commercial break

We now interrupt your regularly-scheduled blog updates with a commercial break aka A Tirade against Singapore's unsustainably unhealthy work culture. And yes, i'm tirading on behalf of others who, unlike me, do not have the privilege of being able to step out of the rat race (mostly because i don't have kids or other dependents) and do more or less my own thing.
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See, what makes me mad is not the fact that there is a lot of work to be done. It's the way employers and bosses are so short-sighted in the way they manage workloads and expectations. Sure, you can work your employees to the bone and still keep them in your thrall because they have nowhere to run -- the whole country is the same. But eventually they will burn out. Anyone who regularly works 13 hour days will burn out -- and that's not even counting the weekends and the work done at home. And once they burn out, they will fall ill -- seriously ill (i've had friends going on medical leave for months because of burnout). And you will lose people.
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(Don't even get me started on what happens when employees die on the job after having given half their life to an institution, and their bosses don't even allow their colleagues a few hours off to attend the funeral -- while giving the entire institution a half-day off to go support the institution team in the final of some prestigious sports tournament on the very same day as the funeral.)
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And eventually, your best people are going to realise, Enough with this shit, and vote with their feet. They will leave the company, leave the workforce, leave the country. And by then it will be too late.
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PS:
True, people have the option of saying No. i've always maintained that if enough people say No, there's nothing The Powers That Be can do to stop them, asides from a mass firing (both literally and figuratively). Sometimes i wonder what would happen if people here were a little less compliant, had a little more, dare i say, courage.
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