WHEN Cabinet ministers took turns to rebuff a proposal to push up salaries of lowly-paid workers, most Singaporeans viewed it as good as buried.
Given the strict way the government is run, the revolutionary idea raised by former state economic adviser Professor Lim Chong Yah might well have faced the death sentence.
His think-out-of-the-box way of narrowing the economic gap called for the salaries of low-level workers to be raised by 50% over three years, and those at the top-end be frozen for a similar period.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s response to Prof Lim was a firm “no” and said such pay increases must be matched by a rise in productivity.
The unequal growth was not due to globalisation or technological change, but the mass influx of foreign workers in the past 10 years, said prominent diplomat Prof Tommy Koh.
He said Singapore had a per capita income similar to Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, yet cleaners in these countries were paid some seven times more than those in Singapore. Full story
