Love

Love. Sometimes known as Charity in other versions of the Christian Bible.

I intend to talk about ministerial pay and social work pay, about just recompense for the fruits of one's labour and the effect of talent in achieving those, and the nature of public service for both ministers and social workers.

Of course whether this intention has been realized in this article is not for me to judge, at the end. :)

We begin. And begin again and again, on the topic of ministerial pay. Presently the ministers are paid 1.2m a year. According to a pay peg to the salaries of the most highly-paid 8 professionals in 6 fields of the private sector (Yawning Bread), they should be paid 2.2m. Our Prime Minister wishes to "close this gap" (direct quote). Needless to say, the question of perverse incentive to not spend effort on closing the other gap has been raised elsewhere.

It's going to rise no matter what we say. You know it, and I know it. A question to consider is: why is it that we know what we know? My suggested answer is, because there is no clear accountability for performance of the ministers. If they advocate that they deserve to have their pay pegged to the private sector, where are their KPIs, and thus the sword of Damocles that falls when they perform badly?

I hear only a ringing silence on this.

A hypothetical scenario for comparison: If I walked into my boss' office today and asked for a pay raise without justifying the contributions over and above my job's required specifications that I had made, he would not only laugh in my face but possibly fire me for arrogance (except that it would be called lack of team-playing skills or something). But this situation would never arise amongst the citizens and the PAP, because they were voted in without any clear mention of their jobs' required specifications a.k.a. KPIs. Thus the screaming of the cows (Ringisei).

But all this isn't quite about what KPIs they have. The present state of affairs has not even reached that stage of transparency yet. It's about on what basis (KPIs, pure randomness, the 66.6% vote?) they are paying themselves more. Let those criteria be held up for open scrutiny by the citizens, our country's stakeholders - only then will the increase in pay begin to be rationally justified.

Alternatively, the pay peg to the private sector would be acceptable if, like the masses they govern, each and every one of them could do this: Go to a private sector company with absolutely no ties to their original company Singapore (no suggestion of possible corruption or vested interest for our PAP, no), apply for a job, get selected for the interview, pass the interview, get offered a certain salary, and then bring that salary amount back to their original company Singapore as a competing quote. How the ministers are going to put this into effect, well we will just have to rely on their work ethics to find such jobs.

Other comparisons have been offered, from the method of selection of PAP ministers (LuckyTan), to the lack of further increase in Public Assistance (PA) funding, to the recent GST hike to "help the poor" ...

On to social work pay now. Yapdates mentions (found via The Void Deck: Minsta Pay Increase Special!) that people do not want to become social workers because of the low pay.

"I think back on those social organizations where social-workers receive one of the lowest pay in the whole economy, yet people continue to say that the work they do are 'priceless.' Isn't it common to hear positive comments about social workers helping an unemployed widow of many children find a job? Yet how many people will raise their hands to become social workers? Not many, as one of the reasons is that it does not pay adequately). "

Please, this is a pretty inaccurate analogy. From anecdotal evidence, I have heard that the threshold for "being paid adequately" in the social service sector is a question of whether one can support a 1-child family on social worker income. This criterion is one of basic subsistence; it is a far cry from the proposed increase in ministerial pay. So please do not insult the social work profession in this manner, by saying that its inadequate pay is comparable to the ministers' inadequate pay and that its selflessness is comparable to the ministers' selflessness. Notably, on Jan 21 2007, a day after the ST ran their Saturday profile on Social Workers' Day, Dr Vivian Balakrishnan announced in the ST that 11m would be set aside for the social service sector, some of which would go towards an increase in social workers' pay. 11m happens to be more or less the same sum as that required for the salaries of 10 Cabinet ministers to reach their proposed benchmark.

Which leads on to whether ministers are more talented than social workers? Undoubtedly they are. (okay, indubitably, you pedants. :) ) But...

...On just recompense for the fruits of one's labour and the effect of talent in achieving those. LuckyTan has another interesting piece on this. Less rantily, there will always be a pay differential amongst various occupations, though all are required to keep the society running. This pay differential would ideally be based only on the fruits of one's talent (therefore, the existence of KPIs) as a contribution to society, but this view ignores pre-existing variation in people's talents or backgrounds in contributing to those fruits. Say, if one had enough space at home to store all the books one wanted to read, one would tend to buy those books instead of renting or borrowing them, thus enabling 365/24/7 access to the ideas in those books. This is quite different from borrowing those same books and taking the extra time to summarize them quickly for future reference before returning them, to achieve the same outcome of round-the-clock access. In the former, the cost is in money; the latter's cost is in time. If society places a premium on group availability of the individual's time instead of group availability of the individual's money, then the financially poorer one would be disadvantaged no matter what claims of equal starting points the meritocracy rhetoric has. The word for unequal starting points, in the social work conceptual framework, is 'privilege'.

So there are pre-existing variations in people's talents or backgrounds already. But does it therefore follow that those variations must be reinforced, or worse, solely attributed to one's individual intrinsic 'talent'? Is it really true that the poor deserve to live poorly while the rich deserve to live richly? Well this is up for debate and is a huge topic in itself, but I have taken the step to be a social work student so I clearly do not think so. Neither do the many people who have made their stand clear that the nature of public service is one of selfless generosity.

Ian, especially, talks about how public service can never be bought over by large sums of money, just recompense for the fruits of one's labour aside.

"Finally, I think the people in civil service and government should be people whose morality cannot be affected by money. We shouldn’t give more money to ensure people don’t be corrupt. We should give more money because it is fair to give them that amount of money for the work they do and their contributions to Singapore. To say X amount of money is enough to prevent corruption is to me naive because someone else could always offer X + 1. But if the argument is that there is indeed a threshold where a person would be less susceptible to be corrupt (if not totally not corrupt), then shouldn’t there also be a threshold where enough pay is enough to want to keep the person from jumping ship to the private sector.

And there is indeed such a threshold. It is the benchmark to private sector salaries. But the benchmark will change won’t it. And if such a benchmark changes which means the threshold changes, then by working backwards, doesn’t that mean the people we have are just being bought off now at current market rates so they won’t be corrupt.

And if so, doesn’t that mean they have a price. Which comes back to the first point. If there is a price, there is always an X + 1. "

It was supposed to be about Love and Charity. Are you committed to serve?

[Edit: One more thing I forgot to discuss. Social workers are bound by their national organisations' Codes of Ethics. The comparable document for government ministers would presumably be the Constitution. Your thoughts on this?]

Faith (Part 2)

This is a continuation of the previous post but it was written in January - some things had changed from Nov to Jan.

It should be noted that "The finished Penal Code Amendments Bill, with adjustments for opinions from the public feedback consultation exercise, will be tabled for Second and confirmatory Third Reading in Parliament in the first quarter of 2007." Which is soon. :)

The January 2007 issue of the Singapore Law Review has a editorial and some contributed articles on the Penal Code amendments, do look through it if you can.

1. Responses to this social issue in Singapore (Key Debates)

In this part (II) of the paper I continue the discussion on whether civil unions or gay marriages can be legalized in Singapore, and the steps that can be taken to achieve social legitimization of such partnerships.

Since the submission of part (I) of this paper on 17 November 2006, I have had the privilege to participate in my personal capacity in the women’s focus group discussion on the proposed Penal Code amendments, organized by the government feedback unit REACH on 30 November 2006 [1]. It was explicitly stated by the REACH moderators in their introductory preamble that lesbian sex had always been and would continue to not be criminalised, although they acknowledged that section 377A of the Penal Code (pertaining to all sexual contact between men) was proposed to be left unchanged and that this was a point of dispute. One of the moderators was Ms Ellen Lee, cited in part (I) of this paper as speaking for the general Singaporean population in being averse to the removal of s.377A. The mood however was relaxed and friendly, with the moderators taking on the role of facilitators instead of being arbitrating judges, and a large part of the discussion was taken up on the sexual aspects of the proposed amendments. Five of the nine women who spoke made it clear before they began that they were attending the event in their private capacity, and spoke in favour of abolishing s.377A. The remaining four were from the local feminist group Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) and spoke both about abolishing s.377A for moral and economic reasons and about extending the coverage of the marital rape amendments.

Not long after on 13 December the mainstream broadsheet The Straits Times reported a summary of all the focus group discussions (Nadarajan, 2006) [2] in a manner that suggested that only AWARE had mentioned abolishing s.377A and for the completely inaccurate wrongly cited reason of lack of police enforcement at that. To clarify, the REACH moderators had clearly stated during the session’s preamble that s.377A although left unchanged was not going to be enforced as is the status quo, and yet passionate views about abolishing s.377A still continued in full flow after that. Lack of enforcement was never an issue in the ensuing discussion. In the Straits Times article, no views of any of the private individuals or AWARE members who had spoken about s.377A were quoted, nor paraphrased.

In part (I) I had expressed the hope that greater social acceptance of non-heterosexual Singaporeans would eventually be supported bureaucratically. In light of the Straits Times report, Singapore is only in the extremely early stages of legal acceptance of homosexual partnerships. The finished Penal Code Amendments Bill, with adjustments for opinions from the public feedback consultation exercise, will be tabled for Second and confirmatory Third Reading in Parliament in the first quarter of 2007.

2. Strengths and Limitations of this Response with reference to Gay Marriages and Civil Unions

Although the likelihood of gay marriages and civil unions being legalized in Singapore within the next 15 years looks bleak, a framework and a plan must be set up before any goal is to be set on its path to becoming reality. Blogging has become a popular method of expression for Singaporeans, and the government is paying enough attention to thought expression in this medium [3] that it has set up its very own blog for junior members of Parliament, at http://p65.sg/ . Bloggers’ views have been cited in the mainstream media and by journalists when questioning government ministers. One of the issues that can be raised in the blogging medium is therefore the issue of gay marriages and civil unions. Mr Alex Au, of the blog Yawning Bread at http://www.yawningbread.org/, is a noted gay rights activist and well-respected for his clarity of thought on matters not limited to gay rights. Local pro-LGBT organisations such as Sayoni, People Like Us, and Oogachaga have also formed communities by blogging on their own websites on the Internet. As of the present moment the Singapore government is not censoring any of these websites nor blogs.

3. Social Workers’ Roles – A Model of Stages

‘Begin where the client is’, goes the social work intervention axiom. Bearing in mind the current rigidly conservative legal and social environments of Singapore, the ‘traditional’ institution of marriage was defined in very practical terms for this paper, as the only existing definition of marriage in Singapore to be between a man and a woman, in line with section 12 of the Women’s Charter. The combination of ‘gay marriages and civil unions’ in this paper’s title is deliberately chosen to reflect the early stage of legal acceptance of same-sex partnerships in Singapore, as the distinction between ‘marriage’ and ‘civil union’ is only viable if acceptance of rights and privileges of homosexuals is already widespread. The recent October 2006 case of Mark Lewis and Dennis Winslow et al. v. Gwendolyn L. Harris etc. et al. (Supreme Court of New Jersey, 2006) will be used as a guiding example of the various stages of specific conditions necessary for same-sex partnerships to achieve full marriage or civil union status.

In the New Jersey case, firstly it was decided that the definition of marriage and its associated rights and privileges could not be defined as between a man and a woman because the denial of equivalent rights and privileges to same-sex couples violated the New Jersey Constitution’s equal protection clause (p. 22). A look at Singapore’s corresponding equal protection clause in its Constitution, as mentioned in part (I), states that persons shall not be discriminated against based on religion, race, descent or place of birth, and that “all persons are equal before the law” [emphasis mine]. The most fundamental document of Singapore law thus suggests Singapore law itself to be the initiating point for change; it offers no expository insight into the basic moral need of the law being constantly vigilant in at least considering the judicial possibilities of reflecting contemporary social mores. Neither does it offer any broad ideals for law review committees to act upon.

It may however be fair to say that the Singapore Constitution is too venerable a document to be open to rewriting and change, by association with the touchstone Constitutions of other countries. In what other ways then might Singapore law itself monitor its own changes and adaptations? The New Jersey legislature had enacted an amendment to its Law Against Discrimination (LAD) in 1992 to include sexual orientation. The LAD stipulates that homosexuals will not be discriminated against in “pursuing employment opportunities, gaining access to public accommodations, obtaining housing and real property, seeking credit and loans from financial institutions, and engaging in business transactions.” In comparison, Singapore fares relatively badly in terms of principles in common with the New Jersey LAD; the legal and social environment is pro-business and thus in business transactions sexual orientation is irrelevant. However in the pursuit of employment opportunities, access to public housing, and financial credit, it has no anti-discriminatory laws for sexual orientation or same-sex couples. In fact, as in the above anecdote on the Penal Code amendments focus group discussion, the not improbable suggestion to strike off existing homophobic legislation that is not enforced anyway was not well-received by the government authorities. Logically, if Singapore is to move towards acceptance of same-sex partnerships, section 377A has to be struck off the Penal Code. This would clear the way for other changes in legal rights pertaining to same-sex couples.

In brief, New Jersey enacted a Domestic Partnership Act in 2004 that allowed same-sex couples to have death estate rights, guardianship rights, tax-related benefits, medical visitation and decision-making rights, and spousal health and pension benefits. In the cited October 2006 case, additional full rights of marriage afforded to same-sex couples were as follows: joint property ownership, tuition assistance for tertiary education for children and spouses of selected groups, testimonial confidentiality given to spouse of an accused in a criminal case, spousal care and childcare leave benefits, revocation of rights upon divorce, duty of care to children from the relationship, spousal maintenance allowance after divorce, and division of assets after divorce. All these rights are well-afforded to married couples in Singapore, but not to same-sex couples. We may be able to introduce these rights to same-sex couples in Singapore in similar stages.

The matter of children in a family with same-sex parents can be operationalized legally and socially as well. Allen and Demo (1995, p. 119; cited in part (I)) [4] has an overview of how family research is turning away from the original paradigm of “benchmark family versus deviant alternative family” to embrace the diversity of family types now in existence. Herek (2006) [5] describes the legal recognition of same-sex families throughout the United States in a comparatively up-to-date review.

Social workers can advocate for these changes in policy.

4. Conclusion

Given that social change does not occur overnight, and that the lack of gay marriages and civil unions though bringing much pain to homosexual individuals and couples does not fare well in comparison with income inequality and structural unemployment issues in Singapore, it is not easy to describe how this may be desirable for Singapore in the long term. Singapore is not a country known for prizing its civil liberties above economic ones, but perhaps when that changes, the stage-by-stage framework suggested or modified by future events will come in useful in thinking about the issue of homosexual rights and making gay marriages a reality here.


References

[1] Another first-person account by Ms. pleinelune can be found here on the Sayoni site.

[2] Nadarajan, B 2006, ‘Feedback focuses on sex laws: marital rape laws inadequate, say some; continued outlawing of gay sex also questioned’, The Straits Times, 13 December 2006. I am unable to find the fulltext version of this article online and instead provide a link to Mr Wang's partial extract of it here.

[3] Also see Ms. Kitana, 'Why the internet is the most powerful voice we have', 26 October 2006. <http://kitana.wordpress.com/2006/10/26/why-the-internet-is-the-most-powerful-voice-we-have/>

[4] Allen, KR & Demo, DH 1995, ‘The families of lesbians and gay men: a new frontier in family research’, Journal of Marriage and the Family, vol. 57, no. 1, pp. 111-127.

[5] Herek, GM 2006, ‘Legal recognition of same-sex relationships in the United States: a social science perspective’, American Psychologist, vol. 61, no. 6, pp. 607-621.

Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You

Will it change the world? Of course not. Will it change anything? Not directly. But is it worth three hours of your time? Yes, definitely. Bloggers often feel themselves to be at liberty to pass comment on political issues and politicians. They do have, and must have, that liberty. But I cannot help but feel that their commentary and criticisms would be taken so much further, and would be delivered/crafted which so much more insight and clear-mindedness, if they were willing to step up and say these things openly and face to face with the person/policymaker they are criticizing, so that the latter will have the right of reply and also so that you, as a commentator, do justice to your views. [...]

A reply means it is a conversation. [...] It does not mean that I am converted to their thought - often I come away with new points of disagreement. But my perspective is always developed, because it has ventured out of its safety zone, and dared to engage. If we become blase and disinterested, distancing ourselves, then is it really the government's fault when we complain of an affective divide?

- Gayle Goh

Mr Wang, Gayle, Rambling Librarian and Bernard Leong have written about this. Not.

It seems to me that there are two issues here: one, talking about the blogosphere in the mainstream media (MSM), which has been cautiously disparaging of 'the new media' at best and virulently abrasive at its jealous worst ('blogs are worse than porn'). And two, the opportunity of having a face-to-face conversation with a Cabinet minister. Gayle's position, if I have not misunderstood it, is that the advantages present in the latter outweigh the pitfalls of the former. Mr Wang's position is simply the uselessness of the latter. (Although he was the first to get the ball rolling. He maintains this view in comments to the post though, at time of this post's writing.) Rambling Librarian says the personal disadvantages he perceived in the face-to-face conversation outweighed its advantages. BL takes a more convivial tone in saying that "the discussion before and after the actual event was actually more interesting" and goes on to hint of the advantages of a face-to-face meeting in his chatter about "surprising excerpts".

So I'm not sure how to title this post, since everyone has begun by talking about very different things. I could turn this into yet another insipid post on the joys of civilised discourse, but the question is: How does meeting someone in person enhance respect for the other?

(I wholeheartedly support Gayle's take on it, by the way. If that makes me '[bursting] with emotion', so be it.)

This isn't an easy question to answer. The Singapore government has often been accused of being a faceless monolith. In fact there is this joke going round about how the Feedback Unit was renamed REACH because its original acronym cut a bit too close to its actual response to citizens. But my cynicism digresses.

As a general rule, it is a given that we don't rob or kill people whose viewpoints and hopes and dreams and actions we know, as compared to those we don't know. (Some of us still do. But it's considered a disease.) Well, it's much harder to coldly kill someone we feel has a wholeness of his own and yet a shared humanity to ourselves, even if it is only something as irrational as having eyes, a nose and a mouth. One only has to look at Mickey Mouse's cute neonate features to understand that humans are very strange. Alternatively, nobody loves a sea urchin but harp seals (oh, so adorable!) were a hot environmental cause a few years ago.

So what makes George Yeo less credible than a harp seal? Is it because he lacks "wholeness of his own self" as a Cabinet minister? Do you think that for any person in a value-judged profession, his professional identity must necessarily have eclipsed his personal one at all times? Even if it is this profession.

"I make no apologies that the PAP is the Government and the Government is the PAP."

- PM Lee Kuan Yew, 1982
via Singabloodypore

Perhaps the story from this is that politicians are people too.

P.S. At the time of this post's completion, Michael Palmer has replied to Mr Wang to apologize and invite him to re-post his comment that was, I quote, inadvertently censored on his p65 blog post.

Circularity and Balance

Allow me to reframe F.O.'s belief in civil and rational discourse in this post. It converges with my own aims; call it confirmation bias.

In any discussion,

"... the development of a critical approach to our own understanding of, as well as to existing knowledge about, the world is fundamental for students and educators alike."

- Anonymous

Let's ignore the part about "students and educators" for the moment to talk about critical reflection. Critical reflection is one of the higher-order cognitive skills of mankind, and like other such intelligences, is prized both for itself as well as for its practical usefulness.

In terms of style, critically reflective discussion can go one of two ways: circularity, and balance.

Valuing critical reflection for itself, i.e. ‘understanding of the world’ as in the quote, does not convey the world's impact upon our own understanding as in the ‘person-in-environment’ perspective, and therefore has its limitations in real life. This refers to people who hold their opinions very firmly and refuse to budge from them.

One could think of the discussion between two (or more) such "critically reflective" people as a circle on a plane. They will endlessly be at cross-purposes. Now hold the image of circle on plane firmly in your mind for later comparison.

What distinguishes circularity from balance?

Balance is where discussion moves away from going round in circles to going somewhere else. You have two (or more) people who hold their opinions firmly but can be budged due to rational or emotional persuasion, or what F.O. calls civil and rational discourse.

So instead of limiting themselves to two dimensions on the flat plane (you say to-may-to, i say to-mah-to), it is possible that they still go round in circles but in a screw sort of symmetry instead.

This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "screw you".

But more seriously, screw-type critically reflective discussions takes you places; if you have a preference for exploring circles in flat planes, screw-type discussions gives you a wonderful variety of circles to play with. And if you have the other preference for learning from others (balance, or screw-type discussions), civil and rational discourse is a great way to gradually do so without too much cognitive dissonance occurring.

These are possibilities.

(Update 02/01/07: While searching for something else, I have just come across one of Catherine Lim's articles in which she says "One gets the surreal feeling that everyone seems trapped in a Samuel Beckett-like circularity that nobody knows how to break out of". How apropos. Link here: 'Utopia or dystopia' ST 10 May 2005)

Comfy Chairs

From the ST, Dec 16 2006:

... thousands of middle-aged managers who lost their jobs during the late 1990s downturn and have yet to make their comeback.

Many have tertiary education, speak good English, own private property and used to hold middle and senior managerial positions paying $5,000 to $20,000 a month.

But these days they shuffle around office buildings and shopping centres, a tatty plastic bag of dog-eared CVs and documents in hand, looking for job-vacancy signs.

They first ended up on the chopping board after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Since then, the forces of technology, management de-layering, right-sizing and outsourcing have shoved even more off their comfy swivel chairs.

[...]

In particular, psychiatrist and suicidologist Chia Boon Hock, who has studied thousands of suicide notes, is keenly watching this vulnerable group. He notes that the chief reason why those aged 45 to 59 kill themselves is financial. (emphasis mine)

Sitting on my comfy swivel chair at home reading about other mature adults being shoved off the ultimate Comfy Swivel Chair ... struck fear into this one's heart, especially when I am wondering about my own financial future here from age 40 onwards.

*

Is it more true that some industries are overhyped and later marginalized, or more that individuals blindly follow trends like lemmings under the 'old social compact' , such lemming-like behaviour subsequently much criticized by the government when things started to go sour? What do you think motivates each and every person's choice of career path?

In another paragraph of the same article, finally even the ST itself has said, "'self-improvement' is a bad word for many in this group, who used up chunks of savings to pay for courses leading to diplomas and degrees, only to find these of little use when the crunch came"! Also see this article by Terence Chong on Dec 11.

Please take heed of your own chairs before they become so much flotsam in the ocean.