Found this article. very interesting to see how this ANGMO justifies hiring Malaysians.
<table id="msgUN" width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="3"><tbody><tr><td id="msgUNsubj" valign="top">eview kanna condemned!</td><td id="msgunetc" align="right" nowrap="nowrap">
</td></tr> <tr><td class="msgtxt">Courts CEO Terry O’Connor writes to Temasek Review
January 19, 2010 by admin
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Written by Our Correspondent
Mr Terry O’Connor, the Chief Executive Officer of Singapore mega furniture retail mall – Courts, has written a letter to The Temasek Review via a communications group to clarify his company’s recruitment policy.
We had earlier published an article on 15 January 2010 about Courts holding a recruitment exercise seeking Malaysians to fill various positions in Singapore on 18 January 2010. (read article here) followed by another article 3 days later calling for a boycott of Singapore companies putting up job ads to recruit foreigners only. (read article here)
Mr O’Connor wrote that our articles are “erroneous” and expressed his concerns that this “incorrect representation of facts” in relation to Courts’ recruitment policy has already “aroused negative sentiments towards Courts.”
He asked us to take immediate action to remove the damaging articles and to provide him with a right of reply.
We will be publishing Mr O’Connor’s letter in full tomorrow together with our reply.
We have made some minor amendments to the content of these two articles to better reflect the current reality but we will not delete them as they are factually accurate other than the lack of Courts’ input regarding their recruitment policy, information which we are not privy to at the time of the articles’ publication.
The first article simply reported Courts’ recruitment exercise in Johor Bahru and the various positions on offer to Malaysian job-seekers.
We follow up with a legitimate question on why these positions are going to Malaysians instead of Singaporeans. The latter half of the article is devoted to criticizing the ruling party’s lax labor policies which give Singapore companies plently of leeway to employ foreigners at the expense of Singaporeans.
In the second article, we called for a boycott of all companies which put up ads to recruit foreigners only and not Singaporeans. Courts was never singled out for boycott anywhere in the article.
Mr O’Connor wrote in his letter that 98% of Courts’ workforce in Singapore are Singaporeans or Singapore Permanent Residents, but did not give us a breakdown on the exact percentage of citizens and PRs.
He added that prior to the recruitment advertisement in The Star on 16th January 2010 which we had published in our first article, Courts had placed three advertisements in the Straits Times last year, but the take-up rate among locals was low.
There was no mention of the salaries offered by Courts for the positions nor the length of working hours which may be a key reason behind the lukewarm response from Singaporeans.
This incident is another timely reminder that Temasek Review has grown too big to retain the present status quo without a proper organization (company) to shoulder its legal liabilties which will become a major stumbling block in its future development and expansion.
In a way, we are a victim of our own success. Our readership is as high as that of a small media agency, yet we have no full-time staff or trained journalists running it.
Our correspondents spend no more than 1 hour a day on the site. News articles are frequently written quickly in less than 10 minutes during lunch breaks while opinion pieces seldom take longer than 20 minutes which explain the ubiquitous grammar and spelling mistakes.
With the number of comments and letters we receive from our readers doubling every few weeks, it is impossible to cope with the additional workload without compromising the quality of the articles.
We seek the kind understanding of our readers if we are unable to approve your comments or reply to your emails fast enough simply because we are really over-stretched at the moment.
In the meantime, we leave our readers to judge for themselves if we have indeed misrepresented Courts in our previous articles on the matter.
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:o
