‘A more fundamental point is on the principle of the matter’: WP’s Jamus Lim questions committee’s ministerial salary formula
Workers’ Party (WP) MP Jamus Lim has challenged the Government’s characterisation of the party’s proposed ministerial salary formula, saying it would produce an estimated S$1.08 million today.
Prof Lim said this was substantially lower than the revised S$1.8 million MR4, or entry-level minister, reference salary announced by the Government.
Source: Jamus Lim on Facebook
He made the comments in a Facebook post last Friday (11 Sept).
Prof Lim was not present for the debate as he was in Taiwan on a trip with residents, “which would not have clashed had there not been a late change in the sitting schedule”, but said he had been listening in.
WP leader Pritam Singh had already raised most of the party’s positions in Parliament, but Prof Lim wanted to clarify how the party calculated its salary formula.
Source: MDDI Singapore on YouTube
Jamus Lim says WP formula would result in about S$1.08m today
Prof Lim revisited a disagreement over the WP’s salary formula dating back to a 2018 parliamentary debate.
He said then-Senior Minister Teo Chee Hean had argued that the WP formula would produce a figure similar to the salary committee’s recommendation at the time.
Mr Teo had attributed the difference partly to the WP using a monthly salary for an MX9 superscale civil servant at the lower end of the pay grade, Prof Lim said.
MX9 is a senior management and the starting superscale grade, a tier for top leaders above standard salary scales, in the Singapore Civil Service’s Management Executive (MX) scheme.
Civil servants at this grade generally hold senior management positions and form around 2.5% of the Civil Service, the Public Service Division said.
Source: Jamus Lim on Facebook
However, information disclosed in Parliament in 2022 provided more details on the MX9 salary range.
Then-Minister-in-charge of the Public Service Chan Chun Sing had said the annual remuneration for the MX9 grade ranged from S$200,000 to S$260,000.
He also said the figure included both fixed and variable components, with the variable component making up 20% to 35% of the total.
Prof Lim said these figures allowed the WP to “reverse-engineer” its earlier calculation.
Using the midpoint of the MX9 range, he estimated that the WP formula would have produced an all-in MR4 salary of around S$882,000 in 2012.
He said this was not close to the roughly S$1 million figure previously cited by Mr Teo.
According to Prof Lim, the discrepancy appeared to stem from treating total salary as the fixed component before adding a variable component.
He argued that this effectively counted the bonus component twice.
Using the WP formula again and accounting for inflation between 2022 and 2025, Prof Lim said the resulting MR4 salary would be around S$1.08 million today.
He questions whether S$1.08m and S$1.8m are in the same ‘ballpark’’
The Government’s revised MR4 reference salary is S$1.8 million.
This benchmark is based on the median annual income of Singapore’s top 1,000 earners, with a 40% discount.
Source: gov.sg Committee report
Prof Lim said the WP’s estimated S$1.08 million figure would be about three-fifths of the new benchmark.
During the recent parliamentary debate, Prof Lim said the Government had again suggested that the WP formula would produce a similar amount to the new salaries.
“And if I heard him correctly, he said that our revised numbers would be S$1.5 million,” Prof Lim said.
“I’m not sure how Minister Chan arrived at his numbers, but I don’t think they’re right, based on the information that he had previously disclosed about MX9 salaries.”
Source: MDDI Singapore on YouTube
He added that the initial one-off increase of up to 9% for current political officeholders was more closely aligned with what the WP formula would imply today.
However, he said this did not change the fact that the two salary benchmarks were fundamentally different.
WP wants political pay benchmarked against senior civil servants
Prof Lim said the disagreement was not just about the final dollar figure.
He argued that the Government and WP had different views on what political salaries should be benchmarked against.
Under the Government’s framework, ministerial pay is pegged to the income of the top 1,000 Singaporean earners.
Prof Lim said this effectively ties political remuneration to corporate-sector incomes.
The WP instead proposes using senior civil servants, such as those in the MX9 grade, as the benchmark.
“We believe political leadership is a public service duty,” he wrote.
“Benchmarking ministers’ pay to senior civil servants — such as the MX9 — reflects a different philosophy: that political leadership is anchored to the public sector they lead.”
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Featured image adapted from Jamus Lim on Facebook and Lawrence Wong on Facebook. Picture credits on the right to MDDI.
