The news that infuriated me on the first day of Chinese New Year, is this published by ST on 28 Jan: http://www.straitstimes.com/business/companies-markets/inchcape-sending-expats-to-downsized-spore-office. The newspaper reported that Inchcape, the motor distributor based in UK, is moving angmo expats to fill the roles of Singapore staff who were retrenched by the company earlier.
If you remember, it was reported on 30 Dec last month that Inchcape would be retrenching 120 local staff in one of the largest downsizing exercises to hit the local motor industry here: http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/car-distribution-giant-to-lay-off-120-workers.
Now, I don’t blame the angmo FTs nor Inchcape for this. After all, every company will look after its own interests first. So, for a UK company, obviously they want to look after the interests of their own Brits. If I were them, I would probably do the same thing too.
But what I don’t understand is this: WHY IS OUR MANPOWER MINISTER LIM SWEE SAY ALLOWING THIS TO HAPPEN?
Inchcape may have wanted to save the skin of their own home countrymen but that doesn’t mean our own Govt should allow this. Expats working here need work pass from MOM. Obviously, our “chia liao bee” Minister Lim must have granted those expats work pass to work here !!!
We should ask ourselves this question – are our Singaporean staff really so lousy that they can’t do the job so much so that we need angmo expats to do it? If this is true, then our education system is a mess. But the Govt keeps touting that our NUS and NTU are among the best in the world!
Mr Lim, should start questioning Inchcape, about why they need to replace our local staff with expats. If they do not have a good explanation, then they’d better not be granted any work pass to work here in Singapore.
I hope Mr Lim has the guts to stand up to MNCs who are clearly trying to take advantage of our local staff. And btw, Inchcape is no high-tech company – just a car distributor. What value is this MNC bringing to Singapore, I ask you?
p.s. A fellow Singaporean working in Europe has told me that retrenching people in Europe is a very expensive business. They have to pay big retrenchment penalties. By moving them to Singapore, they would avoid paying such penalties.
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Republished with edits from the Facebook page ‘We want Minister Grace Fu to resign‘.