Right to work
The employment of foreigners has always been a touchy issue in Singapore, and with the unemployment rate at 4.5 per cent, a level not seen since the 1980s, the issue is back in the spotlight.
Foreigner-bashing is always a vote- winner: look at France and the last presidential election, when the xenophobic leader of the Front National, Jean-Marie LePen, made it through to the second round.
However, in tiny Singapore the government often takes on the opposite role, as a defender of foreign workers.
Journalists regularly raise questions at press conferences about the number of foreign workers, whether they are taking jobs away from Singaporeans, whether they are too well paid and whether they should be retrenched first. When this happens, the government has always been at pains to explain that foreigners are needed because there are plenty of jobs available that Singaporeans refuse to take, like in the service industry, where hours are long and the pay is low.
As Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew recently pointed out, the open-door policy has served Singapore well, bringing investment by multinationals and creating jobs for Singaporeans.
But a recent claim by two academics from the Nanyang Technological University that three in four jobs created in the past five years had gone to foreigners, has reignited the debate. The fact that the figures were incorrect and that the academics have publicly apologised seems to be of little importance.
Following the sensational headline news, the government responded that 90 per cent of jobs created in the period had, in fact, gone to Singaporeans and permanent residents. It attributed the difference in findings to the fact that it had all the figures, while the economists only had access to the public figures posted on the ministry's website.
The fact that the ministry does not release all the data does underline how sensitive the issue is. The fact that the ministry doesn't break down the data between Singaporeans and permanent residents is also raising a few eyebrows.
In the coming months, as unemployment figures are expected to worsen, the government will have to tread a fine line between appeasing Singaporeans at a time when many are being retrenched or asked to take a salary cut, and keeping an eye on its goal of building an innovation-driven economy.
