Since I was occupied getting my new sites ready last week, I didn't have quite enough time to provide proper coverage of one of, I believe, the most disturbing political spectacles in Singapore's parliament to date.
Yes, I'm talking about the way the Workers' Party, this time led by former The Online Citizen editor, Gerald Giam, decided to hijack the debate about the milestone Platform Workers Bill in order to attack both the NTUC and PAP, over their supposedly cosy relationship.
The allegation is, as you probably know, that being so tightly intertwined with the ruling party – to the point that some of its members are high ranking officials of the trades unions congress – NTUC may not represent the workers' interests sufficiently well.
Now, I'm not going to debate that it does or does not, partly because this has been explained many times over the past week, and partly because all you need to do is look at the outcomes of the tripartite negotiations, involving the government, unions and employers in Singapore, which gave birth to such solutions like Progressive Wage Model.
I'm not even going to return to history, to highlight how in early day Singapore trade unions supported various political parties (as unions around the world do even today), and that NTUC's relationship with PAP was born out of such cooperation, which the union had an interest to build precisely to advance workers' interests.
Or that WP itself was founded by and for trade unionists.
No, what I want to highlight is the heinous opportunism of the Workers' Party, which basically trampled over the people it claims to represent, only to play politics against the PAP.
70,000 nobodies
Over 70,000 people in Singapore work for online platforms and last week was supposed to be theirs.
Globally landmark legislation was under discussion in the parliament, which for the first time would recognise a new category of workers, somewhere between permanent employees and freelancers, to provide them with greater social protections, as they received very little to none beforehand.
Unfortunately, WP leaders believed it was the right moment – and context – to mess with the PAP and dominate the media with their unfounded assault on the NTUC.
In the process, they have monopolised media attention which was supposed to be given to thousands of delivery drivers, many of whom I'm sure are helping to feed the mouths that made so much noise.
To the "Workers'" Party the actual workers were just expendable proxies, nobodies, a statistic that you can casually ignore in your desperate political crusade ahead of the coming General Election.
They don't care about policy but politicking.
And, don't get me wrong – it is perfectly fine to ask government tough questions, including questioning NTUC's independence or whether it could have done more for the workers of Singapore.
The role of the opposition is, after all, to provide some oversight of the government's actions and alarm the public to its questionable behaviour.
It's all not only acceptable but a feature of democracy.
But there is a time and place to do it.
Parliamentarians can file motions with the Speaker and ask questions of the cabinet. They don't have to roll into a debate about an important bill and start a flame war on a completely new topic, taking advantage of the spotlight in that particular week.
It was a robbery, a daylight robbery of 70,000 workers in Singapore, who had the public and media attention shamelessly stolen from them by cynical politicking performers.
Instead of reading about new protections and privileges, they had to comb through dozens of articles covering punches exchanged over political history of Singapore, started by the very party that claims it cares about them.
In reality, it only cares about is own seats.
