SINGAPORE — Contrary to misperceptions among stressed-out Singaporeans that the Republic can afford to go a tad slower, Manpower Minister Lim Swee Say said going down that route could blunt the edge Singapore has had over other countries, which will make talent retention a challenge.

Appearing on a special edition of Talking Point last night to discuss Sunday’s National Day Rally, Mr Lim cited his encounter with a French union leader to explain why the assumption is wrong. The union leader, who had been championing holiday allowance for the jobless, told him that the unemployed faced greater stress than the employed.

“It’s true, in my work, I see working people feeling the stress. But at the same time, when we see people looking for a job after three, six, nine months, I can assure you their life is even more stressful,” he added.

The fact that Singaporeans are better off than their counterparts in other countries is because “we have been special for the last 50 years”, Mr Lim noted. And moving into the future, this notion of being special is essential because young people have increasingly high job expectations, he added.

“More and more of them are driven by passion. If we’re not able to create an environment where there are opportunities in many exciting areas that will appeal to them, then they will go somewhere else,” he said. “These are the kind of things that I worry about. Therefore, I think it’s really important to make sure that there is a leadership team in place to lead us forward in the next 15 to 20 years.”

During the hour-long programme, Mr Lim also discussed the challenges that Singapore faces: An ageing population, the trade-offs of supplementing the local workforce with foreigners and a mismatch of jobs.

“We want to do our best to minimise the mismatch,” he said, stressing the important of the SkillsFuture scheme. The decision to centralise the Singapore Institute of Technology campus in Punggol, alongside a creative industry cluster, is one way of nurturing the matching of jobs and workers, he noted.

Mr Lim also spoke about helping low-wage workers through the Progressive Wage Model, which covers the cleaning, security and landscape sectors. “Our challenge is to keep spreading this concept to as many sectors as possible. We have to keep finding ways for this concept to be applicable to non-low-wage jobs as well,” he said.