Global Auction Case Study

The impact of Global Auction on future skill, employment and the labour market in Singapore.
Singapore, unlike South Korea and Taiwan, chooses the reliance on foreign capital, technologies and managerial expertise to resolve the socio-economic challenges. While this TNCs strategy has helped Singapore to achieve an average of 5% yearly growth over the last three decades, Singapore is characterised by SMEs and a historical reliance on cheap foreign labour (OECD, 2013). Since the Asian Crisis, the Singapore government had started nurturing indigenous enterprises for sustainable growth and job creation (HO, 2016). In this sense, the policy to retain and attract TNCs continue to be important while the government continue to support SMEs to adopt

In a recent survey by Titus Ng (2012) on leadership practices by SMEs found that 58.3% of the leaders were not ready to take the organisations forward. Instead, SMEs choose to build the business model around cheap foreign labours for profit. In other words, SMEs would either shift their operations to a low-cost country or pursue low-skill low-cost product strategy using cheap low productivity foreign workforce depressing the labour market and shun by the locals (Lim, 2014).
Henceforth, the 2010 Economic Strategic Committee (ESC) and the 2017 Future Economy Committee (FEC) recommend weaning SMEs’ addiction to low-cost foreign workers; providing training grants of up to 95% to encourage individuals to take responsibility for their upskilling and reskilling and support and help SMEs to restructure the organisations, adopt digital technologies, pursue high skills strategy to access the international market for sustainable growth and job