This week, following a furor in the run up to the election, we learnt that our ministers’ salaries, and for that matter the President’s too, are no longer to be pegged to the high end of the private sector. Governmental service, so the thinking now goes, should involve a degree of sacrifice, an acknowledgement that you’re not working entirely for fiscal gain. “It’s not a job or career promotion,” said PM Lee. It’s a “calling to serve the greater good of Singapore.”Until the start of this week, ministerial salaries were calculated using a neat little sum that involved taking the median salary of the top eight earners across six private sector professions, and working out what two-thirds of that was. In other words, the number crunchers walked around the CBD one lunch time and asked a few personal questions of the blokes eating the biggest sandwiches.How will they do it now? If the salaries have been de-pegged, what to peg them to now, before they float off in the breeze like loose laundry? Among other factors, we’re told the new calculation will take into account salaries of comparable jobs in the private sector and involve a “significant discount to signify the value and ethos of political service.” But that still all sounds rather vague to us. Better, we think, to fix it against something more solid. Something a little more… concrete. Say, a formula pegged to the tallest building in the city? Here at I-S we’d never be so glib as to suggest “you do the math.” We’ll do it for you. Here are the magic numbers:GSS = $(F – LBA) x Sk8 + HHWhere:GSS = Governmental Salary Standard/monthF = The number of floors in whatever happens to be the city’s current tallest buildingLBA = The number of those floors taken up by law firms, banks and accountancy servicesSk8 = The number of floors, offered at discounted rates, given over to the creative industries, chill-out spaces and skateboardingHH = The total length of happy hours at the building’s skybar in any one weekEasy, right? Let’s run through a quick example: (150 floors – 0 law firms) x 149 floors of cool creative types + (24 x 7= 168 hours/week to get drunk) = $22,518/month.Now you can’t say fairer than that, can you? Time to start building, guys. First drink at the top’s on us. We’ll be carrying skateboards so you recognize us.
