September 09, 12:06 PM 
514 Chai Chee Lane 03-16, Singapore 469029 The Workers' Party East Coast GRC candidate Gerald Giam has come out to clarify the statement he made about the Government cutting foreign manpower growth that has hurt companies.
He made this clarification at a walkabout on Wednesday morning (9 September) to the media:
I would like to correct some misreporting in yesterday's report in what in some of the media organisations has been reporting about what I said yesterday regarding the foreign worker tightening.
Workers' Party supports the Government tightening the foreign worker inflow. We feel that there is no choice to tighten the inflow because of the excesses of the previous decade where there were a lot of foreigners that were brought in and there wasn't sufficient planning done.
But what we are doing looking forward is that we feel that businesses need more predictability, which is why in our manifesto, we have proposed that the Government set clear targets, clear timelines for reducing the foreign worker dependency ratios. And this should be done independent of electoral cycles and independent of other things that will be affected by political considerations.
What we want to do is to give businesses more chance to plan, and be able to predict what is going to happen in the future.
The clarification captured in video by The Straits Times can be viewed here:
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Posted by The Straits Times on Tuesday, 8 September 2015
The WP manifesto's chapter on limiting foreign manpower growth says that WP does "not seek to keep foreign workers out of Singapore, but for their numbers to be held steady". They propose this because they want to "focus on growing and upgrading the Singaporean workforce."
The manifesto states that their approach "involves keeping the non-resident population constant at around 1.5-1.6 million as long as we achieve the 1% resident workforce growth target. This allows for a temporary addition of foreign workers to make up for shortfalls if we are not able to achieve the 1% target."
In other words, should Singapore's resident manpower growth hit 1% or more, non-resident population will not grow beyond 1.6 million.
In relation to Giam's comment that the Government should set clear targets and timelines for reducing foreign workers, the WP manifesto included a proposal on foreign worker ratios. It proposes that "sectors where productivity lags global developed country norms, clear long-term targets should be set for reducing foreign worker dependency ratios." It further states that "five to ten year horizon depending on the sector and the nature of business" should be set.
Top photo by Christopher Wong.
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