Saturday, May 23, 2015

The case for a minimum wage in Singapore



Kenneth Jeyaretnam said:

A few days ago I put up a post on Facebook about the decision by the Los Angeles City Council to raise the minimum wage in the city to US$15 per hour. I asked why Singapore could not afford a minimum wage of, say, $8 per hour. In response an American economist gave his reasons why the case for a minimum wage was much stronger in Singapore than the USA:

There are many. But I’ll give you four. One, the Singapore workforce is now nearly 40% foreign imported labour vs. 16% in the US. Actually, since a good percentage of foreign workers stay and eventually get citizenship vs. very few in Singapore, the gap is effectively much larger. Two, Singapore has much tighter controls on immigration than the US. Three, Singapore’s “democracy” is structured to minimize specific-issue local dissent. Four, Singapore is a city-state with a tiny physical geography while the US consists of 50 states, DC and nearly 10 million square km.


Read the full article here.

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