ST: Staff crunch spells last orders for tze char stalls

Got this from the Straits Times (2 Apr 2008)

Staff crunch spells last orders for tze char stalls
By April Chong

MR HUANG Hui Liang, 40, served up his last plate of braised noodles at his tze char stall in Tampines in February.

Four months earlier, his brother had also called it quits at his Bedok stall.

Such stalls, fixtures in heartland coffee shops, whip up restaurant-style dishes - fish-head curries, soups, stir-fried greens and fried rice - for dine-in or takeaway customers.

The brothers had the same problem: They could not find enough Singaporeans who wanted to work for them - not at the rates they were willing to pay anyway.

No hard data is available, but those who lead coffee-shop trade associations say many tze char stalls are shutting down.

The way out, it would seem, is for these stalls to hire foreign workers willing to stand for hours over hot woks for less pay, but labour rules forbid these stall holders from doing this.

So although these tze char stalls are kings in the coffee shops in terms of the size of their stalls and their menus, many claim they are not doing royally.

For starters, their ability to whip up so many dishes from scratch makes them more labour-hungry than the average one-dish stalls that sell only, say, fishball noodles or chicken rice.

Tze char stalls typically need seven employees - two cooks, two kitchen helpers who assemble the ingredients, a server, someone to take the orders and collect money, and a dish-washer, or some variation of this formula.

The Manpower Ministry (MOM) allows only Singaporeans and permanent residents to be hired.

Mr Huang said he can pay $1,000 for a kitchen helper, and twice that for a cook.

He concedes the work is hard. The 12-hour work days typically start in the morning, with going to the market and preparing the food. More stalls now open for lunch and take a break before re-opening from 5pm till midnight.

He said his brother tried to get around the shortage of workers by hiring five foreigners illegally. He was caught and fined last year.

Aside from the difficulty in finding workers, he was also up against rising food costs; his rent was also going up from $5,000 to $6,500.

The average rent for a noodle stall is about $2,000.

Mr Huang said his operating costs left him out of pocket for six months last year. In better months before rising costs came along, he made between $1,500 and $4,000 a month.

His problem is common, said Mr Christopher Tan of the Foochow Coffee Restaurant and Bar Merchants Association, whose members account for a fifth of the 2,000 coffee shops here.

He said a growing number of tze char stalls run by association members had shut down in recent years, though he could not say how many.

Mr Wee Jee Seng of the Kheng Keow Coffee Merchants Restaurants and Bar-Owners Association, which represents about 300 coffee shops and stallholders here, confirmed the trend.

In the last five years, the associations have appealed to MOM at dialogues to reconsider its stance against foreign workers but have always received a firm 'no'.

A MOM spokesman told The Straits Times there were no plans to liberalise this rule and, as the stalls were small, they could be operated by the licensee with family help.

Veteran labour Member of Parliament Ong Ah Heng pointed out a difficulty with liberalising the hiring policy: 'If you open up the regulations, another 10,000 foreign workers will come in.

'Of course, they do contribute to the economy, but it will become a social problem that we cannot afford.'

The stallholders say that MOM's call to rope in family members does not solve the numbers problem.

Mr Ong himself has met a couple who could no longer cope with running their stall when the wife became pregnant.

Industry associations have suggested, for example, tapping senior citizens and housewives and offering them flexible work hours.

To this, Mr Kenneth Lee, 46, who is also short-handed at his Toa Payoh coffee shop, said he had few such takers even when he offered the 'market rate' of $5 an hour.

Sometimes, with this group, it is not only about the money. Housewife Ang Guat Khim, 54, who used to earn just above $1,000 preparing drinks, said she quit because she could not bear standing nine hours a day.

MP Ong said tze char stallholders simply have to pay more to entice Singaporeans to do the job.

Some tze char operators have hatched other solutions - not all legal - to get around their problem.

One is to hire foreigners on the sly. A chef from China, for example, will work for $1,800 a month, against a Singaporean's asking wage of $3,000.

Last year, 341 employers in the food and beverage sector were caught hiring foreigners illegally; 1,544 foreigners were arrested.

Another ruse: 'Borrow' foreign workers from their landlords - as coffee shop owners have been allowed since last July to hire a limited number of Chinese nationals.

The landlords do try to help, because the fortunes of the coffee shop are tied to that of the resident tze char stall, especially if it is one that pulls in the crowds with good food.

Coffee-shop operator Wee Jui Ho, 63, said he suffered a 60 per cent drop in business at his drinks stall when his tze char tenant closed shop last December because of a worker shortage.

He has not been able to find another tze char tenant, and will now try running the tze char stall himself. But he has no experience in this area and is aware that if he fails, he will have to end his 30-year-old coffee-shop business as well.

There is only so much coffee-shop owners like him can do. They could ask tze char stalls to pay better salaries but, as the coffee-shop merchant association's Mr Tan says: 'It's very hard to raise wages without raising the prices of the food, and this comes at a risk of losing customers.'

I'm shocked beyond words. How dare this MP Ong Ah Heng suggest that the reason why stall owners cannot find enough Singaporean workers is that they don't pay enough?

But seriously, this is a real problem. Tze char stalls are facing a real problem in getting workers because they are not allowed to hire foreign workers. On the other hand, when I was back in Singapore, I saw plenty of PRC waiters and waitresses in Chinese restaurants everywhere. It seems doubtful to me that restaurants in Singapore are not allowed to hire foreign workers. Isn't it unfair that tze char stalls are denied access to foreign labour while bigger establishments like Chinese restaurants aren't? The rationale for it is that MOM believes tze char stalls can get by with family members.

Excuse me, but don't the top honchos in MOM realize that families are getting smaller nowadays? Or that a tze char stall is a 7-man operation? Why should restaurants be given the cost-lowering advantage of hiring foreign workers but not their tze char counterparts?

To be fair, labour restrictions should equally applied both tze char stalls and restaurants. On the other hand, not too many foreign workers should be allowed into the food and beverage industry. One possible solution would be to fix the total number of foreign workers in the industry. This can be easily accomplished by issuing a fixed number of work permits for the industry every year and then letting restaurant and stall owners to bid for these work permits the same way aspiring car owners bid for COE in Singapore.

Come to think of it, maybe we should try that for other industries in Singapore.

ST Forum: Help grads who do as well as foreign talent

From the Straits Times on 20 Feb 2008:

Help grads who do as well as foreign talent

RECENTLY, I befriended a group of scholars from China studying at my alma mater, Nanyang Technological University (NTU). They were in their late teens and were attending foundation courses in English and maths before starting their undergraduate studies. In their five-year sojourn at NTU, they will be given free lodging and a monthly allowance of $500 each. Needless to say, they do not have to pay for their tuition fees. When they graduate, they must work in Singapore for six years as part of their 'payback'' bond.

A highly conservative calculation of their five-year tenure at NTU suggests that each will cost the Government or NTU some $70,000. That is, $30,000 for their five-year tuition fees, including the charges for their foundation courses, and some $40,000 for hostel accommodation and their monthly stipends. I graduated from NTU five years ago, with a good honours degree.

I was in the top 15 per cent of my cohort - and performed better than some of these scholars. While studying at NTU, I had to work as a pizza delivery boy to earn my allowance. Upon graduation, I had to start paying off a $24,000-student loan.

Why are Singaporeans like me not treated as considerately as such scholars? My study loan took five years to pay off after I started working. The China scholars receive financial support, a free education and start their working lives debt free. Their six-year bond is seen as a contribution to Singapore.

Am I not contributing as much, if not more? Non-scholar Singaporeans are not treated in quite the same way as foreign talent, regardless of how well we perform. The disparity is disheartening.

Don't Singaporeans like me who have done well deserve some relief? True, local scholarships are available. But not every Singaporean who graduated well, gets one.

Can the NTU or the Education Ministry tell me why graduates like myself don't deserve some relief or reward for doing as well as, or better than, some of the foreign talent?

Zhou Zhiqiang

At first glance, in a cynical cold-blooded way, a foreign talent policy that provides extra benefits to talented foreigners would make sense. After all, Mr Zhou is presumably a Singaporean and there is no need to be equally generous to people like him even if he is as capable as his foreign friends. To paraphrase an overeducated hawker I once knew, he is a captive of the system. So, because he is a Singaporeans, the government takes him for granted.

Yet, this is not the way to draw in young mobile foreign talents. Yes, generous scholarships to foreign students are a way to get these people to come. That's not difficult. The problem is, how do you get them to stay. Any foreign talent worth his/her salt will be able to infer that the reason he/she is a beneficiary of Singapore's generous foreign talent policy is that he or she is a potential immigrant i.e. not a Singaporean. Of course, it remains his/her advantage to stay a potential immigrant.

Don't get me started on the unfairness of it all to Singaporeans. How does the government expect Singaporeans to show goodwill towards their country when they can see that the system rewards bright talented foreigners better than it does bright talented Singaporeans. No bloody wonder we lose 1000 of our brightest every year. Yes, it is true that most of the 1000 leave Singapore because of better opportunities elsewhere but those 1000 too would have friends and family in Singapore. They may even care and feel outraged that the government treat those friends and family so shoddily. It is also this discriminatory policy that might push Singaporeans like Mr. Zhou to join the exodus.

The Goatherd And The Wild Goats

A GOATHERD, driving his flock from their pasture at eventide, found some Wild Goats mingled among them, and shut them up together with his own for the night. The next day it snowed very hard, so that he could not take the herd to their usual feeding places, but was obliged to keep them in the fold. He gave his own goats just sufficient food to keep them alive, but fed the strangers more abundantly in the hope of enticing them to stay with him and of making them his own. When the thaw set in, he led them all out to feed, and the Wild Goats scampered away as fast as they could to the mountains. The Goatherd scolded them for their ingratitude in leaving him, when during the storm he had taken more care of them than of his own herd. One of them, turning about, said to him: "That is the very reason why we are so cautious; for if you yesterday treated us better than the Goats you have had so long, it is plain also that if others came after us, you would in the same manner prefer them to ourselves."

What is your religion?

One of the things that strikes me as somewhat odd in America is the almost Talibanish national obsession with religion. Well, not really religion in general but just one particular persuasion, Christianity. The majority of Americans are religious to the extent that an ordinary Singaporean who does not share their beliefs would find it almost fanatical and irrational. I've had one who've tried to convert me, very gently, but he inevitably failed.

However, I've long since learned that amongst Americans, there is a strong social stigma against people who have no religion; 'atheist' is a taboo word in many social circles. The lack of belief is practically synonymous with immorality in this country. So, I try not to mention that, for most of my life, that is after the age of seven, I've been utterly irreligious. Actually, I wasn't very religious before the age of seven. I only went to church because my mother's mother insisted that she go to church and that we were to accompany her. After my maternal grandmother's death, we simply stopped going. My mother and her brother were probably not very ethusiastic churchgoers to start with. My father's family is Buddhist but Buddhism is something I know very little about. As a result of both my parents belonging to different faiths, religion wasn't and still isn't something much talked about at home. It was something that other families do but ours don't.

Personally, based on my personal observation of Americans, I don't think that there is a particularly strong correlation between religiosity and human decency. There are some very nice, unselfish and helpful people in my building and they sometimes schedule their experiments on Sunday mornings. There are decent people of every and no persuasion. So, for me personally, it's hard to accept the idea that you cannot have morality without religion.

Besides, it is so damn obvious that those holy books were penned by humans.

ST: It's S'pore's gain even if 30-40% of immigrants settle here: MM Lee

This recent Straits Times article caught my eye. The MM said that it is Singapore's gain even if 30 to 40 percent of immigrants settle here. He also acknowledged that many PRC and India students use Singapore as a stepping stone to the West. Well, it certainly took him some time to catch on to what most ordinary Singaporeans have known for a long time.

I was back in Singapore a couple of weeks ago. Feeling nostalgic, I took out my copy of Commencement 2004, which stated who graduated with what degree in 2004 from NUS. As I thumbed through the pages of the booklet, I saw that majority of the first class honours graduates from the Engineering and Science faculties had very Chinese Singaporean surnames (Lim, Tan, Teo, etc). Mind you, these faculties are where the PRC and India scholars are concentrated. Also, first class honours are usually given to the top 3 to 10 percent of the cohort (depending on the specific course of study).

Given that foreign students make up 20 percent of the NUS undergraduate body, you should expect PRC and India scholars in the Engineering and Science faculties to be grabbing the majority share of the top honours. After all, we are told that for every one local undergraduate on scholarship studying in a university in Singapore, we have two foreign undergraduates also on scholarship. Surely, it would not be unreasonable to expect our foreign undergraduate scholars perform academically. If undergraduate scholarships are given out on the basis of pure academic merit, then we should expect the ratio of foreign to local first class holders to be 2 to 1. Yet, this is not even true in the faculties in which the foreign students are concentrated.

This clearly demonstrates the strong anti-local bias in our foreign talent policy. Good local students, who study the same subjects as equally able foreign students, are given much less financial incentives to enroll in our local universities, unlike their foreign counterparts. What more can I say?

Commonly mispronounced English words in Singapore

One of my pet peeves is the way many common words are mispronounced in Singapore, even by teachers of the English language. By mispronunciation, I mean the way the Singaporean pronunciation of a particular word diverges from that as prescribed in dictionaries. While learned opinion may remain divided as to how a particular word is to be pronounced (e.g. 'schedule' or 'often'), it is fairly safe to say that the Singaporean pronunciation of a common stock word would often be at variance with any of the established standards.

The reason for this state of affair is that reading was and still is not emphasized in English lessons in Singapore schools. I don't recall ever having a class on phonetics or on reading in secondary or primary school and I suppose this is probably true for most Singaporeans of my generation. Many older English-educated Singaporeans do however speak the language with a pronunciation scheme that conforms closely to the prescriptions in dictionaries. Two such speakers who come to mind are Lee Kuan Yew and Eugene Wijeysingha, if any RI alumnus still remembers that old dodderer. Younger Singaporeans, even the English-educated ones, have a more colloqualized pronunciation scheme.

Of course, there will be those in Singapore who will lambaste me for insisting on a foreign pronunciation standard. Afterall, it is the Singaporean-accented English that distinguishes the true sons and daughters of Singapore from foreigners. The same people also say that pronunciation should be descriptive, not prescriptive, and we should stick to the vulgar standard, if one can ever call it a standard. Strangely, no one has ever suggested that we should teach the grammar of Singlish instead of proper grammar. The consensus is that we have a linguistic diglossia in Singapore for grammar. The grammar of educated language should conform to that as prescribed in (British) English textbooks but the grammar of colloquial Singaporean English retains its distinctive character. The same goes for spelling - few in Singapore believe that we should have a uniquely Singaporean orthography. So, why should we reject the pronunciation scheme as prescribed in the same dictionaries from which we learn our spelling?

I think that it is important for educated Singaporean English speech to be less divergent from more established varieties of English such as Received Pronunciation (RP) or General American (GA). Afterall, it is the prevalence of the usage of the language that has contributed to our competitiveness in the global economy. This prevalence has enabled Singapore to position itself as a financial centre. Because English is the language of education, government, commerce and law, Singapore is able to import large numbers of workers from Australia, Britain, India, the Phillipines, the US, etc as well as to export hordes of Singaporean workers to the aforementioned countries. Even if their governments wanted to, countries like Japan and South Korea can't do that, at least to the extent Singapore can, because English is not their official medium. There is simply no reservoir of Japanese-speaking or Korean-speaking labour for them to draw upon.

This is not to say that Singlish should be eradicated but we should recognize that there are established pronunciation norms the same way there are established grammatical norms. At a time when millions in China are trying to learn English, an established English variety without any idiosyncratic pronunciations, it is highly inadvisable for Singaporean schools not to arrest this divergence in Singaporean English speech lest Singapore loses the competitive edge the prevalence of English has given it.

Anyway, here's an incomplete list of commonly mispronounced words that I can think of. The pronunciation scheme follows that of dictionary.reference.com (with slight modifications since the former approximate GA as its idea). Stresses are highlighted in bold while the differences are underlined.

WORD	CORRECT PRONUNCIATION	SG PRONUNCIATION
Calendar	[kal-uhn-duh]	[kuh-len-duh]
Compete	[kuhm-peet]	[kom-peet]
Complete	[kuhm-pleet]	[kom-pleet]
Compare	[kuhm-pair]	[kom-pair]
Comparable	[kom-pruh-buhl]	[kom-pair-uh-buhl]
Committee	[kuh-mit-ee]	[kom-mit-tee]
Complication	[kom-pli-key-shuhn]	[kom-pli-key-shuhn]
Compliance	[kuhm-plahy-uhns]	[kom-plahy-uhns]
Condemn	[kuhn-dem]	[kon-dem]
Condemnation	[kon-dem-ney-shuhn, -duhm-]	[kon-dem-ney-shuhn]
Compose	[kuhm-pohz]	[kom-pohs]
Composition	[kom-puh-zish-uhn]	[kom-poh-zish-uhn]
Concept	[kon-sept]	[kon-sept]
Conceptual	[kuhn-sep-choo-uhl]	[kon-sep-choo-uhl]
Colleague	[kol-eeg]	[kuh-leeg]
Cylinder	[sil-in-der]	[sil-in-der]
Excuse	[v. ik-skyooz; n. ik-skyoos]	[ek-skyoos]
Exclude	[ik-sklood]	[ek-sklood]
Extra	[ek-struh]	[ek-stra]
Estate	[i-steyt]	[es-steyt]
Especially	[i-spesh-uh-lee]	[es-spesh-uh-lee]
Establish	[i-stab-lish]	[es-stab-lish]
Excite	[ik-sahyt]	[ek-sahyt]
Excitation	[ek-si-tey-shuhn]	[ek-sahy-tey-shuhn]
Excel	[ik-sel]	[ek-sel]
Excellent	[ek-suh-luhnt]	[ek-suh-luhnt]
Japan	[juh-pan]	[juh-pan]
Japanese	[jap-uh-neez, -nees]	[juh-pan-ees]
Privilege	[priv-uh-lij, priv-lij]	[priv-i-leyj]
Second	[sek-uhnd]	[sec-kend]
Pressure	[presh-uh]	[prezh-uh]
Rectangle	[rek-tang-guhl]	[rek-tang-guhl]
Rectangular	[rek-tang-gyuh-luh]	[rek-tang-gyuh-luh]
Ticket	[tik-it]	[ti-keyt]
Triangle	[trahy-ang-guhl]	[trahy-ang-guhl]
Triangular	[trahy-ang-gyuh-luh]	[trahy-ang-gyuh-luh]
Wednesday	[wenz-dey, -dee]	[wen-uhs-dey]
Monotone	[mon-uh-tohn]	[moh-noh-tohn]
Monotony	[muh-not-n-ee]	[moh-noh-tohny]
The	[before a consonant/vowel thuh/thee]	[thuh]
Vehicle	[vee-i-kuhl]	[vee-hee-kuhl]
Vehicular	[vee-hik-yuh-luh]	[vee-hee-kyuh-luh]
Position	[puh-zish-uhn]	[poh-zish-uhn]
Potent	[poht-nt]	[poh-tuhnt]
Potential	[puh-ten-shuhl]	[poh-ten-shuhl]