Workers’ Party MP Leon Perera wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday (July 24) that at Serangoon that day, some of the topics that cropped up revolved around disagreement with the timing of next year’s GST hike and worsening inflation.
However, one SME (small and medium–sized enterprise) business owner had an “interesting conversation” with the Aljunied GRC MP about how “many locals do not want to work in the construction industry.”
Mr Perera wrote, “He said that he employs some foreigners on EPs and SPs as engineers and draughtsmen. He pays some EP holders a base pay of $7,500pm. However, he finds it virtually impossible to hire Singaporeans even at those levels of pay.”
The business owner said that this is because many Singaporeans don’t want to work in this particular field.
“Repurposing trades jobs to be attractive to Singaporeans is a subject I have spoken about in Parliament several times. I shall continue to expand on this theme.”
The MP, who is a father of two, wrote that he himself would be “glad” if his children entered the construction industry, as long as the jobs they got had “fair pay, a good career path, and decent conditions.”
Mr Perera then added “on a sobering note” that a sizable number of the wet market hawkers he spoke to at Serangoon “shared how footfall and business have fallen due to multiple factors, including the rising trend of online cooked food ordering.”
“We need to redouble our efforts to ensure that our heritage hawker industry thrives,” he added, thanking the residents who had taken the time out to speak to him and the WP team today.
Earlier this month, residents spoke to fellow Aljunied MP and expressed similar concerns.
During a visit with residents, business owners talked to Workers’ Party MP Gerald Giam about their challenges in finding people to fill various jobs.
“Their concerns were not simply about difficulties obtaining work passes for foreign workers. Instead, these hiring challenges point to a more worrying trend of insufficient Singaporeans entering fields that are in demand by industry,” the Aljunied GRC Member of Parliament wrote in a Facebook post on July 12.
The MP added that the concerns about there not being enough Singaporeans to fill in-demand fields should not be dismissed as merely “a result of pickiness or an unwillingness to endure hardship.”
He wrote that “instead, a more productive approach would be to examine why more young Singaporeans choose not to enter disciplines like engineering or switch to other fields upon graduation.”
Mr Giam then proceeded to ask whether “pay, working conditions, the image of the industry, management expertise, lack of career progression, or a combination of all these factors” are what is at play in Singaporeans not choosing to pursue these in-demand careers. /TISG