Dear reader,
- The short election runway exposes Lawrence Wong’s nerves
- GE update, featuring the PAP’s Aljunied, Chua Chu Kang, and Sengkang teams
- Could Megan Khung have been saved?
- Works by P Ramlee at SG60
- Our prolific poets
- Is the use of AI in prisons a boon for all or a step closer to dystopia?
And more, in our weekly digest. Read it now.
Video. Jom has published our first two video commentaries.
- On a Palestinian book launch and community event
- Our first GE piece: which parties might benefit from a deglobalising world?
We’re trying to slowly find our Jom voice in the crowded video world, so do watch, reply and let me know what you think! We’re building this together.
Essays. We have two pieces this week from members of opposition political parties. As you all know, but worth repeating, Jom will not be endorsing any party in the upcoming GE. On a related note, we’re happy to publish work from members of different political parties, and this morning we just invited the PAP again, this time to respond to the below articles.
“GE2025: time for a necessary course correction” is a commentary by Harpreet Singh, a member of the Workers’ Party.
“Yet, despite these advantages, the government appears to have resisted bold reform. Instead, it has preferred incremental policy adjustments and deploying financial assistance schemes and voucher programs that do little to address the underlying structural problems. This inertia is not due to a lack of competence within the civil service or a lack of national resources—it is the result of our overcentralised political system that has narrowed the space for fresh policy ideas to gain traction, curbing the depth of policy debate.
This is why a stronger opposition in Parliament is not just desirable—it is necessary.”
“A Universal Minimum Wage for Singapore: an idea whose time has come” is an essay by Lawrence Pek and Leon Perera, member and volunteer, respectively, with the Progress Singapore Party.
“Over the past few decades we have, in our respective corporate roles, worked with companies spanning small local manufacturing firms to large multinationals. In the process, we’ve witnessed how global trends, such as trade liberalisation, the fourth industrial revolution and the advent of AI, have interacted with local ones, such as immigration and wage policies, to affect worker welfare in Singapore. We are all now facing the prospect of a world with higher tariffs and trade barriers, which could further wreak havoc on Singaporean workers.
However well intentioned Singapore’s Progressive Wage Model (PWM) was when the government designed it 12 years ago, it is now outdated, narrow in scope, and exclusionary in nature…All this is why it is high time Singapore implemented a Universal Minimum Wage (UMW) for residents.”
Jom belajar,
Sudhir
Editor-in-chief, Jom
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