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Last week, Trade and Industry Minister Chan Chun Sing asked if Singapore was prepared to have 2,500 babies born here every year grow up to be construction workers?
He explained his calculations as follow: Singapore now has 300,000 construction workers. IF a Singaporean is three times as productive, then we will need 100,000 Singaporean workers. And over a 40-year period with Singaporeans replacing the foreign workers, we will need 2,500 a year, or about 8% of our babies each year.
He argued that therefore Singapore cannot cut down on foreign workers as other countries had because of our small size and lack of natural resources. The Minister seems to suggest that this high reliance on foreign workers situation is inevitable.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Singapore’s journey to nearly 1.5 million migrant workers detailing the 30 years journey we took that saw this rapid explosion in number of foreign workers, especially the low wage workers. I will leave you to read that and will focus on looking at the construction sector in response to the Minister’s statement.
Let’s look at the Minister’s reasoning.
(1) The Minister has a way of exaggerating. His mathematics is based on 100% replacement of all workers in the construction sector by locals. Singaporeans are practical people. We are not calling for total replacement. We are calling a stop to this over reliance and ever-increasing number of migrant workers. We are calling for deliberate steps to correct the process and to seriously make careers in construction viable for Singaporeans so a more sizeable number can be in the industry.
The Minister’s question and the tone of it seems to make construction as a shunned career. It sadly adds to the poor image the industry is already having because we can only think of the low wage and low skilled migrant workers. The reality in many places is that skills in a strenuous job can pay well. Many of these jobs are not shunned by the locals in say Japan, Australia, Switzerland or Finland. And some aspects of the construction sector do include skilled specialists and trained experts.
(2) The Minister assumed that Singapore construction workers can eventually be three times as productive as currently. This figure is probably arrived at by looking at the best in class, where in places like Australia and Japan, the locals are indeed three times or more productive than a construction worker in Singapore currently.
It is a big ‘IF’. We are currently so far off the chart in productivity compared to other developed countries. Why are we not even attracting Singaporeans into this industry?
Higher wages local workers may not lead to much higher overall costs. Top local businessman and hotel magnate Ho Kwon Ping shared in an interview in 2011 that his company has construction development experience in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and so on. He was shocked that when they built their hotel in New Zealand, the number of workers they had to engaged was about 10 percent of what they did in Thailand — because the workers were well trained.
(4) The Minister is correct to say that Singapore has a small population. Well, so do New Zealand, Switzerland, Finland, Hong Kong and other small developed countries with high local participation in construction. The Minister also said, “If we lose out in that relative game compared to other people, then unfortunately, I think the future of Singapore will not be what we expect it to be.”
To correct decades of neglect in Singapore, we cannot just ask the market to correct itself. Private companies are forced to accept the current market situation because each by itself cannot correct the industry. For years, the preschool sector could not correct itself and was moving towards the path of large number of foreign teachers, poor pay relative to peers, and low interest by locals to be preschool teachers. Painful and difficult though it might be, the situation has to be changed with major government interventions.
https://www.onlinecitizenasia.com/2...sters-take-on-singapores-construction-sector/
He explained his calculations as follow: Singapore now has 300,000 construction workers. IF a Singaporean is three times as productive, then we will need 100,000 Singaporean workers. And over a 40-year period with Singaporeans replacing the foreign workers, we will need 2,500 a year, or about 8% of our babies each year.
He argued that therefore Singapore cannot cut down on foreign workers as other countries had because of our small size and lack of natural resources. The Minister seems to suggest that this high reliance on foreign workers situation is inevitable.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Singapore’s journey to nearly 1.5 million migrant workers detailing the 30 years journey we took that saw this rapid explosion in number of foreign workers, especially the low wage workers. I will leave you to read that and will focus on looking at the construction sector in response to the Minister’s statement.
Let’s look at the Minister’s reasoning.
(1) The Minister has a way of exaggerating. His mathematics is based on 100% replacement of all workers in the construction sector by locals. Singaporeans are practical people. We are not calling for total replacement. We are calling a stop to this over reliance and ever-increasing number of migrant workers. We are calling for deliberate steps to correct the process and to seriously make careers in construction viable for Singaporeans so a more sizeable number can be in the industry.
The Minister’s question and the tone of it seems to make construction as a shunned career. It sadly adds to the poor image the industry is already having because we can only think of the low wage and low skilled migrant workers. The reality in many places is that skills in a strenuous job can pay well. Many of these jobs are not shunned by the locals in say Japan, Australia, Switzerland or Finland. And some aspects of the construction sector do include skilled specialists and trained experts.
(2) The Minister assumed that Singapore construction workers can eventually be three times as productive as currently. This figure is probably arrived at by looking at the best in class, where in places like Australia and Japan, the locals are indeed three times or more productive than a construction worker in Singapore currently.
It is a big ‘IF’. We are currently so far off the chart in productivity compared to other developed countries. Why are we not even attracting Singaporeans into this industry?
Higher wages local workers may not lead to much higher overall costs. Top local businessman and hotel magnate Ho Kwon Ping shared in an interview in 2011 that his company has construction development experience in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and so on. He was shocked that when they built their hotel in New Zealand, the number of workers they had to engaged was about 10 percent of what they did in Thailand — because the workers were well trained.
(4) The Minister is correct to say that Singapore has a small population. Well, so do New Zealand, Switzerland, Finland, Hong Kong and other small developed countries with high local participation in construction. The Minister also said, “If we lose out in that relative game compared to other people, then unfortunately, I think the future of Singapore will not be what we expect it to be.”
To correct decades of neglect in Singapore, we cannot just ask the market to correct itself. Private companies are forced to accept the current market situation because each by itself cannot correct the industry. For years, the preschool sector could not correct itself and was moving towards the path of large number of foreign teachers, poor pay relative to peers, and low interest by locals to be preschool teachers. Painful and difficult though it might be, the situation has to be changed with major government interventions.
https://www.onlinecitizenasia.com/2...sters-take-on-singapores-construction-sector/
