Hello again guys, in today's post, I want to talk about a common problem that I have observed in some companies and whilst I'm not saying it is exclusively a Singaporean problem, it does seem to happen a lot more in Singapore than in the West. This is when workers are overworked and subjected to hideously long hours because the company refuses to hire more staff - so here's the example from Singapore that I have stumbled upon on Youtube. It is about an old couple who run a cake shop in Tiong Bahru and they are retiring this year, the old lady in her 70s Mrs Soh said to CNA in an interview that she gets about 4 to 6 hours a sleep a night because she has to start work at 5 am to start preparing all the ingredients at the shop, the work doesn't stop till 11 to 12 pm, sometimes even 1 or 2 am. It was even reported that she wold work till 4 am during Chinese New Year to fulfill bulk orders. When I read that line, I did a double take and thought, 你这么辛苦 (you're suffering so much) what about sleep? The thing is in Asian culture, when we see an example of a hardworking person like Mrs Soh, we praise her for her excellent work ethic whilst totally ignoring the toll this would take on her health. I often chat with my friends in Singapore on social media and I'm so used to getting messages from them in the middle of the night, either they're up late working or they are up stupidly early to get to work. One friend recently told me he worked from 6 am to 2 am just to complete an important audit and I didn't want to nag at him when he was already suffering this much, but that is not sustainable in the long run and the lack of sleep will take a toll on his health.
So let's stick to the example of Mrs Soh's cake shop in Tiong Bahru: there is a simple solution of course to her extremely long hours. She could easily hire more staff instead of doing everything herself, thus giving her more time to get enough sleep. So take the early starts for example, she could hire a bunch of workers to come to the shop early in the morning to do all the preparation early in the morning so she could get more sleep, so if these workers arrive at 5 am and work an 8 hour shift, they would finish at 1 pm, which then allows them to have the rest of the day to do other tasks or get some much needed rest. The other option would be to allow Mrs Soh to get to bed a lot earlier - so they would probably stop baking in the afternoon and the last customers would be those who come to the cake shop, looking to buy breakfast for the next day. That means Mrs Soh could leave the shop by about 5 pm once the last cakes are baked, then hire some staff to handle the sales of the produce for the customers in the evening and do all the cleaning up in the premises. That way, she would have supervised the most difficult parts of the production process and can get an early night after delegating the much easier tasks to her staff. Whilst all of those do sound like sensible options, hiring more staff would mean increasing the cost of production. She would have to either raise her prices or take a hit in terms of her profits - neither of these options are attractive of course. In the short run, it is undoubtedly cheaper if Mrs Soh does everything herself as she is the owner of the business but in my opinion, she is still paying for it by sacrificing a lot in the process in terms of the massive toll it takes on her health as well as the lack of free time she has for family life and leisure activities.
Don't get me wrong, this is in no way an attack on Mrs Soh - it's her business and she can run it the way she wants. Thus allow me to use another friend in Singapore to show how this mentality can work in a different context, let's call this friend Daniel (not his real name). Daniel has a good job as an accountant and to all intents and purposes, he is a highly skilled graduate who commands a good salary. However, he works extremely long hours because his company simply hasn't hired enough people to do the work given to his department. Thus Daniel finds that he has to work very long hours, including on weekends just to be able to meet the deadlines set by the management. Ideally Daniel would like at least two more people in his team to share the work load but that would mean paying out two more salaries of qualified accountants - that's something his company is very reluctant to do as it would increase their costs and cut into their profits. Daniel explained to me, "it's not too bad, like if we have to work very late then the boss would order dinner for us if it is after midnight, then he would arrange for us to be taken home by taxi." I told Daniel that I don't need free dinners and taxi rides home, I'd rather just leave the office at a decent time so I can then make my own dinner at home and get to bed at a normal time. Daniel just sighed and said, "Singapore is like that one lah, if I refuse to work like that, then they will replace me with someone else who is willing to accept such working conditions. If I wanted to leave at 6 pm when the rest of my team is working, I think everyone would think that I am not a team player - like I am not pulling my weight when everyone else is working so hard. Thus I have little choice but to work as hard as the others in my company even though we're all similarly overworked and underpaid. Sigh. There's always way too much work for my small team. #辛苦"
There could be some similarity between Daniel's situation and Mrs Soh - after all, it could be that she is forced to keep her prices so low because all her competitors (ie. the other cake shops in the vicinity) are also working crazy long hours instead of hiring more staff to do the work and if Mrs Soh hired more staff and increased her prices by 10% to 15% to reflect her higher costs, then she would lose a lot of her customers. If that is indeed the case, then Mrs Soh would have little choice but to force herself to work those crazy long hours in order to guard her share of the market. People like Mrs Soh and Daniel feel like they have little choice but to put up with such extremely long working hours because others around them are doing just that, but do they have a choice? Well, I think they do but it is not easy of course. For Mrs Soh, she would need to come up with a USP (unique selling point) which would make her cakes so unique, delicious and Instagramable that the 15% price hike wouldn't deter her customers if they simply cannot get a similar product elsewhere. As for Daniel, he has far less control over what he does as an accountant seeking employment but he can try to look for a much better place to work where the employer isn't trying to cut costs at every opportunity. Most people in Daniel's position wouldn't hesitate to leave if they could find a job with better working conditions and then his employer would be then have to find a replacement. That is a situation you want to avoid because there's always a period of training and adaptation for anyone when they start a new job so if an employer treats their staff so badly they experience a high staff turnover, then that would end up costing them a lot more in the long run; thus what Daniel's employer is doing just not sustainable in the long run. After all, you want to retain staff you have invested a lot of time and money training.
The thing is for older folks like Mrs Soh in her 70s, perhaps they have not had the kind of education necessary to be dynamic, creative and innovative when it comes to running their business; those are qualities that I would associate with young people running start up companies but not with older folks near the end of their working lives. Thus it could be argued that it has never really been a part of her business culture to innovate and the emphasis has always been placed on hard work; there's a word for this in Chinese: 吃苦 - it literally means 'eat bitter', but it means the ability to endure hardship. Now don't get me wrong, as a gymnast, I truly know the meaning and value of 吃苦 and anyone who has done any kind of competitive sport at a very high level would feel the same way. In sports, you reap what you sow and you have to be prepared to work bloody hard to achieve the results you want - that's what 吃苦 is all about. However, I'd like to think there's more to it than that and I feel there's a lot to be said about working smart rather than just working hard. What surprises me is the fact that Daniel is going down the same route that Mrs Soh has gone down, I don't want to be too hard on her as she's of my parents' generation and they grew up in a different world but Daniel? We're around the same age and surely he is a lot better educated than someone like Mrs Soh - so why isn't he able to break the cycle of simply relying on the ethos of 吃苦 then? Why isn't he able to say to himself, "I'm not going down that same path that my parents' generation did, we are much better educated than them, we can do better and we deserve better - much better."
Whilst we are analyzing the cultural significance of the way Chinese people view the concept of 吃苦, I want to share another word that comes to mind: 辛苦 - it literally means 'suffering bitterly'. So when my Chinese clients wants to acknowledge that I had just done them a massive favour by helping them translate a whole pile of technical information, they would say 辛苦你了 - so they are acknowledging that they have inconvenienced me by making me do all that hard work for them and thus 辛苦你了 is also a polite way to thank someone who has done you a massive favour. Then there's also the phrase 痛苦 - it literally means bitter pain, but it refers to terrible suffering like what the people of Ukraine are going through right now in the war. I'd like to think that you wouldn't just 吃苦 and 辛苦 as if it was some kind of character building exercise, it has to serve a purpose. Thus when I see poor working class people struggle to make ends meet and have to endure terrible working conditions, I roll my eyes and think, what's the point of all that suffering? If you're training for the Olympics and have a chance to win the gold medal, then sure all that 吃苦 and 辛苦 has genuine meaning and purpose. However, if you're working insane hours just to make ends meet and you feel you really don't have any choice but to do it, then I hate to be the bearer of bad news here but there really isn't any meaning or purpose to that kind of suffering - it doesn't achieve anything and there's little point in trying to romanticize it or pass it off as some kind of great virtue. Yet for many working class people, they face a daily struggle full of 吃苦 and 辛苦 and hence they are so very desperate for all their suffering and hardship to mean something when really, it is just 痛苦 at the end of the day.
In China, this kind of work culture is referred to as 9-9-6: you work from 9 am to 9 pm 6 days a week, clocking in at 72 hours a week. When I was in Shenzhen back in 2018, I was suffering from jet lag and I couldn't sleep: my hotel room faced a few office buildings and I remember seeing workers still leaving the building way after midnight, suggesting that it wasn't uncommon for them to work past midnight. This does leave me puzzled of course because I don't have to endure such working conditions as a white collar worker who is rewarded for being creative, innovative and ingenious when it comes to my problem solving skills. I don't become more creative, innovative and ingenious if I am in the office 72 hours a week staring at my computer. My management understands that so they do not insist on me coming into the office at a certain time or spending a required number of hours in the office as long as I great at my job. Thanks to the internet, I don't have to physically be in the office in order to get work done. There's also a difference in expectations: if there is a problem that needs a complex solution, my clients and management don't expect me to come up with the perfect solution within the hour. They realize that if they give me more time to go through all the options, do my research, speak to some experts and have a good think about it, then I'm likely to come up with a better solution. However, not everyone has that luxury: in a recent post I talked about my friend Hannah who is a coach at my gymnastics club - she gets paid a flat fee for every lesson she teaches so the more hours a week she works, the more she gets paid and so there is a direct correlation between the number of hours she works and how much she earns. That's often the case with a lot of working class jobs but I wouldn't consider Daniel's job to be working class yet he seems to be stuck with a working class mindset.
So I'm not saying that this 9-9-6 culture is purely an Asian thing, people like the gymnastics coach Hannah in the West are forced to work long hours because her hourly rate is so low that unless she puts in a full working week, she doesn't earn enough money to make ends meet. To be totally blunt, Hannah is poor for a reason and if she wants to become richer, then she has got to change jobs to alter that relationship between the number of hours she works and her income. I have talked about the Big Mac Index in a previous post, having raised the topic with my nephew when I was coaching him for his A level economics exam. It is a measure of productivity: how long do you have to work in order to buy a Big Mac at your local McDonald's? So this erases the differences in local prices: prices are more expensive at the McDonald's in Switzerland but Swiss wages are higher too, by the same token, a Big Mac at the McDonald's in the Philippines is a lot cheaper, but local wages are lower too. So if Alan and Ben both earned $1,000 this week but Alan worked 2 hours whilst Ben worked 72 hours - Alan is a lawyer who spent 2 hours with consulting his client this week and his hourly rate is $500 whilst Ben is one of those office workers who adheres to a 9-9-6 schedule, thus Ben's hourly rate is just $13.88 and whilst both Alan and Ben earned the same amount of money that week, it would not be sufficient to simply look at their income per se to assert that they are on level footing when it comes to their ability to earn money but we need to measure their productivity - their big Mac Index. Whilst I'm sure Daniel understands how this concept works, he just chooses to ignore the inconvenient truth; I don't want raise this issue with him, as I don't want to antagonize him.
Therein lies your answer, Daniel needs to be in a company where they are actively seeking to find new ways to improve productivity and add more value to their service, rather than simply cut corners by forcing their staff to work ridiculously long hours for free (or little more than the price of a dinner and a free taxi ride home). If Daniel is not in a position to try to make his employers adopt a better business strategy, then it is time for him to find a new job. So there you go, that's it from me on this topic, what do you think? Have you met people who don't quite know the difference between 吃苦, 辛苦 and 痛苦? Do you consider the 9-9-6 culture 吃苦, 辛苦 or 痛苦? Have you met anyone like Daniel or are you like him? Why do some people choose to romanticize suffering instead of recognizing it as an important warning sign that something is terribly wrong? Is suffering in small doses a necessary evil in the name of 吃苦 in order to succeed? When do you know your suffering has become too much to bear and that things have to change? Is Mrs Soh who has to work so hard she gets barely 4 hours of sleep a night totally oblivious to her own 痛苦? Are people who work such crazy long hours oblivious to the concepts of efficiency and productivity? Please leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.
I blame the media for portraying that suffering is part and parcel of work. The media often uses the suffering of our parents to rationalize and motivate the younger generation (perhaps only the working class) to be fillal. There is also some truth to Daniel's observations that there are people who are willing to be in his shoes just to be paid his salary. Then again, this shouldn't stop him from finding a new job with better working conditions. There could be other reasons to explain his willingness to stay on.
ReplyDeleteHi again IA, I think it's more than the media - it is part of our Asian culture. After all, the concepts of chi ku and xin ku are even a part of our language, like how do you translate chi ku into English without losing a lot of the connotations about the value of hard work? The concept of chi ku was often used by my gymnastics from China - ie. you need to suffer now, endure the hardship during the training sessions, week after week, month after month, but it will pay off when you become the champion. So within the right context, yes chi ku can be meaningful - we can romanticize that as the story of the young athlete working so hard to win the gold medal at the Olympics. But for a lot of working class people who work so hard for so little reward, that isn't chi ku per se, it's more like tong ku, they're just suffering for little or no reward, it is virtually abuse. As for the suffering of our parents, well, the way I see it, I see so many working class parent stuck in crap, low-paid jobs because they have to pay the bills to bring up the kids - they can't take a hiatus from work and go get some training to access better paid job. That again is often sold to us as some kind of noble sacrifice whereas I just smirk and say, "use a condom, then you can fuck all night and have loads of sex without having any kids - get your career in order, make sure you have enough money then have your first child. A pack of condoms costs a lot less than what it takes to bring up a child.
DeleteI think it could be the general fear of being unemployed in Singapore. There isn't a social safety net. But also there isn't much of a work-life balance culture in Singapore either. I used to work in Sg in the industry and people would work overtime because it paid extra, but that just means the salary was very low to begin with. I don't think its so much the workers but the lack of companies that value workers on a productivity basis rather than "cheap labor that works many hours" mindset. I can only speak for engineering in Singapore, which is not known to be very innovative, hence the long working hours. The company I worked in didn't even allow any of the engineers to do research and development, all of that was done in branches in Europe or the US, while we just followed orders from them. But then again Singapore isn't a country that is flush with innovation. I think that's the issue, using the same techniques everyone has but doing it more often, rather than innovating new techniques to work better/faster or in a more niche area, like what you mentioned Mrs. Soh should do. If even the engineers don't value innovation, I think the idea of innovation would trickle down even less to other professions.
ReplyDeleteHmmmm. Allow me to speak as someone in a country where we have unemployment benefits, ie. that safety net. Sure I worry about losing my job if I don't perform well enough, my company is paying me a lot of money but also expecting a lot from me and there are days when I do feel frustrated of course. My expertise is in solving problems, ie. I'm not the kind of worker who merely follows a formula and replicates it over and over again, like how a worker in a McDonald's restaurant makes the same burgers following a recipe that they replicate over and over again all day - they can effectively turn off their brains and follow instructions in a very working class job manner. Currently, I have a client whom we shall call CP who has brought me a complex problem and I'm expected to solve that problem for him - there's no textbook where I can look up for a simple solution to this problem and whilst I'm allowed to run around and ask for help, I'm still expected to come up with a solution for him and my original idea has been rejected, so I have to come up with plan B and that's what I'm still working on. So even individuals like me fear being unemployed or losing my job if I cannot come up with brilliant ideas and deliver the goods, but the social safety net means nothing to me. If I may be blunt, the kind of employment benefits offered to unemployed folks here in England is a tiny, tiny fraction of what I earn and knowing that I am entitled to that little bit of money should I lose my job doesn't bring me any comfort - I'd rather just make sure I'm so good at my job that I never get sacked in the first place. If you're in a working class job earning peanuts, then yeah this kind of safety net means something but for people like me (and I'd like to think that for people like Daniel), it really doesn't mean much.
DeleteI think for your tier of job the social safety net doesn't matter, but even in many white collar jobs in Singapore the wages aren't very high. The starting salary for a university graduate in SG is $3k-4k sgd. But I think my main point is that I don't think its simply 1 or 2 companies that treat employees badly in Singapore, but entire industries with the exception of 1 or 2 companies that do treat employees well. So quitting a job and trying to find that one rare company that isn't abusing their employees could be considered a risk. The lack of a social safety net makes this choice even riskier, but I suppose families and living at home are the social safety net in Sg. The banking industry seems okay in Sg, not too crazy long hours and low pay, but engineering definitely isn't great, and I can't speak for accounting or food and beverage.
DeleteWell I did solve the problem for CP but it wasn't that complex, if I may confess CP did a lot of the solving himself and I just helped but then again, I was like, oh what if my management didn't think I solved CP's problem and realized he solved his own problem (and I'm claiming credit for it) then what? Yeah it's not like I don't worry about not doing my job well enough, it's just that the presence of a welfare state doesn't factor into the equation as I would simply look for a new job rather than rely on that pitiful little bit of money offered as unemployment benefits to those who have lost their jobs. It's all pretty awful in Singapore when it comes to long hours across the board, especially if you compare like for like with the West.
DeleteAhh so there is very little element of luck in your job that you can believe your actions make a difference. In an ideal world, every job would be like that. But if there aren't opportunities then it does seem to be a matter of luck if you can apply for and land a job that does give them.
DeleteOh its not just Singapore, unfortunately many Asian countries have long working hours and low pay. Nothing unusual though in newly developed countries. In the west during the industrial revolution, the hours were crazy with no regulation on a maximum hourly limit for workweeks until unions were formed and new laws were drawn up. I mean, come to think of it at least Singapore doesn't have "zero hours contracts", I heard those are miserable for UK retail workers. Anyway, Asia doesn't have strong unions which can enforce a minimum hourly pay and an hourly maximum per week. I think the PAP is too obsessed with Singapore rapidly developing as fast as it can, and forgetting that they are already one of the richest countries in the world.
The only part of Singapore I think which is extremely relaxed is the theoretical physics department at one of their government institutes (not a university). I collaborated with some of those people and they were super chill... all they do is math/code everyday that nobody above them can understand, so they can't really quantify performance in terms of working hours very well, and just let people do whatever they want. But then again, top tier level math research is not rote learning of multiplication tables or calculus integrals like A level math. It's closer to art class where inspiration for good ideas comes and goes, and working longer does not translate to making more progress. Kinda like your working environment actually... Did your management find out CP solved the problem? I hope CP is at least happy and said glowing things about you.
Hi Amanda, allow me to explain how complex problems don't have easy solutions. I popped into McDonald's on the way home yesterday to use the toilet as it was right next to the supermarket where I was buying some groceries. As I waited in line to use the toilet, I noticed a problem being solved. A woman approached a member of staff, "sorry, my child has knocked over the drink, there's coke all over the table and floor, could help mop up the mess please?" The member of staff moved the family to another table, helped them move all their food across, then promptly got another member of staff to mop up the coke that was on the floor and table, before the table was clean and ready for another customer to use. Yeah, that's an example of a simple problem that can be solved with a 100% success rate. But imagine if the cancer patient goes to the doctor with a brain tumour, the doctor would have a range of options to treat the tumour, none of which would guarantee success but he would then have to try something with the knowledge that it might not work and he would need a plan B if plan A failed to get rid of the tumour. So whilst I'm no brain surgeon, the problems like my client CP brings to me can be rather complex and I can try various things to solve them but the success rate isn't always high. There was once when a guy did bring me a situation, "solve my problem to move my money out of this investment platform and I'll invest with you." In the end, I couldn't figure out how he could do that and he didn't invest. With CP, it was a similarly complex issue but in all fairness, he solved the problem (not me) but I was desperate to claim some credit for helping the process along. It would have been nice if I could have been the one to have solved the problem for him but such was the situation, I did think my management would wonder, "you claim to be good at solving such problems, but did you actually help CP? How much did you actually contribute?" Anyway, I'm waiting for the next problem to solve and the whole CP situation would be history by then.
DeleteAs for the Singaporean labour market, please see part 2 below.
Singapore's labour market is very open - you could walk into a mall and be served by Filipino and PRC nationals who are there on a work permit, doing very low-paid unskilled work like customer service or making you a bubble tea. This has been a source of cheap labour to keep prices low, the fixed cost of running a bubble tea store is tied to many factors such as the rent of the stall, the cost of the ingredients etc but otherwise you have variable costs like the cost of the workers which can be pushed down if you hire foreign workers who will accept a terrible contract because it's still a lot more than what they can get back home in the Philippines or China. Now the UK doesn't have that - we used to exploit poorer workers from places like Poland and Bulgaria on the same business model but that's no longer the case after Brexit. In any case, Poland and Bulgaria aren't that desperately poor - they're just slightly poorer than the UK and certainly not as poor as the Chinese and the Filipino migrant workers in Singapore. So in light of this, the Singaporean working class are really forced to work like these foreign workers because they're never going to university to become doctors, scientists, bankers and engineers. So some Singaporeans benefit from this arrangement: if you're a well educated Singaporean with a good job, you would want to keep prices low thanks to the cheaper labour costs so your income would go a lot further. But if you're a working class Singaporean, then trying to argue for better working conditions by restricting cheap foreign labour would mean your own costs going up because even if you do earn a bit more money without these lowly paid foreign workers, your wages are not going to go as far once prices increase due to the lack of this cheap labour. The working class in Singapore are so fucked, they can't win either way. And this is why the poor stay poor in a place like Singapore despite the mirage of social mobility through the education system - they are really dependent on the kids winning the genetic lottery to be super brilliant at school in order to access that kind of social mobility because short of that, there's nothing they can do.
DeleteSo think about it this way: if you're a Singaporean working class person with a job like making bubble tea, you stand to get a 20% increase in wages if Singapore gets rid of all foreign workers overnight. However, the prices you pay would go up 20% overnight if all foreign workers leave - take for example the bus services, a lot of the bus drivers are PRC foreign workers who would accept long hours and low pay. Without the PRC drivers, the bus company would have to train local drivers (that's cost to be added to be bus service) as well as give them a pay rise to attract locals to become bus drivers. That would automatically push up the cost of providing the service and that would be passed onto the passengers who see a 20% increase in their bus fares. The guy who works at the bubble tea store would take the bus to work whilst the rich people who drive to work wouldn't be affected. Likewise, the same situation would happen when our Singaporean bubble tea guy goes to the hawker center for lunch during his short break - the preparation of food at the hawker center is a labour intensive task and the the hawker was reliant on helpers from China who would show up at 5 am to do all the food prep for the day in order to keep prices down. So the hawker is now forced to turn to local workers who demand higher wages along with the use of expensive machines to mechanize part of the food prep process, all of which pushes the prices up by 20% and that is passed onto the customer. So I could go on but you get idea: they can't win. They get a 20% increase in their wages but prices go up by at least 20%, they're no better off. Ouch.
DeleteYes, this shop in Tiong Bahru estate, Galicier is very popular, famous for its soft and tasty cakes (or kueh as they called it). It has long queues, even in the afternoon. The shop has a variety of pastries and is one of those old school bakery. The owner probably don't trust other people with her recipe.
ReplyDeleteConsider the case of another famous pastry stall in Tiong Bahru, HarriAnns, website available for online order. Same locality, same product, but different outcome. HarriAnn now has a couple of outlets, even in shopping centres. The owner diversified its offering, and is now a cafe that serves food. Their pastries are a lot more expensive though. But still nice.
Well Mrs Soh can still focus on the baking of the cakes/kuehs whilst employing people to do other tasks like doing the prep, cleaning the kitchen and serving the customers. As for whether or not you trust others with your recipe, a lot of that boils down to whom you employ in your business. If I gave you a strict recipe, follow steps 1 to 10 to prepare this cake, can I trust you to pay attention to detail or would you make several mistakes each time you try to follow a recipe? I don't think it is that hard to get people to follow a recipe, after all, so many working class jobs involve following instructions - you turn off your brain and you just do exactly what you're told. No need to solve problems, no need to be innovative or creative, just follow the instructions/recipe. So hiring staff who can follow instructions is never a problem, the real issue I suspect might be cost - the more people you hire, the more expensive your production process becomes, the higher your prices become.
DeleteDo you wanna compete on the basis of price or quality? After all, with something like cakes, if you want really cheap cakes, you can get those at the supermarket but you get what you pay for. There's this Japanese bakery in town where they charge £9.50 for one slice of cake and I'm like woah, I can buy two or three whole cakes at the supermarket for that price but of course, they pride themselves in making a unique product that no one else can make with their Japanese style cakes. The older generation are not internet savvy, they don't understand how to do digital marketing, they don't understand the vital role that social media can play when it comes to selling something like cakes - they rely on competing on the basis of costs by working crazy long hours when the solution is quite simple: add value to your product, then you can justify charging £9.50 for one small slice of cake.