Cheap Chinese Workers? Got Hidden High Price

Recent spate of accidents involving PRC bus drivers & a PRC ferrari driver here jolted the masses. Govt-linked public transport companies like to hire PRC drivers because they are cheaper. Scores of businesses including govt-linked companies like to hire cheaper workers to keep costs down due to killer rents.

Cheap cheap cheap is the mantra. But is cheap cheap really good?

Tourists & minority races lament about inability of many PRC service staff to converse in basic english. Is cheap(short term) the way to go at expense of long term profit?

Economist Graeme Maxton wrote about the perils of doing business in China:
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There is an expression in Shanghai, 'We can copy everything except your mother,' because almost everything can be duplicated.

- fake hotels which use names of international chains
- fake network routers known as Chicos
- fake cars which are sometimes copied from drawings of rivals & appear on roads before 'original'
- Risk of fake blood plasma given to patients in hospitals
- fake receipts for expenses submitted by employees
- fake references & fake degrees used for job applications
- Some of best educated claim they are authors of worthy scientific papers, although findings are fake or plagiarized
- good marks in exams? Someone may have written paper for student or parents paid teachers to give answers
- 250 people caught cheating every month in prestigious civil service exams
- fake fruit injected with dubious fluids to look firm & ripe
- fake contestants. In 2010 Xiamen marathon, 30 runners were caught cheating, hiring doppelgangers to run much of route before a car deposited them near finishing line to run last few hundred metres

- common practice for secretaries in China to be paid a 'commission' by travel agents when booking flights for bosses
- receptionists can be $$ enticed to refer sales enquiries to competitors
- employees can form groups to exploit an employer & share profits made
- business managers happily make transfers of assets to themselves or companies in which they have a stake.
- workers falsify accounts or set up competing businesses
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When S'pore's hybrid regime imports vast numbers of PRC workers/people, their bad habits are imported as well. Remember how S'pore's govt who claim they are very talented & thus paid themselves absurb $M salaries are outsmarted & screwed in Suzhou Industrial Park.

Just take the 2 common fakes mentioned by Maxton which i'm sure would plague S'pore employers/supervisors:
- fake receipts for expenses submitted by employees
- fake references & fake degrees used for job applications

Sinkie job applicants need to highlight Maxton's points as above to get an edge. Remind the hirer that cheap cheap is not as it appears to be. Cheap does not equal value for $$.

Hidden perils of cheap cheap workers are not blatantly obvious to many until......