MSM uses picnic to conceal protest

Trust our government-owned media to give such noble coverage to the May Day Hong Lim events as this bunch of utter drivel.

Pictographical representation of the quality of reportage.

Never mind that the two events were six hours apart, carried completely different themes and purposes and were organised by completely different groups of people. One was a picnic that cost $5 to attend, and the other was a protest. The picnic drew a crowd of a few hundred. The rest of the 5,000 came for the protest, half a day later.

“Yes! We should totally mash the two events together in our report!” an editor apparently thought, “What a stroke of genius! It’s like that time I reported on ’10,000 people attend Adam Lambert and New Creation Church’. And Michael Palmer.”

Really, the only thing they had in common was the bleeding venue. All the journos/editors could see was this – a strong turnout for a protest that desperately needed to be hidden from the public eye.

The photo of the crowd with umbrellas out was shot before the bulk of the people had arrived and is credited to Dylan Loh, the News 5 news reporter I find the most hilarious of the lot.

News 5 at 9:30pm decided to run the same horror reportage, the only difference being that it had mind-numbingly uninformative B-roll to accompany it. Not a single shot of the crowd. You can smell the government intervention and the shameless self-censorship.

Who’s surprised now?

If you want a real news story about events like these, you’ll have to go to the alternative media. If TOC/TRE makes you overly suspicious, try Yahoo! or Breakfast Network’s coverage.

Khaw open to forming offshore FW ghettoes

This post was first written for Breakfast Network.

We wanted to float them “out of sight, out of mind” back on 2008 in dystopian floating dorms. Yesterday, there was more talk in parliament about housing foreign workers (FWs) on offshore islands.

Does anyone smell the stench of apartheid? Arkham City? “District 9″? Refugee camps? WW2 ghettoes? Discrimination? All this in the name of convenience and comfort for Singaporeans. After all, we want to “use them and lose them”, not see them walking in our neighbourhoods. No need to integrate them.

Why? Um, well… they smell, commit crimes and hang out with our FDWs. In the midst of the 2008 Serangoon Garden FW dorm debate, then Minister George Yeo shared that “We may grow much faster if we open our doors to foreign workers but if there are too many of them coming into Singapore, it will affect our living environment.” (Workers’ dorm: An issue for whole of S’pore, Serene Luo, ST, 8 Sep 2008).

He suggested building “townships” for them. There, they would get better access to “cheaper food” and “their own places for recreation”. For their own good. Because we don’t want to be near them, screamed the subtext.

Maybe if we end up building townships, we can also house all the other people who spit, commit crimes, smell bad, talk loudly, and don’t flush the toilet, regardless of nationality. Maybe even people who can’t speak or understand Singlish, because they will slow down the queues at the hawker centre. We don’t want to be seen as racist or discriminatory, after all. First sign of antisocial behaviour and off to the outer islands you go. Our new society shall rise pristine and reformed.

It will be an awesome spectacle of the Singaporean dystopia.

Hawkers – culture killing culture

Minister for the Environment and Water Resources Vivian Balakrishnan bemoaned the risk of Singapore’s hawker trade dying. In spite of his ministry’s efforts to build more hawker centres, he felt that not enough young Singaporeans would step up to fill the shoes of the outgoing generation of hawkers.

“There is a very real chance that we will not succeed because of manpower.” ST reported the Minister as saying, “We can build many more hawker centres, but will we be able to get the hawkers?”

He said that his ministry was pushing for “lower rental rates”, and was hoping to find ways for veteran hawkers to teach their trade. Meanwhile, his ministry would “wait and see”. Is it enough, or fast enough?

The truth is that the Singapore culture is killing hawkers, who are in turn a mainstay of our local culture. Almost all the reasons why the hawker trade is dying can be traced back to the culture we have built.

Globalisation

Hawkers face competition from other kinds of eateries. Without giving market protection to hawkers, you can expect them to die out, just like how supermarkets are slowly killing our mamak stalls.

It’s not just low rents (which don’t exist in popular areas) – preferential access to schemes and perks and tax breaks and rebates are needed, and must be pushed to busy hawkers who have no time in their day to walk to a government office or browse a government website to check out what’s available.

Protected trade

Only Singaporeans and PRs can own or work at hawker stalls. As noble as this may sound, I think that this works against the survival of our hawker trade. Many Singaporeans today are not inclined to work the long hours of a hawker.

Anecdote: a western stall in my hawker centre is run by a couple with a thick mainland Chinese accent (I assume they are PRs). They make great “western food”, Singapore style. If they can adapt to and advance our local hawker culture, it stands to reason that another “foreigner” will be able to as well.

You see, the “foreigner problem” isn’t about them being foreigners – it is about there being an oversupply of foreigners, which depresses wages. Manage the labour supply and it may be possible to allow a quota of foreigners (with tested language skills) to take up a hawking profession.

High rents and subletting

How exactly does the Minister hope to “lower rental rates”? Removing the bidding price floor was a start, as was letting SEs manage hawker centres, but with stalls still generally available for “subletting” (by means legal and illegal), prices of prime stall locations will always be pushed up, giving hawkers razor-thin margins.

Insisting that hawkers run their own stalls and stop profiteering from a rentier mentality will not only improve the prospects of hawkers, it will encourage real expertise as cooks and chefs take ownership of their stalls. Beefing up the supply of stalls in overcrowded areas will also help lower rents. Give grants to shop assistants to take over from their rentier bosses.

Risk aversion and the safety net

Why work 12 hours a day so that you can potentially lose the shirt off your back when nobody shows up at your stall? Why not take a job working for someone else in an entry-level job and still be able to net some overtime pay?

With hawker centre cleaner wages set to rise to $1,200 or more, some hawkers may find it more profitable to throw away leftovers than to put food on the table.  With the massive income gap in our country, we need to equip hawkers to deal with risk, lower those risks and strengthen social safety nets. Maybe free utilities for the first two years of opening a stall.

Lack of respect, lack of prestige

Hawking has long been treated with disdain. It is the last resort of failures and dropouts. Our education system discourages the professional pursuit of our passions, unless that passion is something like engineering, law or medicine.

We need to reform an education system and economy that glorifies paper qualifications and sneers at those who become tradesmen. Hawkers must be made noble. Awards are nice, as Ambassador-at-large Tommy Koh suggests, but hawkers really want some basic human dignity, not the crumbs of elitist meritocracy.

And please don’t make a state-sponsored Mediacorp drama about it. Maybe we can screen “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” instead? It is an excellent documentary about passion for making just one type of food.

Low birth rates

How to pass on a family business to the kids you don’t have? When the government eugenics and sterilization programme ripped our birth rate to shreds in the relentless pursuit of more “graduate mothers”, the hopes of a hawker heritage went out the window.

Our TFR will always be a thorn in the side of our cultural survival. Many suggestions have already been made on how to fix it, but steps taken so far have not been courageous enough.

Some hawkers could take on and register apprentices and could be given cash payouts/rebates if their apprentices set up shop on their own after two years, or if they take over the business.

Infrastructure

Sure, the minister wants to build more hawker centres, but are they in the right places? The Marina Bay Financial Centre and the CBD are overcrowded and undersupplied. Meanwhile, new hawker centres are being built in the boondocks, with stalls in places with low foot traffic. Hawker rents in the CBD are through the roof while new hawkers in new towns see few customers, although rents are lower.

Distribution of hawker stalls needs to be normalised, or else new “city centres” need to be developed quickly (as mentioned in the population White Paper) to divert the working population to fringe hawker centres.

 

Lack of sector development

So, a hawker school. That’s an idea, although it’s already been nose-thumbed by some. The ministry fails to realize that trades like hawking are best taught by a quick foundation in general food industry knowledge, small business management and then years of apprenticeship. A school may not be the best way to pass on knowledge.

Hawkers also need to be resilient businessmen and must be equipped with basic financial management, risk management and other administrative skills associated with the trade.

ST getting muddled on race, culture, ethnicity and nationality

I’m married to a Finn. When my wife became a PR, she had to fill in a form that asked her what race she was. To her surprise, “Finn” was a race, apparently only recognised by the Singapore government. She gamely signed off on it, although “Finns” are not a race, and include the Nordic, Sami, Urgic, Aryan, and more. Her ethnicity, though, is indeed Finnish, whatever that counts for.

I’m mostly Chinese (part Straits Chinese), and often mistaken for a Malay when tanned, and Japanese when fair. Singaporean born and bred.

Our kids are NOT Eurasian, whatever some ST Forum hack might callously presume. They are something else, part Singaporean, part Finn, Chinese in some ways, Nordic in others, Peranakan sometimes, but mostly just whatever our family is coming to terms with about their identity as they grow up. Yes, the G and the world will brand them one way or another, for one purpose or another, but their identities are their own, whatever a few letters on a pink plastic card might say someday.

Even Wikipedia’s entry on what “Race” is shows our local system up for the gobbledegook that it is. Yes, I understand that in order to do such things as prevent HDB enclaves along ethnic/racial lines, one will need to bag and tag each individual, and assign an ill-fitting pigeonhole so that you can tell some people that “their” people have maxxed out the quota. Or so that the “self help” groups can help to cover people, but not all. It’s one less fault line to worry about, although religious, economic and educational ones still threaten our society.

ST isn’t helping us much, with their poor definitions of xenophobia, nationalism, race, ethnicity and nationality. If they want to really tackle the question, I suggest that they get their terms ironed out before trying to pose as experts on race, ethnicity and our national identity.

Union vs Employer: new dawn for collective bargaining?

Friday’s ST (Home section, p2) ran an article about the Singapore Industrial and Services Employees’ Union (SISEU) winning a court case against an errant employer. The NTUC’s legal arm, led by Mr Patrick Tay, took the company to the Industrial Arbitration Court for not giving annual increments to workers. Unusual.

Let’s face it, almost everyone in Singapore thinks that the best thing about being a NTUC member is the supermarket discount. You need look for no other anecdote to tell you that Singapore’s unions, at least to the face of the public, are practically unknown for their wage bargaining, dispute resolution, worker representation work. In other words, Singapore’s unions are best known for not being unions.

The NTUC has long been accused of being in bed with both government and businesses (and not without reason). Many workers have seen wage stagnation and breaches of workers’ rights and have no idea who to turn to for recourse.

That’s why this little news report sticks out. 41 unionised workers got a ruling for a built-in annual wage increase of 2.5%, or $50 (more than 2.5%) if they earned less than $2,000 – less than the 5% initially sought, but within the NWC guidelines.

NTUC’s Patrick Tay, who is also MP for Nee Soon GRC, shared that his legal arm fought four cases in court last year. One was even for PMEs, who are not even normally represented by unions. When the Industrial Relations Act is amended to give PMEs union representation in the future, you can bet that Patrick Tay’s team will start to get really busy.

Until then, the best thing to do is spread that this union membership thing isn’t just for discounts. If all else fails you can still sue your union.

Commissioner of Police Ng Joo Hee’s interview in the Sunday Times put some hard numbers on the developing trend of using cameras to aid in police work. That number is an average of more than eight cameras per HDB block, which comes to almost 100,000 little digital eyes watching over our neighbourhoods by 2016. This is just for Singapore’s 10,000-odd HDB blocks.

Those of us following the issues closely will recall comments earlier this month in the news where Ng said that police “are prepared to share the footage with other agencies such as the Land Transport Authority and National Environment Agency.”

Surveillance cameras are nothing new to us Singaporeans, if we are attentive, we will notice than we have already been watched for a long time – MRT stations, malls, and major roads are already covered by a comprehensive, live network of cameras. On a typical day, I count at least 25 government cameras that have picked up my movements. Still, this is the closest that Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon has come to our homes, and privacy advocates are going to get antsy.

It falls short of the endless surveillance of George Orwell’s Oceana – an authoritarian police state whose government uses every possible means to control its population. It is in this Orwellian dystopia that the phrase “Big Brother is watching you” is first used.

When confidence in the G is high, people generally don’t worry about an invasion of privacy – the annual Edelman Trust Barometer ranked Singapore second out of 26 countries surveyed for trust in the G. The machinations of surveillance in Oceana and Singapore may be very similar today, but our governments are very different, save to a small segment of die-hard conspiracy theorists.

I’ve really got nothing to fear from the G. They can watch me all they want – I’m a citizen in good standing. Maybe they’ll uncover my secret penchant for picking my nose in private, but I don’t think they’ll really care. When it comes to police work and fighting crime, you can say I trust the government.

Trust means that I’m not too concerned with the G being able to find me on some camera the moment I step out of my house or poke my head out my window, but is that trust misplaced? What if circumstances change? I really know nothing of the internal processes and checks that exist to govern how the information captured on surveillance cameras is accessed, disseminated and used.

As usual, the G is quite opaque on how things are run on the inside. Which elements in the G can view surveillance footage? Who signs off on it? How does footage get passed from one agency to another? How long is it kept? Is it governed by some sort of privacy law?

You see, most Singaporeans have no clue about our privacy rights. Many do not even know the implications of the Personal Data Protection Act that came into effect at the start of 2013. Will we even know when the line is crossed and the government starts putting cameras that peer into our homes?

A system shrouded in secrecy is a system that breeds fears of abuse by rogue elements. What happens if some stalker NSF in the SPF is keeping tabs on my daughter’s movements? What if someone I’ve offended in some government agency can get his hands on surveillance tapes of my front door? What happens if there is a change in government? Can surveillance footage be abused for political power? Will footage of my daily journeys be sold to some data-mining corporation for a quick buck?

“With great power comes great responsibility”, some hero’s uncle used to say. With the power to enhance our safety and uphold the law through surveillance comes the responsibility to ensure that such power is not abused. We need to be assured that data thieves and snoopers cannot be given an opportunity to exploit a system meant to prevent physical crime.

For this to happen the limits and laws governing surveillance need to be very clear. I think the G needs to be more pro-active and communicate the processes and checks that are in place to preserve the privacy of residents.

This article was first written for Breakfast Network.

Workers lied, new SOP for vice raids

PARODY (because some idiot is still going to misunderstand).

Since MOM made the claim that the crane-top workers lied about accommodations, new measures have been put in place for vice busts around the country. MOM happily gives vile, exploitative employers a WHOLE WEEK to clean up a dorm before inspecting it, so that they can then happily announce that workers’ complaints are false, and living conditions are GREAT! “They climbed the crane for no bloody reason, really, and should be thankful that they have such digs,” said an MOM officer as he reclined in his air-con office. “How dare they make claims against their awesome, respectable employers? Don’t they know that employers create jobs, and that without jobs we would all starve? Chuck them in jail for complaining.”

Perfect living conditions for slaves, er, workers.

MOM will also now require the following paperwork before entertaining future complaints:

a) the payslips that your employer didn’t give you

b) proof of overtime from the records that your employer never keeps

c) the work injury report from the doctor that your employer didn’t let you see

d) the passports that your employer illegally confiscated

e) any other documentation that doesn’t exist because MOM didn’t make laws to mandate them and wouldn’t enforce them anyway

The Singapore Police are taking a page out of MOM’s playbook now. In a bid to make themselves look good, they will now be announcing drug busts and other vice raids a week in advance. “This will give all the illegal scum enough time to clear out,” said a top cop while on his lunch break, “arrests will drop, we’ll have less paperwork to do, and residents will be assured that for that one day in the month/year, there will really be no crime in the area.”

THIS IS A PARODY (in case you like to read stuff starting in the middle).