But according to the MOM these foreigners can only come from one country — the People’s Republic (and to some extent Malaysia). This puts any non-Chinese business at a disadvantage as PRC workers tend to speak only Chinese and it is never easy to manage staff you can’t communicate with. It puts these community facing businesses at a particular disadvantage; perhaps an Indian-run shop can make do with PRC shelf stackers, but a Malayalee restaurant or saree store is unlikely to be able to manage. Now you can say this is all to protect some sort of ethnic balance because there are so many Indian and Bangladeshi workers in construction that having service sector workers from China balances things out. But firstly isn’t maintaining a “correct” race balance in itself a dubious exercise? What does this policy say to us? That Filipinos can be maids but not servers? Indians are good for being construction coolies but we don’t want to see them as hotel staff? This is why you see Mandarin-speaking servers struggling to pronounce Palak Paneer across the curry houses of Singapore. It’s destroying Singaporean businesses: Indians, Malays and Eurasians have been put in a position where they can’t compete on equal terms. The incentive to break and bend the rules in order to hire staff you can communicate with is very high and Blue Diamond is very unlikely to be the only offender. For simply wanting to hire staff who speaks their language, a whole community is liable to be criminalised and if you ask me, that’s racist.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 11:46:54 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015