A legal recruiter went viral this week after saying that companies are firing Singaporeans to hire other workers from SE Asia who are hungrier. Because the chosen words were somewhat inappropriate, angry Singaporeans made the message go viral. Even I benefited from this: I forwarded someone's comment on this, and my message got over 12k views on LinkedIn.
I congratulate Lee Shulin for successfully becoming famous overnight, because there is no such thing as bad publicity, and I do not agree with the personal attacks on her. However,
I think there is adequate space to critique her argument.
First of all, I think it's hard to label Singaporeans as not being hungry enough. We are a successful city-state, and we solved the problems of hunger decades ago. Expecting Singaporeans to hunker down and be exploited by SMEs (many law firms are just SMEs) is not realistic.
Having hungry Singaporeans is also regressive.
Ultimately, SME bosses who want to hire in a modern, wealthy city-state need to ask themselves what conditions they must create to attract Singaporean workers. There are valid reasons to site their HQs here, like great location and stable government, and for that, they need to hire a quota of local workers to conduct their business.
Hunger is a very bad state to be in here. But Singaporeans have alternatives.
a) Singaporeans can be greedy
First off, while we can't starve our kids, we can teach them to be greedy - work for themselves and sell their time for more money and a better life. This can be a powerful motivator. Some SMEs may not pay well, but they can offer a wide range of work to build a resume, and our kids get higher pay elsewhere down the line.
I'm going to share a story about a towkay who spouted the same line about Singaporeans lacking hunger; instead, he's full of effusive praise for some workers he hired from Shanghai. He said that even before you ask for something, they would have already done the work and submitted a report to you. But within a year or two, these excellent Shanghai workers had taken his SOP and built a larger business in China, even taking some of his clients with them.
I actually want my kids to think like these Shanghainese, but maybe in a less unscrupulous fashion - maybe launch a business with the old boss taking a 10% equity stake to supply his company. Or buy up his company so he can retire one day and take a page from Codie Sanchez's playbook.
To be greedy does not mean being ruthless.
b) Singaporeans will choose to be angry over being hungry
The fact is that there is a political dimension to local employment. If we open the floodgates to foreigners, many Singaporeans will indeed go hungry, and we won't stand for it. Instead, we will become angry.
Angry Singaporeans can go to the ballot box to ensure that SMEs or even some MNCs reserve some employment for locals.
I think this is the most unfortunate side-effect of Lee Shulin's post: many SME bosses want to hire more foreigners and argue that Singaporeans are not hungry enough to work for them. But the government needs to monitor this discussion because an attempt to "starve" local workers resulted in the biggest thrashing for the PAP in recent memory in 2011 at Aljunied.
And Singaporeans will go to the ballot box - at least to make Tanjong Rhu Singaporean again.
c) Some will just choose to be Horny
I think there is a third option: Singaporeans can be horny.
Marry well, and a lot of these problems with employment disappear.
Lee Shulin herself embodies this principle because I think she's really one of the luckiest women of her generation. I say this because her husband is happy to be a house-husband and support her by minding the house and the kids, so that she can build up her business. A guy like this is hard to find, especially in a patriarchal society that might label house husbands as not being hungry enough to find work.
So I've included three possible alternatives to being hungry.
You can be greedy, angry, or horny. I think it's much better than being hungry.
But maybe there is a unifying principle behind all this.
Motivating people after they have resolved their physical needs is hard, and one thing I tell the teens I teach in a Polytechnic is that they need to find a reason to have a high level of agency. Some guys might gravitate to this because guys need high status to function in a society where finding a mate is hard.
When you have high agency, you exude what Gen Z called Main Character Energy. If you just exist in s a state of hunger, only to be exploited by a toxic company, you are an NPC zombie.
There are many younger influencers who are trying to decode and explain what high agency is. I shall leave it to you to find these gurus. I'm in the process of understanding what this means.
