Sunday, August 03, 2008  

[Of big bellies and little wheels....]

Today's Sunday Times offered two interesting topics for discussion.

Firstly, there's a report about how pregnant women were being fired from their jobs as some SMEs choose to take the easy way out and not pay their expecting employees maternity benefits. I am not at all surprised at this. My experience with SMEs gives me the impression that the management of these companies are only interested in one thing - money. The bottom-line. They are not interested in anything else, and would rather save money in the short term than to make more money in the long term.

While it's easy to fire expecting employees to get out of paying them maternity benefits, have they considered how much would it cost to hire someone new and how much it would cost before this new hire would be as skilled on the job as their previous employee? This is especially so in certain job scopes that require a lot of human-to-human contact, connections, and the like.

While this can be an interesting topic, going forward, for the MIW to tackle, we cannot forget another aspect of this situation - male employees being fired due to RT/ICT commitments. Don't say it doesn't happen, don't say it's against the law. It happens. Anyone who's spent some time looking through the employment laws of Singapore will be able to tell that the laws favours employers, perhaps exceedingly so.

Why is that, I wonder?

Luckily for me, these are issues I would never have to deal with in my current workplace.




Secondly, the issue of parents using strollers versus the general public was raised.

I've always wondered about the wisdom of parents who bring their strollers out with them on public transport, into crowded streets, or into places that basically make those strollers a nuisance. Once, I encountered a stroller when I was browsing at a pasar malam. Com'on...The stalls are lined up behind a small pavement. The stroller itself takes up 75% of the pavement. What the hell were the parents thinking, pushing that damn stroller down the already-packed pavement?

Strollers should be banned, and specifically allowed in places that do not make them a nuisance. Like parks or something. Don't expect people on a crowded street to give way to your damn stroller. We owe you nothing.

^^^ by Locksley @ 10:16 AM. 0 comments.
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