The two statements are Worlds Apart…
..one commits whole heartedly, the other … merely wishes…
what a waste of Tax Payers money…

How ironical! Here you have the President of the United States who is paid much less than this Singapore Union leader but yet has empathy for the unemployed in america and our own union leader a member of the PAP trying in a vain attempt to show he cares for singaporeans.

But we all know that he cant do or say anything without first getting clearance from the PAP government. Our union is unique in the world. In singapore our union leaders are in actuality members of the government in this case the PAP and it is this government who appoints the union leaders. So I leave you to come to your own conclusion who is running the union?

To think, maybe LSS should be in the US government to solve their unemployment problems. After all he is one of our talented ministers without portfolio and well he is paid more than the salaries of both the President and Vice President combined!

But given a choice to choose I will opt for President Obama cos I find him more sincere and less worried about hia next paycheck than all our union leaders and ministers let alone our cicil servants!

Well, he want us to be a a cheaper, better and faster (CBF) economy, and yet cost of living remains high and on the rise. So, who benefit from his CBF?

To all lesser mortals and insignificant peasants
Please try not to make our intelligent ministers repeat and remind you that “singapore is a city , not a country nor a nation”. So please continue to lead your miserable life, be content and stop comparing SINGAPORE with USA. Please note that this will be the final and last reminder. No further warnings will be issued after this and any resistance will be met with drastic measures. Over and out !!!

cant stand the way he talks. trying to appear sincere while uttering shit. cant tell us how much his cpf is….how wonderful.

cant stand the way he talks. trying to appear sincere while uttering shit. cant tell us how much his cpf is….how wonderful.

Basic Econs 101. Why is unemployment in the US rising? Because they raised the minimum wage.

Look at the cause and effect, not merely what he says.

QUOTE
Stop hiring on the cheap
Goh Chin Lian
Sun, Nov 08, 2009
The Straits Times

An office cleaner quit last month after she had enough of pay cuts, longer working hours and loss of benefits in four of the five times a new cleaning firm took over the contract.

The 58-year-old’s monthly pay did increase over her more than 10 years of service – but only from $370 to $400.

Her sorry state, mentioned by labour chief Lim Swee Say at a seminar last Thursday, is common among cleaners, security guards and other low-wage workers.
UNQUOTE

Lim Swee Say really wants it cheap ! Disgraceful …………

We need minimum wage policy for all worker ………………….

“So let us move towards a cheaper, better, faster Singapore economy.”

Lim Swee Say … do what u say, start from your pay, we say.

Lim Swee Say want CBF, so can we peasant want CBG, i.e. Cheaper better Government?

To 7) Han (shianux):

You cannot attribute the raising unemployment in the US solely to the rise in minimum wage. There are a host of other factors involved. It is not an easy thing to ascertain cause and effect. For all purposes, the rise in minimum wage and rise in employment might be correlated, but you cannot say that one causes the other. If that is the case, why does lowering wages not result in the lowering employment?

The irony behind the statement made by LSS is really disgraceful,look @ President Obama,he’s willing to slug it out @ all costs,Lim Swee Say wants to plug it out @ low cost,how worse can it get?The US Prez wants to fight for his people,land them jobs & make sure Americans are comfortable living a happy life,here in SG,what does the govt do?Take in foreigners,more foreigners,the legion is increasing triple-fold every other day,what John Connor is saying,get out of Spore before it starts to sink even further!

It is just a matter of time before we start seeing desperate measures for locals who can’t take it anymore!How much blood does the ruling party plan to squeeze out?

PS : If you are reading this & agree with this statement,you are part of the resistance,right now we need salvation from this termination!Over & Out!

#7 – Han (shianux)

To substantiate what #11 ahtong said, here are links to actual US historical unemployment rate data and the historical data for minimum wage in the US:

Bureau of Labor Statistics Data (select 1948 to 2009 and click on “include graphs” box):
http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet

US Department of Labor (table of minimum wage):
http://www.dol.gov/ESA/minwage/chart.htm

Given your logic, why did unemployment rates fall 8 straight years from 1992 (7.8%) to 2000 (3.8%) in spite of a minimum wage jump of 20% from 1991 to 1997?

Having said that, minimum wage *may* affect unemployment. The question is how much quantifiable impact the minimum wage has (if any). I have no data that tells me anything useful about this. If anyone has access to data to show the impact of minimum wage, please let the rest know about it.

Meanwhile, please do not make huge leaps of logic and base your arguments on “Basic Econs 101″ with no supporting data. Even if the minimum wage and unemployment were correlated, it does not imply causation.

@ Lee Chee Wai

I apologise for my poor choice of words. I should not have assumed “causation”.

However, since you asked for data:

http://j.mp/1E561T

The above is Gap Minder, a videograph tool to help understand data (as presented in TED). I have set the Y-axis to be % unemployment rate, the X-axis to be Time. Data available is from 1980 to 2006.

http://www.dol.gov/esa/minwage/America.htm

This is from DoL providing state min wage laws, which are over and on top of federal min wage laws.

The videograph tool will show you that states with lower total min wage consistently have lower unemployment than states with high min wage laws, from 1980 to 2006.

@ Lee Chee Wai

I add that during periods of strong economic growth, unemployment rates will fall regardless of minimum wage levels. What you will notice that raising the min wage during times of economic distress exacerbates the unemployment rate.

@ Lee Chee Wai

*which are over and on top of federal min wage laws

Scratch that, the higher rate applies. =P

off course without a doubt..limsiasuayed will employed a few overpaid deadwood ex-sia ticketin frontline staffs who were retrenched to set up another useless overexpened department sound liked the new ministryofforeignpower section to delegate new foreign talents their new found underpaid slavelabour jobs..
see who says limsiasuayed is stupid?
he employed 1 retrenched singapoorium and 6 new foreign talents in 1 go

LSS is trying to throw the problem back to the people and save his own ass.

8) 3rdKlassCitizam on November 8th, 2009 11.03 am QUOTE

The 58-year-old’s monthly pay did increase over her more than 10 years of service – but only from $370 to $400

PURE EXPLOITATION!

This is ridiculous. How terrible is it that someone that old has to work and work for 400 dollars a month?? She is supposed to be retiring not thinking about trying to find a job that pays her the same amount of money as the expensive bags that these ministers kids carry around!

As a secondary school humanities teacher, here’s how my exam question would look like for a Social Studies Source-Based Case Study of Effective Governing.

Q: In what ways are the two sources different?

A: The two sources are different in whether the government wants to help the people. In Source A, the government is willing to do everything in its power to make things better for its people but in Source B the government wants the people to do everything in their power to make things better for themselves without the government coming in to help them. In conclusion, Obama is a good President while the PAP makes other dictatorships look good.

I just hope he loses his voice one day…
can’t do nuts, best just shut up & enjoy your world class salary & wait for your time to go..!

Whenever LSS speaks it is irritating and annoying short form to describe him will be “IRRINOYING”. Not making fun of his english or they way he speaks per se but it’s just so irrnoying and he is one of our most highly paid ministers who talks about cheaper faster workers who are paid low wages. This is sheer total exploitation of any human being!

No wonder singapore has no human rights for the workers. We use them we exploit them than we ship them back home after getting them to build up our country. There are times when I am ashamed to be a singaporean knowing well how the government exploits our cheap labour, they have no choice but to eek out a living. THe government gives them no choice take it or leave. And then we have our ministers going round the world preaching to them about life and how to be a First Nation. Does not everyone realise we have not reach that state yet and at the rate we are going we never will.

The government is interested in only raising the ministers salaries. I just cant wait till they announce the next raise.I was talking to a taxi driver the other day and he said wait for election time to collect some money cos even he knows thats when the government distributes money to the people to buy their votes legally.

Hopefull this time round we will take the money cos its ours but then we will vot e the whole government out .Lets all show the world SINGAPOREANS want a CHANGE and we will get that CHANGE this time round. IT’s now or never!

YODI #22- “IT’ now or never!”

yes, yes!!

It’s NOW or NEVER, please take the Last OPPORTUNITY!

patriot

Even Obama’s half brother is commendable and honorable..compared to all this ninkumputs put together….especially this BIG IDIOT LIM SWEE SAY!

Please don’t insult our million dollar mouth piece, I am sure if he had said that to the American people, he would have been fried alive!!!

Frankly we should think along these lines, outsourcing our govt.we need capable people who can work for SIngaporeans ,with the amout of money we are throwing away , I am sure if we put the money to good use ,Singaporeans would be richer in many ways!

We need a govt that serves and works for the people and not the other way round!

Last call to exercise your vote !!

By “cheaper’ does he mean for ALL or just some?

There is only 1 way out .

Let me have the chance to vote.

#16 – Han (shianux)

Cool, thanks for the links. I like the gapminder tool, it is very useful for the discovery of some unexpected trends.

Did you manually compare minimum wage with unemployment? Because I could not find the metric for minimum wage on the charts.

The one interesting bit of trend information I got was when I compared unemployment with average state salaries. It seems that from 1980 to 2006, the unemployment rates generally went down with increases in average salary. What was particularly interesting was the stagnation of average salaries across all states as unemployment (across all states) jumped and then recovered from 2000 to 2002.

I am actually a little less convinced minimum wage has a lot to do with unemployment after looking at this aspect of the data. Minimum wage affects the lowest-earning portion of the employed workforce but it is hard to tell how strongly it influences the average salary in each state without information on the salary distributions.

Anyway, I’m sorry I sounded a little harsh earlier. I just get miffed (particularly with ministers who ought to know better) whenever claims are made without any backing data. To be fair, I do that quite a lot myself and I welcome chastisement so I can get miffed with myself and contribute better to the discussion later :).

I wish we could fire our PM and hire 5 Barack Obama for Singapore.

#15 – Han (shianux)

argh, I missed out your comment about times of economic distress. That does sound reasonable. In those times, minimum wage can possibly force employers to retrench when they cannot afford workers wages. At the same time, the amount earned (depending on the level of minimum wage) may not be enough to get workers to spend and generate demand for goods and services.

I watched a documentary about the 1930s. To counter the massive unemployment in the US, Roosevelt instituted the Civilian Conservation Corps to get young men working on conservation projects all around the US, paying them $1 a day. These men had lodging, good food and a very minimum pay (most apparently kept $5 at the end of the month and sent home the rest). That seemed like a good alternative to enforcing a minimum wage on employers during those bad times.

If anyone is interested, here’s a link to the documentary (hosted for free by PBS):

American Experience The Civilian Conservation Corps
http://video.pbs.org/video/1309577149/

28) Star7 on November 8th, 2009 11.00 pm

I wish we could fire our PM and hire 5 Barack Obama for Singapore.
I dun think so firing is a good word. these useless people should be put onto the firing squad and finish them off for good.

@ LCW #27

I rashly posted an ill-thought out comment, so I guess you could say I deserved your harshness? =)

@ LCW #29

Yes, my point was not that “we shouldn’t help the poor”, but more along the lines of “the minimum wage is a lousy way of helping the poor, and in fact would hurt them during economic contractions”.

The problem with minimum wages are that since they are legislated, they cannot adjust in real-time to volatile economic conditions, which are especially so during recessionary periods. The result is that the employer businesses are forced to fire more workers than they would under normal market-adjusted wages, and even worse, they would be slower to higher on the upswing.

I suggest that direct lump sum payments spread out through the time period of economic contraction, or co-contributions from the government to be a more fine-grained policy tool to help those who are unemployed. I think this is the aspect that is lacking from our current government.

Otherwise the retraining is much needed in order to restructure our economy away from a manufacturing intensive to services, as most advanced economies are. The fact of the matter is we simply lack the human resources to move up the ladder. One way to do it is like how the Japanese have: automate our way out of labour requirements.

On that note, think about it. If employers replaced locals with machines rather than employ foreigners, would these people display the same outrage as they do now? If not, does it not suggest latent xenophobia?

* slower to hire. gah for typos.

If you place two comments together, I feel that US President Barack Obama is determine to find jobs that gives decent salary for his people whereas Mr Lim is concern about how generate low income job for our people to boast the economy.

Between determinate and concern, which word will make people believe that he/she understands(in mind and not in appearance) that he or she actually knows that he/she has a duty?

One is a maverick leader and the other’s a cheapskate clown, there you have it !

Hope our Ministers can become cheaper,better,faster too..