Wow! Fire PMETS to Keep FTrash Employed!

[makapaaa]

<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" border=0><TBODY><TR>Only Govt can help jobless PMETs
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<!-- START OF : div id="storytext"--><!-- more than 4 paragraphs -->LIKE me, many employees in the PMET (professionals, managers, executives and technicians) band have lost their jobs because of the financial crisis and the recession. Most PMETs are in middle to senior management, aged 40 or older, and are the first to be retrenched in the current downturn. Even profitable companies do it, as DBS Bank did last year when it cut 900 jobs.
There is nothing like a downturn for companies to rid themselves of middle to senior managers.
So there are many well-qualified, displaced professionals today and more to come - hard-working, honest, intelligent men and women in their mid-40s or older who are now jobless, and find it next to impossible to land a similar job.
Asking PMETs to retrain themselves as taxi drivers or security guards is as ridiculous and regressive as asking, for example, someone to return to using a typewriter instead of a word processor.
A generation ago, it was normal to retire at 55, withdraw one's Central Provident Fund savings and live on them. Not today, when the retirement age is likely to extend until one is 65 or 70 to survive.
The Government can do more to help the large and growing pool of PMETs. Here are a few suggestions:
Set up a job-matching agency for PMETs. Liaise with public- and private- sector firms to job-match PMETs in its database with part- and full-time vacancies, including overseas assignments. Suitable PMETs should be hired to work in the agency as consultants and trainers;
Let PMETs serve as corporate trainers, coaches and mentors to schools, tertiary institutions, and public- and private- sector businesses;
Introduce unemployment cash assistance for three to six months to help the jobless get by while they search for work; and
Allow unemployed PMETs to withdraw a small portion of their CPF funds, of say up to $10,000, to tide them over until they find work.
What is needed is a proactive, coordinated effort which only the Government can make successfully. Spenser Tan

 

[Logisex]

He could not land a job because he can't even spell his name right. It should be "Spencer" instead of "Spenser".

 

[newyorker88]

<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" border=0><TBODY><TR>Only Govt can help jobless PMETs
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<!-- START OF : div id="storytext"--><!-- more than 4 paragraphs -->LIKE me, many employees in the PMET (professionals, managers, executives and technicians) band have lost their jobs because of the financial crisis and the recession.
Asking PMETs to retrain themselves as taxi drivers or security guards is as ridiculous and regressive as asking, for example, someone to return to using a typewriter instead of a word processor.
. Spenser Tan

What can the govenment do? CREATE JOBS for PMETs? These jobs are gone, and will not come back. SMEs are local companies that govenment dont want to help much, becos they dont create a large number of jobs instantly. However, they are the ones who hire most.

When you ask youngsters to go into a particular field, such as engineers and medicine, they need to be in that field for life. These are very specialise jobs and asking them to go back to school for another 2 - 4 years? to be trained in other fields? Thee are jobs that emerging countries can take over easily, and moving up the chain to R & D takes time. Unfortunately, singapore lost the golden opportunity to do that during the last 20 years or so. Many of the brightest and best left singapore, due to many reasons, from a better life elsewhere to politics.

Most of these PMETs are family bread winners and need a huge sum of salary to maintain their families. Not to forget the pricely HDBs which is "heavily subsidised?"

MNCs can come and pay a good salary, they move out fast too. And those who are left behind are as good as dead. The other jobs that are available are jobs that pays so little that no singaporeans want to do becos they simply cannot survive on the pay.

If you want them to survive on the pay, either set a mimimiun wage or lower the cost of living, which is tied to land value, which has risen to levels that is not sustainable.

To boast up the value fast, you need demand for the land, and the govenment had artifically raise the value by letting in numberous FTs, and granted PRs to many who would in turn need housing and use of offices. That pushes up the rental, value in a short time. However, to maintain such a value in the property prices, the economy need to be expanding all the time. Which is impossible, by law of nature and cycles of economic up/downturns.

What we are facing now is a sharp down turn, a crisis unseen since 1930s. Many of the FTs and PRs will go, dumping the HDB flats, value and the economy of singapore will go downwards to levels that may be in the 1970s or 80s level.

Prices of everyday food will not go down, due to so called inflation and demand. Jobs are hard to come by and many will suffer.

 

[singveld]

why dun they join up and start a business or something.

 

[2lanu]

I was puzzled why they want to protect the PR with the Job Credit Scheme. Just let those PR return and the jobless locals and new graduates can come in and work.

Down time is the best time to flush out them...

 

[annexa]

They created jobs, by destroying careers. That's the scholar FT way.

 

[1sickpuppy]

I am a singaporean and my big boss keep telling me to work hard of FT will take over my job. Then turn around keep forcing us to do OT because cannot hire people? So I ask you people out there how to work harder when I work from 7am to 9pm?

 

[myfoot123]

I am a singaporean and my big boss keep telling me to work hard of FT will take over my job. Then turn around keep forcing us to do OT because cannot hire people? So I ask you people out there how to work harder when I work from 7am to 9pm?

If employer kept threatening their local workers, we should boycott their products.

 

[DerekLeung]

If employer kept threatening their local workers, we should boycott their products.

What are you waiting for, the time is now !

 

[halsey02]

If employer kept threatening their local workers, we should boycott their products.

What are you waiting for, the time is now !

If my memory doesn't fail me, I remembered during the Asian Financial Crises, there was this boss of a large well known resturant here, derided Singapore workers for being choosy..etc..and when later given some concessions by the government, changed his tune!!:p

You think this employer went out and hired Singaporeans?, who were out of work in droves in those time?, no!, got permission to hire PRC's...

You think the inability to hire workers, and they move the chain elsewhere, would affect us?,

Hire Singaporeans first, make foreign companies who is making use of the resources here to make money, do that!

:(