|
|
|
|
|
|
This letter was written in mid-2001, in response to a series of newspaper reports in which government ministers criticised the unemployed for being "choosy" for not taking up cleaning jobs. It was offered to The Straits Times as a Letter to the Editor, but not published.
Choosy?
When you cannot help somebody, the next best thing you can do is criticise him for not helping himself. And so, many jobless Singaporeans are now being criticised for being “choosy”.
I know of a graduate - with an engineering degree plus an MBA - who has applied for over 120 jobs and has yet to receive a single job offer. His friend, with a Business Administration degree, has applied for nearly 200 jobs, also without success.
They are not choosy. The engineer with MBA, for example, had worked 20 years in multi-national companies. Yet he applied for lower level jobs as well as higher level jobs in small companies, for jobs within and outside his industry, for civil service and private sector jobs.
Recently, I read in the ST about another man, without much educational qualifications, who remained jobless in spite of having applied for over 500 jobs!
These are people with skills and talents. Even those without much qualifications may have the skills and talents to be supervisors, technicans and so on. When they apply for lower level jobs, they are rejected for being “over-qualified”. It’s not easy.
Now, just because job openings for people to clean hotel rooms and toilets are not being taken up, the unemployed are criticised for being choosy.
Recently, I was offered a job that:
- Required me to go against certain deep personal beliefs.
- Did not pay well anyway.
I rejected the offer and, yes, some of my friends felt I was choosy.
Sure, when a person gets hungry enough, he will grab anything that comes along. Women will prostitute their bodies, men (and women) will prostitute their souls. Must we come to this?
We are, indeed, in a very sad state of affairs when people capable of earning a few thousand dollars are criticised for not taking up cleaning jobs that pay a mere few hundred .
As a nation, we have failed to create jobs that match the abilities of our people. Can our government ministers - who are said to possess the nation’s brightest minds - solve this problem?
Or do they only know how to chide the unemployed for being choosy?