Thursday 29 November 2012

good god we had a strike!

I live on the peaceful republic island called Singapore.
Our government has learnt to be a little relaxed in its rules and regulations (commandments) but we still have a very long way to go before free speech (which is overrated they tell me) and the right to protest (again I heard its overrated) are a norm.

We in Singapore have learnt to toe the line and through the years have become totally apathetic in regards to the rules, regulations, laws and whatnot.  We just don't care anymore as we aren't heard.  We may have elected our government in,  and the only reason we have done it, is because we never had a decent enough opposition party that we thought could measure up. We thought  ' well the current government has had a good track record, theres always growth, multi national companies come to our country to invest because we are stable and the government has a tight rein on all the happenings.'
So we plod on, we don't rock the boat.  we like our cushy existence, we like that the government does everything for us including thinking.

Our country was a migrant society, built by importing people from all over ( My great grand father came here from India because the British dangled a good salary for English speaking civil servants), and so it continues to today.  Singaporeans don't want to work as waiters, waitresses, cleaners, factory hands, we want the white collar jobs, we want to sit in offices and have air-conditioning blow up our asses all day. So we have to import labour to keep the economy going, to have enough people to work the blue collar jobs to keep the rest of us lazy asses in comfort.
So we imported people from India and Bangladesh, Thailand,  Myanmar and China to build our roads and work on construction sites.  We imported maids to clean our homes and be nanny to our children, from Indonesia and the Philippines. We imported people from China and Malaysia to drive our buses.  We brought in  all these people to make sure wages were kept low, to make sure MNC's stayed as we were a cheap place to do business.  We began to see them as 'drones' not people.  We didn't talk to them, we didn't interact with them, we didn't appreciate them.
we didn't treat them very well.  we still don't.

So what happens when you  import people that don't follow the rules, you get the imported bus drivers from China going on strike about living conditions and salary.......

the times they are a changing.............



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