Singapore's booming community of millionaires, and China's striking workers

Check the Times of London story below on China's striking workers.

Communist one-party-ruled China is doing something unprecedented and unique: It is allowing, even encouraging its workers to organise and strike. It is letting its people demand higher wages and better living conditions. Note the two bold paragraphs.

In contrast, Singapore's one-party feudal system is crushing its people and letting the inequality gap widen.

Companies, in particular MNCs, are still making rich profits. Why is this happening?

In one word: SELFISHNESS.

The political leadership is stacked with selfish greedy leaders, and the business community is just taking the cue. The number of millionaires in Singapore has risen to a record level, which the system is proudly trumpeting. Religion has been hijacked by big churches, temples and mosques led by powerful and rich leaders. There are no honest intellectuals left in this country. When the collective leadership has become this selfish, the system has reached its peak. There are no new ideas because the value system is bankrupt and corrupt.

Singapore is nothing but a money-making machine, each man to look out for himself. It's a very sick place that doesn't know it is sick.

TIMES of London report below, 13 June 2010
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/markets/china/article7149002.ece

Reacting to public opinion, a chorus of editorials and commentaries in the state-controlled press praised the trend towards higher pay. “Analysts ... predict that these actions could ultimately bring an end to cheap labour in China,” said the China Daily in a front-page report.

“The Chinese workforce is no longer infinite,” said Zhang Wenkui at the development and research centre run by the state council, China’s cabinet. “It’s finite. That means walkouts and strikes will be more frequent.”

Independent research for The Sunday Times found an epidemic of strikes and bold wage claims in recent months across manufacturing zones.

On May 14, 5,000 workers at a privatised textile factory at Pingdingshan in Henan province, blocked the gates and posted a slogan reading, “We ask our mother, the Communist party, to give us a bowl of rice to eat.” Police arrested four strike leaders, but faced resolute workers angry about alleged corruption in the privatisation process and poor compensation.

In Yunnan province, a taxi drivers’ strike paralysed the city of Honghe and spread to 13 counties. Again, the causes were complaints about extortionate fees and graft.

The China Management Daily, an influential business newspaper, said: “It’s not only Honda that should panic. China should panic, too.”

“The Honda strike is a milestone in China,” said economic analyst Xu Jianfeng in an online commentary. “For ages the people’s government has forbidden working people to go on strike and forbidden the media from reporting strikes, but this time the government failed to do that.”

Powerful lobbies, led by the ministry of commerce and by exporters, are fighting a rearguard action to stop change. However, the sudden upsurge in labour unrest may subtly have reframed the debate. Economists say rising wages in China will help to spur domestic demand and consumption.

Researchers for The Sunday Times examined wage slips that showed many workers for multinational suppliers have seen no rise in pay for eight years. In the same period, consumer price inflation has eroded earning power in real terms and the proportion of China’s GDP taken by wages has fallen.

So higher pay fulfils two aims of China’s more enlightened policymakers. It will give workers more money to spend on goods, and it should also spur Chinese factories to move up the “value chain” and out of the sweatshop era.

Such Chinese firms face a tough time because, to take one example from the state media, most textile factories are surviving on profit margins of 1% to 2%.

But there is no question that foreign middlemen have room to cut their margins. When The Sunday Times tracked a plastic item that retailed in London for 99p back to its source, it emerged that the cost price at the factory gate was 22p. And when the factory’s raw material costs were stripped out, the Chinese supplier had only 6p to cover wages, operating costs and profit.

“In other words, wages could double and it could be absorbed,” said one British buyer.