Future Jobs for Singaporeans? Or not?

And while PAP MPs & Ministers are going on and on about closing the gap and catching those who fall through the cracks, not that this is a bad thing, i reiterate my call for more pro-activity in a similar capacity through secondary school and beyond and especially through University.

Singaporeans of the future cannot afford not to have an option to pursue a University degree at later points in life then through only a standard and PAP determined route. Life is far more variable then what a bureaucracy with its policies and possibly outdated modus-operandi would like it to be.

To the Education Ministry I say this: while the government is attempting to balance between keeping the country afloat and keeping its citizens employable you are perhaps not moving fast enough or radical enough to keep up. And its not about throwing money at it in terms of more spanking new multi million dollar buildings. Its about the mind set. Its about removing artificial barriers such as quotas for certain faculties (and perhaps gender) and for Universities as a whole that distort market forces.


November 12, 2006
On the Contrary

A Boom in Jobs, and Fear

By DANIEL AKST

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/business/yourmoney/12cont.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

AMERICA’S biggest export, it sometimes seems, is jobs. A shocking new study a consulting firm whose specialty is helping big business improve back-office operations, says the Fortune 500 companies could save $58 billion annually by moving more of these activities offshore.

But the truly shocking thing about this number is how small it is. Last year, the Fortune 500 had revenue of $9.1 trillion. Moving more back-office operations overseas, in other words, could cut costs by way less than 1 percent of sales. A nice boost to profits, but hardly earth-shaking.
Here at home, meanwhile, it’s raining jobs — an estimated 5.8 million new ones in just five years, according to a recent Labor Department report. The government’s household employment survey showed a gain of 437,000 jobs in October alone. Unemployment that month fell to just 4.4 percent, a 5½-year low.

Jobs are so abundant that investors are worried that the Federal Reserve may delay making interest rate cuts, lest inflation revive. The concern is that all these new jobs may lead employers to bid up wages, heaven forbid.

There are so many jobs, in fact, that we can’t fill them all ourselves. Instead, we rely on millions of immigrants to pick up the slack. The supply of employment opportunities in this country was demonstrated by President Bush’s recent authorization of a 700-mile fence along the Mexican border. There is gainful employment here, and plenty of it.

Don’t let the recent election-season rhetoric fool you. The nature of American work is changing, but jobs are abundant, and the dynamic nature of the economy is one reason that they will remain so. Outsourcing isn’t likely to change this in the foreseeable future, and I suspect that it’s even helping to sustain domestic job growth by promoting efficiency and thereby freeing capital for better uses. We even gain jobs by insourcing — by receiving jobs from other countries.

Toyota and Honda, for example, have thousands of employees in the United States.
While Hackett says that “increased use of offshore resources may impact up to 1.47 million general and administrative jobs,” the Organization for International Investment, a business group representing American units of foreign companies, says that such domestic subsidiaries employ 5.4 million people in this country. In all likelihood, that total will grow.

SO the real issue isn’t saving jobs. It’s helping those whose skills suddenly become obsolete to adjust to the new world around them. The big new job gains, for example, mask continuing job losses in manufacturing as well as recent declines in construction employment, meaning more bad news for people who work with their hands. That, in turn, suggests more income inequality ahead. Washington, despite its recent track record of bungling on so many fronts, will need to play a role in helping these people and their communities adjust, and unfortunately that’s one job we can’t easily send offshore.

Nor is it one that we can expect the private sector to handle. Troubled by soaring health care costs, companies are withdrawing from their longstanding role as providers of medical insurance. They’ve also moved away from providing long-term job security or traditional defined-benefit pensions. Maybe that style of employment no longer suits a changing world, or maybe corporations are too busy back-dating executive stock options to worry about taking care of their rank-and-file employees.

Either way, companies are getting out of the social welfare business — and I say good riddance. What business is really good at, aside from generating wealth, is generating jobs. Social welfare is the business of government.

Some important questions were rarely debated in the recent election. What should be done — and what can be done — for the losers in this time of rapid economic change? How much inequality are we willing to accept? What do we want our society to look like? And, perhaps most important, is our government up to the job of changing the picture?

The next big election is in 2008, and some presidential candidate may yet make a splash by promising to clamp down on free trade, curtail immigration and embrace isolationism, all in the name of protecting American workers. That would be a far more effective job-destruction strategy than the outsourcing that may yet become a campaign issue.

Daniel Akst is a journalist and novelist who writes often about business. E-mail: culmoney@nytimes.com.