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?

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?

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.

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/

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 :).

There is only 1 way out .

Let me have the chance to vote.

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 !!

yes, yes!!

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

patriot

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!

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.

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!

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

Scratch that, the higher rate applies. =P