Need to do some critical thinking

The topic for today is - Ministerial Pay.

I googled and did a short research on the salary of some world leaders.

British PM: £127,334 + £60,277 as a Member of Parliament
US President: US$400 000
French President: 6 594 € per month ~ 80 000 € per year
Singaporean PM: $1.2M or there about

Anyway, I happened to find an explanation to this by the ministry of finance as well. Not very convincing in my opinion.

The formula currently pegs the salary of our ministers to the median of the top 8 earners from 6 professions. (FYI, the engineers are the worst paid group of the 6) As PM Lee recently pointed our, the ministerial salary should be $2.2M should the formula be applied stringently.

Honestly, I have no doubts about the capabilities of our leaders. We have to acknowledge that these men and women are able to command a salary in that range should they have decided to go into the private sector. The purpose of this salary peg is then to retain talent for the civil service to chart Singapore's growth.

Sounds pretty logical, except that the civil service is perhaps driven by different set of motivations. If money is the motivation, why be a politician? A top-rung insurance agent can also earn that amount of money, and I am pretty convinced that our ministers got great persuasive powers.

The civil service has an altruistic dimension, in improving the lives of people, in making this place a better home for all of us. All these are invaluable and can never carry a tangible price tag. Nobody would disagree about the importance of their excellent work, yet when a price has to be put on that, people shudders at the thought of top of the scale renumerations.

This is because the civil service is a not-for-profit organization. The performance of a politician cannot be measured solely on economic terms. Maybe a distant example, but the pay package of TT Durai should serve as a reminder of how people change their perception of renumeration for non-profit organisations' leaders.

Now, pegging the salary of the ministers against the top earners in the private sector is dangerous. Already, people question about the "ironness" of a civil servant's rice bowl. If this iron rice bowl is now gold-plated with the riches of the private world, would we be attracting the wrong kind of people into politics?

The earning potential in the private sector is probably unlimited, and their salaries can only get expectedly bigger. But the Government's budget is limited, and the general rate of salary increase of the taxpayers cannot surpass this elite group. Simply we will have a population which enjoys moderate income growth paying for the supersonic increase in ministerial pay. In this light, this formula is doomed to fail, and is made for creating stirs the day it was approved.

Strange enough, the notion of civil service pay increase seems focused on the top brass until now. It is as if that the work of the top hierarchy is all that matters! As the largest employer in Singapore, it is too easy to demean the work of all the other rank and file civil servants. If the leaders produce stellar results year in year out, doesn't that mean that he has a capable team under him. Then, shouldn't we peg their salaries to the top 48 earners in their domain too? Yet it is an open secret that civil servants' overall pay package tapers off and lags significantly behind their private counter parts.

I think the rhetoric is clear. If the entire structure of civil servants has to suffer from lower renumeration, why should it be any different for the ministerial leaders? In fact, anyone of a good calibre who works for the civil service can possibly get a better-paid and similar position out there in the private sector. The civil service is effective and efficient as a WHOLE, so stop differentiating the ministers as if they were superhuman beings!