What upsets me more than the nonsense Leong Mun Wai, the Progress Singapore Party, and their supporters spout is this: that the employers and business owners are keeping largely silent.
The Government are not the major employers of foreigners. Businesses are.
If businesses don’t defend themselves, and keep making the Government and PAP the fall guy, and one day a populist, anti-foreigner party comes to power, it is going to be businesses that hurt first.
What they need to have the testicular fortitude to dish out, are these harsh truths:
- Employers are not stupid. Our profits come first. We are not going to intentionally hire some useless ninny with a fake or sub-standard degree.
If this happens, we were either a) also a victim of a scam or b) the guy has skills so good his degree was overlooked
- Similarly we are not going to hire some useless ninny that just happens to have the same nationality as us, or come from the same village.
Refer to the profit motive – we are not going to allow our businesses to commit suicide by hiring sub-standard people
- So even though this is now politically incorrect, Mr Lim Swee Say used to say we want to hire “Cheaper, better, faster”.
Why? If in doubt, refer to the profit motive.
If you are cheaper but worse and slower, I won’t hire you.
If you are better and faster, but more expensive I will think twice.
- If you don’t let us hire foreigners that are suitable, will we hire a less-capable Singaporean to take his place?
No.
Why? Refer to the profit motive
- So either we automate, or for those of us who can, if we can go to another country with more abundant talent where we can hire freely, we will.
Otherwise, if we are indeed forced to hire sub-par locals, we will struggle, make less money and eventually shut down.
Then NOBODY gets a job.
- Thus, making minimum employment pass salaries 10,000 SGD, nationality caps, EP levies, are some of the most profoundly retarded, deeply moronic suggestions a politician can make.
Any businessman worth his salt knows this. Any competent employer knows this.
So why the deafening silence?
Too scared? No prunes?
Hiding behind the PAP to make the unpopular points, because afraid to get backlash from small-minded villagers?
Well, come out from behind mommy’s skirt.
SBF, ASME, SNEF, what chamber of commerce, and all you other so-called business leaders.
And all the CEOs of big companies that need to hire foreigners.
If you don’t speak up, defend yourselves and just leave the PAP government to defend you, one day you are going to wake up and have some populist ninnies in government and it’s your businesses and your profits that will suffer.
Then everybody will be out of a job.
By then it will be too late.