GE.

But his ailing father finally gave his tacit blessings by presenting Mr Ong's wife of 15 years with a Tang Dynasty poem, Gui Yuan, by Wang Changling. 'It is about a wife who lets her husband go into public service and thereafter hardly sees him,' he says.

Getting real
AFTER Mr Ong lost in Aljunied GRC, his two daughters, aged 10 and 12, were happy to have got their father and playmate back.

The day after the election, he says, he returned to NTUC and resumed work to improve the lot of workers.

What helps him is how he keeps score - by deliverables, change and action. He has little patience for scholarly pontificating or writing retrospective analyses.

He still recalls the first day of his posting at the Ministry of Trade and Industry, when then Permanent Secretary Khaw Boon Wan told him: 'This job you are taking up can be very big or very small, depending on how big a man you are.'

'He did not say how capable a man you are but how big. I think I knew what he meant. To accomplish something, we can't be narrow-minded and small-hearted,' he says.

He likes to think he's carried that pep talk to every ministry. 'I find things to improve. I like to push the rules to the boundaries. I want to be real, everywhere I go. To be real means today I'm sitting here pushing paper, what difference is it making this week, this month, this year?

'Sure, it's a bureaucracy but within the bureaucracy, there are parameters within which you can make a difference. But to make changes, you've got to know the existing system and rules inside out, to know what needs refreshing and what's stopping you. Then use whatever influence you have to change the rules.

'I think civil servants must preserve that entrepreneurial streak. It cannot just be blind administration of rules, that's meaningless.'

At the Workforce Development Agency, he was known for 'democratising' training, by channelling training funds away from employers to workers and the jobless.

Singapore's Ambassador to the United States Chan Heng Chee, who worked with Mr Ong for four years from 2000 negotiating the US-Singapore FTA, came away 'impressed with his sharp mind, his strategic assessment, his willingness to work hard'.

One sticking point was Singapore's ban on the import of chewing gum, which it viewed as a sovereignty issue. But the US, backed by the commercial interests of chewing gum giant Wrigley, feared that larger markets such as China would imitate Singapore's precedent. She credits him for resolving the potential deal breaker, with his 'ingenuity' and creativity in persuading the politicians here to allow in medicinal chewing gum, a move which appeased the US.

Low-wage solutions
TODAY, Mr Ong finds his stride in union work. As the executive secretary of the National Transport Workers' Union, he says the natural working language and dialect during meetings is Mandarin and Hokkien. 'I realised that I felt very at home. It's like talking to my father and uncles,' he says.
He has spent the past few months negotiating for a pay hike for bus drivers and making sure the Transport Ministry's funding to public transport operators got passed down to drivers. Wage ceilings, which were not raised for 13 years, inched up from $1,560 to $1,700.

'That says a lot about his negotiation skills,' says bus driver Ong Leong Chin, 58, who is SBS Transit east district branch chairman. 'He is someone who treats the workers as equals and respects their views. He goes down to a bus interchange coffee shop at least once a month to have lunch and chat with them.'

His co-workers say he has the right mix of 'mercantilist and socialist' and 'hard headedness and a good heart' to help the rank- and-file.

So what are his solutions to uplift the lot of low-wage workers?

He says the recent increase in bus driver pay, which celebrates 'advancing with skills', sums up his beliefs. With the latest changes in SBS Transit, he says that a bus driver, who is promoted to the grade of chief bus driver, will earn over $3,000, more than what some graduate managers get, and be a mentor and leader to other bus drivers.

'The bus driver would have achieved this not by attending university and getting an academic qualification, but being very good at his craft, acquired by honing his skills through practice and on-the-job training,' he says.

This is not a new concept, he says. In hotels, the general manager is often someone who started out as a waiter, chef or concierge before he worked, studied and progressed up. 'In soccer, the winger or striker carries with him a status and pay no less than the manager. In maritime, the captain needs leadership qualities and is trained in seafaring and gains his experience working on board,' he adds. He hopes 'this major breakthrough in management thinking' in the transport sector will catch on in retail, health-care, childcare and security sectors too.

Change activist
BECAUSE of all the changes he has been able to make within the the system, he is a believer in 'change from within'. He believes there is time for the party to change - in time for the next GE. 'Absolutely,' he says. 'No system is by definition fossilised.'

He cites Apple as a powerhouse of relentless change, all the while with the same man, the late former chief executive Steve Jobs, driving it. 'Steve Jobs was there, left, came back. He obviously believed in that institution, that the institution could change. He was ousted but came back with new ideas to re-energise and reform Apple.

'Now you have a new Apple, same organisation which probably retains the same DNA as before, but applied differently with different products and services. So I think all organisations have that potential to refresh and reform themselves.'

The free-thinker remains a card-carrying cadre of the PAP, and is still involved in grassroots activities in Kaki Bukit, the ward he was assigned during the last GE.

He says he still shows up for community events almost every weekend. Recently, he also spent eight weeks heading internal investigations into the SMRT breakdowns.

The avid footballer also collects vinyls, strums ballads on his collection of three guitars and follows major football tournaments on TV.

There was talk in the last year that he wanted to leave NTUC and give up on politics. There were also rumours online before last week's Hougang by-election that PM Lee would call a by-election in Ang Mo Kio GRC to retire an older MP and bring Mr Ong into Parliament. That did not materialise.

The million-dollar question now is: Will he or won't he run in the next GE? Or is he once bitten, twice shy?

'I am certainly maintaining an active interest in politics. I was not successful when I stood for election. That is part and parcel of democracy and the electoral process. I will learn from it and remain committed to serving Singaporeans.'

He demurs a little. 'I can't be presumptuous,' he adds. 'I believe in serving, and have done so my whole career. If asked to serve again, whether in politics or other roles, I am definitely still open to it.'
Then he adds archly: 'Having said that, you can serve and make a difference without being in politics, and being in politics does not necessarily mean you are making a difference.'

 

[scroobal]

A repeat of ex-cabinet minister and NTUC Lim Chee Onn's saga who also was found wanting. Had to quit suddenly from all political position and given no.2 role in Keppel under Sim Kee Boon. This is the type of parachute that is offered to scholars who quit to join the politics. This then breeds mediocrity as there will be no desire to push the boundaries and let the best one rise.

Take a look at his interview (published here courtesy of JW5) and within the short period where he is now. Its a disgrace.

Keppel is also into property development. Looks like there will it be boundless synergy between and husband and wife.

 

[Yoyogi]

Typical PAP scams

 

[zhihau]

Looks like there will it be boundless synergy between and husband and wife.

bro,
for the longest time me always under the impression that it had been the holy trinity... the father, the son and the holy ghost... :o:o:o

 

[laksaboy]

All these GLCs are dumping grounds for the ex-PAP, ex-SAF people.

Color me surprised.

 

[Confuseous]

All these GLCs are dumping grounds for the ex-PAP, ex-SAF people.

Color me surprised.

Just another scam to provide 'evidence' to potential BE candidates that no sweat, if you lose, we get you a better job, okay. SMRT bring in military, GLCs bring in other riff-raff who cannot get another job to save their lives in the private sector. THAT is talent.

 

[KuanTi01]

A repeat of ex-cabinet minister and NTUC Lim Chee Onn's saga who also was found wanting. Had to quit suddenly from all political position and given no.2 role in Keppel under Sim Kee Boon. This is the type of parachute that is offered to scholars who quit to join the politics. This then breeds mediocrity as there will be no desire to push the boundaries and let the best one rise.

Inbreeding leads to mediocrity and complacency. If he is the talent that is made out to be, he would be headhunted to join some big private sector company.

 

[kukubird58]

A repeat of ex-cabinet minister and NTUC Lim Chee Onn's saga who also was found wanting. Had to quit suddenly from all political position and given no.2 role in Keppel under Sim Kee Boon. This is the type of parachute that is offered to scholars who quit to join the politics. This then breeds mediocrity as there will be no desire to push the boundaries and let the best one rise.

Take a look at his interview (published here courtesy of JW5) and within the short period where he is now. Its a disgrace.

Keppel is also into property development. Looks like there will it be boundless synergy between and husband and wife.

hahaha...as usual making unwarranted personal attacks....
obviously, u don't know what u are talking about.....
has kep corp done poorly after LCO took over????
kep corp is a listed company and well researched by many fund mangers worldwide and consistently been given "outperform" rating
do you know the performance of the company before making baseless attacks on the capabilities of the CEO???
U are 1 person with a really thick hide.

 

[Magic]

Ah gugu ah gugu..

 

[Unrepented]

Go in as management trainee or on student attachment????

Otherwise, go in with no real life commercial experience, make big bo bo ...........gonna be very expensive.........who paying???????

Extracted the funny parts.

Btw, next week company got test or not?

 

[Satyr]

Go in as management trainee or on student attachment????

Otherwise, go in with no real life commercial experience, make big bo bo ...........gonna be very expensive.........who paying???????

From one sheltered position to another. A ministerial position as a continuation. Lord help us.