Daily Lessons from Life 10 July 2009

"Fri, Jul 10, 2009 AsiaOne - Unemployed man willing to reduce pay by 80%

He used to earn a five-figure monthly salary, but no one is willing to hire him now even though he is willing to settle for S$3,000 a month.


Mr Roland Ang, 52, told Shin Min Daily that he used to manage a hedge fund in an investment firm, but lost his job when his company folded last November.

He joined the finance department of a bank after serving national service, and worked his way up from an administrative assistant to department head, but his highest educational qualification stops at secondary school.


He also says that he was headhunted four times in the nineties, and commanded a pay of about $15,000 a month, not including annual bonuses. But he finds it hard, if not impossible to find a job now.

He and his wife have three children aged eight to 16, and they are also taking care of his 90-year-old mother.


Mr Roland Ang has been actively seeking employment, and sends out 20 to 30 job applications a month on average. He says he went for two interviews a month but was always unsuccessful.

He thinks that it is his lack of educational qualifications and age that is deterring employers.

"When they see that I have no university degree, they say they will contact me again but they never do. Even when I indicate that I am willing to lower my salary expectations to only S$3,000, which is the starting pay of a fresh grad.


"They say that I have too much experience. I don't understand, why don't companies want to employ an experienced staff who is willing to work for less pay? Isn't that a good thing? So I think that my age is a factor." "

This is the reality of life in Singapore. If you are above 40 years old and you are out of a job, you are potentially in trouble!

Lessons for me are:

1. in life, especially urban life, living without a stable income (passive or active) can be a very stressful experience. There is surely a need to save for the rainy days. However, if you are going to live to 85 and your lost the income at 40 or 50, there are still a good many decades of existence to go!! What then?;

2. in Singapore, the government welcome Foreign Workers (FWs) and Foreign Talent (FTs) with open arms. In the good time, this practice was questioned but tolerated as the FWs took up many jobs that are so badly paid that no Singaporean can afford to take them up as the FWs lived 20-30 into a small room and only have to send some money back to their home countries. The Singaporeans, who now lived in the 10th most expensive city (and country), cannot make ends meet with that type of low wages. For the FTs, they are taking up jobs that could have gone to the better qualified Singaporeans as the FTs are younger!!;

3. many people became disgruntled with the continued open-door and open-arm policy adopted by the government as they felt in this hard time, Singaporeans need to be taken care of 1st! My reading is that the low-wage FWs are so much a feature of the low-cost service industry that the employers and the government will not be able to do much to change it in the short term. In the long term, I wonder if there are plan to tightly wane Singapore from this over-dependence and addiction!! It will take strategic vision and careful but firm execution to pull this off. If this situation does not improve, many more qualified Singaporeans will be unemployed prematurely!! That cannot be good for the nation who thrive on this cheap FWs strategy!

I hope the authority can envision a new vision and plan better and tighter! The re-training advocated appeared to be a 'suddenly awaken reaction' to the structural unemployment threatening to take place at least 4-5 years ago. Perhaps we can do better going forward?

Good luck to Mr. Roland Ang in landing a job. If not, he will have to find other avenues to survive this crisis as Darwinism dictated that: the fittest survive!