Let’s talk about the absolute cruel confession of Singaporean workplace culture. Everyone loves to say “all jobs are dignified” during National Day rallies, but the moment you step into a mixed industrial-office building, the class divide is real, tangible, and damn suffocating.
I do factory production work. Because of the heavy machinery and logistics, my entire department is located on the first floor. The ground floor. Where the loading bay is, where the diesel fumes linger, and where the real grunt work happens.
Meanwhile, the “educated” office crowd—the HR, the marketing, the procurement folks who spent three or four years getting a degree just to make Canva slides and reply “Noted with thanks”—they sit on the higher floors.
And standard protocol, right? Higher floor automatically means they think they are more atas.
Every morning at the lift lobby, the vibe is so toxic you can practically breathe it. They will look at my uniform, look at my steel-toe boots, and then immediately look away like I’m invisible or carrying some contagious plague. If the lift is crowded, they will literally squeeze themselves to the back just to avoid touching sleeves with the first-floor workers. Hello? I bathe every morning okay, my soap same price as yours.
The worst part is the subtle microaggressions. Yesterday, one high-floor admin executive dropped her grabfood receipt near the bin. I helped her pick it up. She didn’t even say thank you, just gave me this half-hearted nod like she was a royal highness acknowledging a peasant. Then today, I overheard two of them talking in the air-con lobby: “If you don’t study hard, you end up doing manual labour on the ground floor.”
Wah, my blood boil, seriously. You think your air-con higher floor job so high SES meh? If we on the first floor don’t operate the machines, don’t pack the goods, don’t do the actual physical output, your company got revenue? Your high-floor office can generate profit out of thin air is it? You all just paper pushers, but the ego is higher than the building itself.
Stop looking down on first-floor workers. We work with our hands, we sweat, and we actually make things. Your degree teaches you how to analyze data, but it clearly didn’t teach you basic human manners. True story.