A little strange from what I see. Just curious, where are you from ?
The work pressure is high, and the stress is definitely higher than in the west, but if you work for good companies, you shouldn’t be working like slaves like you described. Even if you were working for the Japanese in Singapore, it shouldn’t be the case. Working for stat boards especially under the creative section is not stressful at all. But if you were working for smaller establishments, you’d probably be squeezed dry.
Over here expats are paid much better than locals. So I am puzzled why you sound as though it is the opposite.(?) Many Singaporeans do complain how foreigners take away their jobs especially high paying jobs.
Reason being that
in general foreigners are paid better than locals for white collar jobs, even though the qualifications are very similar, especially true when you come from the west. They’ll compensate you pretty close to what you have at home, if not more. Unless the area you are looking at is different from mine, the compensation shouldn’t be low. It should be competitive. Most of the high end private properties here are taken up by foreigners. The high class areas in districts 10 etc are predominately taken up by westerners,not the locals. If they are Asians, they would most likely be indonesian chinese. Locals take up the low-mid level private properties. For the 85% of the local population, its government subsidized public housing— that is HDB flats.
Prices are very high at the moment. So not many locals can afford private housing comfortably.
A lot of the professors at the local universities are foreigners too. In certain faculties, a lot of them are Americans, and I know their pay isn’t low at all.