Deputy Prime and Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam
announced yesterday that the government will mandate an up-to-20 per cent
increment in the entry-level wages for cleaners. Frankly, it’s about time.
Steps like this are what labor activists have been asking
for and it seems they are finally getting their wish. The 55,000 cleaners in Singapore
earn an average wage of $850 per month. That’s on average, so it’s not unheard
of for cleaners to earn just $600 per month.
In Singapore, no one will even bother arguing that this
salary is too low to survive. So for all their talk of not having a minimum
wage, it seems that the Singapore’s government has finally admitted (without
saying so) that salaries in Singapore are just too low.
Yes, I agree that setting a minimum wage of S$1,000 for
cleaners should be a no-brainer and that they shouldn’t have taken so long to take
what should be a simple decision but hey, this is a step in the right
direction.
Hopefully, this minimum wage policy for cleaners will be
expanded to all workers in the near future.
2 comments:
Hey, better not use "minimum wage". They have stressed that it is not a minimum wage policy, but progressive wage policy.
Just like it is ponding, not flooding.
Seems like the power that be likes to indulge in semantics - words like targeted, calibrated, progressive, etc.
If it's walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it's a bloody duck. The power-to-be may indulge in semantics but as a no-name blogger, I don't have to. It's one of the few joys of being a nobody.
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