The people and the Population White Paper

GETTING the people behind the Population white paper is going to be one tough job. I know the Prime Minister has said that we should look beyond the headline numbers and think deeper about the country’s future.

But as Lydia Lim said in ST, it’s the everyday journey that counts. The instinctive reaction of Singaporeans reading the newspapers today would be to recoil. Yes, recoil. It’s too hard to visualise how even more people can be squeezed into this little red dot. More transport links, more homes, more green spaces – they simply can’t figure out how this will mean you won’t have to be squashed in a train, never mind that a station is a 10 minute walk away.

And while the Paper says that the density is much better than Hong Kong’s – 13,000 people per sq km versus 22,000 people per sq km, all people can think about is the return of shoebox apartments.

Today had analysts all making the point that steps had to be taken to convince Singaporeans. More engagement and more transparency about the numbers, such as exactly where the foreigners would fit in on the jobs-front.

You see, tangled in the emotions is not just that Singapore will be crowded, but also unfamiliar. It breeds insecurity.
The Paper has a chapter on integrating foreigners who want to become PRs or new citizens. It’s the same-old, same-old in my view.

By the way, we should also look at the marriage figures. Those four in 10 Singaporeans who marry foreigners, do they settle down here to have Singapore-born children? Or do they move with their foreign spouses? If their foreign spouses, especially husbands, find it hard to sink roots here, then it’s likely the Singapore wife would move with her husband. But there are no plans now to ease the policy of making them citizens, according to Grace Fu as reported in ST. Seems to me we should be looking deeper into this “leakage’’.

Then those 200,000 Singaporeans living abroad. I don’t suppose they will return to our sunny isle even as steps are made to engage them, especially with news that it might get even more crowded.

I reckon the argument in the White Paper can be encapsulated like this: We are not having enough babies, and we’re hoping for more. Even if this works, we don’t have enough manpower to sustain our economy (which is going to slow down) and standard of living. That’s why we have to educate ourselves to as high a level as possible, so that we can still afford some foreigners to do the jobs we don’t want to do and keep the best jobs for ourselves. This is also so we can support that cohort of baby boomers, who are going to be depending on even fewer young people’s taxes. But don’t worry, we’ll make sure you will live well, in homes that aren’t too small, travel on trains that are not too crowded, and enjoy cycling on green paths.

You think the argument will work on those who won’t be trawling through the White Paper (a very dense paper methinks) I think the on-going Singapore Conversation is going to be hijacked by these issues. I can’t see Singaporeans talking about anything else when they have population headline figures stuck in their heads. Maybe that’s why we are having a Singapore Conversation now? That White Paper is a discussion paper right? Not cast in stone? (See earlier post)

You know, I am wondering if Singapore will become a place where Singaporeans, here and elsewhere, will hold a strong emotional attachment to but, preferably, from a distance.

Stressed out kids

I don’t know about you but I got pretty angry reading the page 1 of Today on what poly students said at the Singapore Conversation. They wanted a stress-free environment with a four-day work week. Which mean, they want their weekends plus a mid-week break. That’s because, said one, people will get tired over the week and would have to drag themselves to work on Fridays if they didn’t rest in between. And this is from someone who hasn’t yet entered the workforce full-time…Sheesh. Is this the sort of values we’re passing on to our next generation? What rubbish is this? Not even in the workforce and already talking about stress?

Are the students reading about what’s happening in Singapore today? About the tight labour crunch? Read BT’s page 1 today for a taste of what’s it like in the F&B industry where restaurants have to trim hours of operation because they can’t get foreign workers to work the kitchen or the tables. Go look at how the SMEs are doing – some are moving out because they can’t get staff. Are these jobs which the poly grads will do? The thing is, the underlying assumption in their request for stress-free work week is that they WILL definitely get a job when they graduate. The wish-list would be quite different if Singapore wasn’t so successful in providing jobs for the people.

You know, if our next generation can’t take the stress, then they might want to work part-time. It’s a popular offering among companies which offer flexi-work arrangements according to media reports today. But I suppose working part-time wouldn’t entitle you to same full-time benefits – and you can bet that people will howl at that. It’s a no-win situation. Our next generation wants no stress, all perks. It’s enough to make a Singaporean cry.

On flexi-work, I have no clue what ST was trying to do with the mass of numbers it was given. I think it believes it’s making reading easier but it doesn’t, especially since someone decided that some percentages should be converted to ratios of 10 and other fractions – but not others. You end up wondering what is less than one in 10 employers – half a body? And it just makes it tough to compare numbers when the base is different.
Take a look:

THE push to improve work-life balance through flexible arrangements is making slow progress. Just over four in 10 employers say they provide them, up from 38 per cent last year. But this mostly entails staff doing part-time work. Other options such as flexi-time or telecommuting were offered by less than one in 10 employers, according to a survey released yesterday by the Ministry of Manpower (MOM).
The poll of 3,500 private- and public-sector firms looked at employment conditions including working arrangements, leave entitlements and sick days taken. It found that 41 per cent of employers offer at least one form of work-life arrangement…
However, part-time work was by far the most common option, offered by a third of firms. All the other options were provided by fewer than one in 10 companies.
Flexi-time, the second most common, was offered by 8 per cent of firms. And just 4 per cent gave staff the option of telecommuting, which means using information technology to work from outside the office.

Take a look at this one par in Today. Isn’t it so much easier to read?

Forty-one per cent of establishments offered at least one form of work-life arrangement to their employees this year, up from 38 per cent last year. Working part-time was the most common work-life arrangement offered by 33 per cent of establishments. At a distant second was flexi-time (8.2 per cent), followed by staggered hours (7.5 per cent) and tele-working (4 per cent).