... notable events : The Asian Financial Crisis and Me

It was 1997, the height of the Asian Financial Crisis.

Salaries were slashed, companies were downsized, people were laid off, and dreams were shattered when the bubble burst.

I was an engineer with R&K Consultants working on a whole series of construction projects at the time. As project money dried up and companies went belly up, we were faced with the possible loss of our jobs and the drastic paycuts. We went from 3-4 month bonuses to 30% paycuts in our basic salaries, and in R&K Consultants, the engineering staff was slashed from a total of 7 engineers in 1996 to just 1 engineer in 1997.

Projects were stacked and I went from handling 6-7 jobs to as many as 18-19 jobs on hand. This went on for the better part of 1997 but then something worse happened. The projects themselves were either shelved or began to stall. The workload dropped from a mad juggling of projects enough to occupy 7 engineers to practically zero. Faxes were silent, phones didn't ring, no clients, architects or contractors walked in through our doors, and e-mails inboxes too went empty except for the occasional chatter with friends. I had 18-19 jobs on paper, but I had trouble filling in my timesheet.

It was great for a time. As an employee, being paid for having no work other than twidling of thumbs is always great, until the silence dragged on into weeks, into months, as colleague after colleague gets axed. The company, increasingly top heavy with 2 primary partners and 2 senior associates supported by a staff of 1 engineer, 2 drafters and 2 admin, was in dire straits.

Paycuts began to hit in mid 1997. It started small, at 5%. Then a further 10%. Then with no end in sight, in 1998 my salary was docked even further until I was drawing the same salary as I did back when I had first joined the company in 1995. As the sole engineer left, my salary was actually the least affected as they really didn't have anyone else to fall back on if I upped and left in a huff. The drafting staff were not so fortunate. The worse off was the senior draftsman who left the company when he couldn't stand it any longer having suffered a 50% paycut.

Some of us ex-colleagues began meeting after work on Fridays, at least those who found new jobs and still had extra money to spend on drinks to complain and to rant on the sad state of affairs. I found it increasingly impossible to join the group if any decent sum was to be set aside and saved in the bank every month, but it was a bitter group indeed and we blamed everyone and everything we could think of, from our bosses, to our government, to George Soros, to the IMF, no one was spared except ourselves. Some of us had just bought new houses which were now worth less than the bank mortgage still owed to the bank. These unfortunate people were stuck, unable to sell, unable to repay the loans. It's a wonder none of us went bankrupt. I count myself lucky to have been just at the age when I was just starting to develop significant savings, yet not significant enough to have had them committed into the downward spiralling property market although I do admit to having rather large losses suffered in hyped buying of stocks and unit trusts during the "good years". Later on I found out that my old R&K bosses, who not only downgraded all their cars from luxury models to regular models, as well as turning up at the office everyday with dark faces due to massive losses at the stock market, all took 12 months
without salaries from mid 1997 just so we could be paid. A haunting memory of
something one of the senior associates once told me back in 1998 echoed
in my head. He said, "When times are bad, the boss work for the
employees." How true. I never realised just how true this statement
was at the time.

It's now 10 years on. Many businesses have recovered, as have many people, but the scars remain. R&K Consultants, once on the brink of making the leap from a mid-sized engineering company to the big league with local and regional mega projects worth in the billions of USD$ in 1996, are now back to and still limited to local warehouses, condominiums and small individual houses. Another friend of mine, whom I watched grow his consulting firm from 1 to a peak of 5 persons, saw his entire savings wiped out and he's now back to square one, no different from the day he set out on his own as a 1-man company.

We've survived, at least most of us have, but behind the shiny new facade of the current 4-5% economic growth are battle scars and a littered trail of broken dreams, individuals and companies.