About 90% of Contractor PQ Builders team that does ground construction work are made up of foreigners. The Singaporeans who are part of the team are in supervisory roles.
“Bringing in foreign workers is not as cheap as people think”, Peh Ke-Pin owner of the company said.
A construction worker typically earns about S$800 a month in basic pay, but each worker costs at least double that.
“It’s not that much more expensive to hire a local,” Peh said adding that he is willing to pay between S$2,000 to S$3,000 for a local, but there are still no takers when he puts out the job advertisements.
This may be due to the current notion of what construction work entails.
Some Singaporeans have said that with higher pay and career advancement, they might consider working in the construction industry, but they admitted that most people here see the job as menial, and even dangerous.
Samuel Goh, 35, said that he once trained as a workplace safety officer but he switched to a sales job after realizing that the starting salary of less than S$2,000 was insufficient to provide for his family.
“If the salary was the same, then I will join the (construction) industry,” said Goh, who is now driving a taxi as he needs flexible hours to care for his children.
Grab driver Ian Chan, 31, said that if the pay was similar, he would still prefer to be a private-hire driver: “It’s less dirty, and you won’t get injured. Construction will be more tiring than driving,” he said.
Similarly, the level of interest among Singaporeans to take up jobs for technicians and technologists is low due to perceptions of these jobs being meant for foreign workers and the lack of recognition and career progression, said Joseph Goh, deputy chairman of the Mechanical and Electrical Engineering Technical Committee for the Institution of Engineers, Singapore (IES).
“The cost of hiring a skilled foreigner worker, including the levy as well as accommodation, laundry and insurance is comparable to hiring a local tradesman”, he said.
“This means that the issue for some employers might not be budget constraints, but the lack of local applicants.”
Their views come amid a debate that was recently re-ignited as COVID-19 cases in the workers’ dormitories surged.
Members of the public and political observers alike have questioned Singapore’s continued demand for lower-cost foreign workers, and whether local companies could and should reduce their reliance on them.
Singapore has recorded more than 38,000 COVID-19 cases, with the vast majority being migrant workers.
During a panel discussion on the COVID-19 pandemic in May, former Nominated Member of Parliament Viswa Sadasivan, said that officials should rethink Singapore’s economic growth model that has long hinged on these low-wage workers, causing productivity to remain low.
Another panelist, National University of Singapore sociologist Chua Beng Huat, said that the country’s dependence on foreign workers has depressed the wages of low-income workers.
Later, in a joint statement, trade bodies and associations said that Singapore’s economy will suffer without foreign workers, and result in fewer jobs for Singaporeans in the long run.
Several Government ministers, from Minister for Trade and Industry Chan Chun Sing to Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat, have reiterated during recent media interviews that while Singapore should depend less on foreign workers by automating processes, the country can never eliminate its need for them.
“Foreign workers fill the low-wage, manual labour jobs that Singaporeans are unwilling to do in areas like construction, security and cleaning”, they said.
And unlike other countries that spend a longer time to finish a project due to manpower constraints, construction companies here cannot afford to take a similar route, Chan argued.
“For a small country without natural resources, we compete on the basis that we are a good place for people to do business. If we lose out in that relative game compared to other people, then, unfortunately, I think the future of Singapore will not be what we expect it to be,” he had said.