Plight of Technical Workers

Technical workers form the backbone of our economy and contribute a lot to the convenience for our daily lives. Examples of technical workers which I am referring to here are technicians, engineers and programmers. Obviously, there are professionals which local Singaporeans shunt due to unpleasant work nature (eg. dirty working environment, long working hours, tedious detailed work etc) and most importantly, low wage and less glamorous prospect.

A good example to illustrate how important a technician/engineer's job is the maintenance of elevators which are essential in a city like Singapore which is dominated by tall buildings. Obviously, the breakdown of elevators causes lots of inconvenience.

Another example is the hard work by IT programmers to develop software applications to streamline our work processes and enhance productivity. Besides using these applications for official matters, applications like Facebook and Whatsapp also enhances the quality of our daily lives. In fact, if these applications were to be down for several minutes, people simply cannot perform their routine tasks smoothly. For example, a glitch in the check-in application of an airline causes flight delay or transportation workers unable to retrieve goods from the wharf when the permit processing system is down. If social media applications like Facebook and Whatsapp were to be down even for a day, it would be like the end of the world for many youngsters. We are in fact so reliant on technology that we simply cannot survive without it.

OK ... back to the topic, this post is not discussing about our reliant on technology but rather the professionals who work hard to make technology work for us. They work very hard to ensure technology stays available 24 by 7 and are also required to be on standby in case of sudden breakdown. Despite the tedious nature of the job, technical workers are still relatively lowly paid and worse of all being marginalised. For example, in a non-IT organisation, IT staff are often considered a burden or overhead as they do not bring in sales or earn revenue for the organisation. Likewise whenever there are any IT problems that occur, they get the blame very quickly. The management will generally allocate lesser budget to the IT department compared to those revenue generating ones. IT staff may probably receive lesser variable bonus compared to fellow colleagues in revenue generating departments.

Perhaps another real-life example is the maintenance of our train system. I believe that if more budget is spent on hiring more experienced engineer/technicians, purchasing more reliable spares and equipments and maybe sending the team for training to upgrade their skills would definitely result in lesser breakdowns. An incentive scheme could also be introduced to reward staff if zero or minimum breakdown is achieved.

These are only some examples which we I know of and I believe there are many other professions out there that suffers similar plight. We should learn to be more appreciative and respectful for all professions out there!

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