Migrant Workers in Singapore

The following sections are included:

• About the Editors
• Contents
• Acknowledgements

Initially upheld as a bastion of success in curbing the spread of COVID-19 in the first few months of 2020, Singapore found itself home to the highest number of coronavirus cases in Southeast Asia by the middle of the same year. Over 90 per cent of its cases occurred among the 300,000 migrant construction workers primarily from Bangladesh, India, and China who live as part of a transient population in this city-state. This collection looks beyond the immediacy of heightened concerns surrounding the migrant worker population in the time of the COVID-19 crisis. It gives attention to broader questions of migrant lives and labour in a city-state that has thrived on migration since its beginnings as a colonial entrepôt. Serving as a primer for the general and academic reader interested in developing a richer understanding of the structural conditions of migrant construction work, the book draws together key studies on migrant construction work in Singapore. The chapters in this volume, contributed by a range of academic experts, spotlight the processes of unequal global development, precarious work, and welfare exclusion that have rendered low-waged labour migrants especially vulnerable to the pandemic. They also highlight migrant men’s social identities beyond the sphere of work by attending to their experiences and strategies as members of transnational families and social-cultural communities…

The typical image of a migrant construction worker in Singapore is that of a male foreign labourer strapped by a harness, immobilised in precarious positions atop a half-completed high-rise building. In this 2017 article, we use this as a starting point for examining the migration trajectories and employment conditions of Bangladeshi construction workers in Singapore, and to explore the politics of (im)mobility in the city-state’s labour migration regime…

The most iconic image of the foreign construction worker in Singapore’s popular imagination is a figure perilously secured by safety harnesses atop a half completed high-rise building. However, we argue that an understanding of the labour process involved in fashioning the migrant worker is predicated on a more expansive understanding of the politics of (im) mobility. In other words, the labour process is not simply secured in the workplace of the construction site but is linked to the politics of mobility and immobility across different spaces in the host nation-state and beyond. Drawing on a mixed-methods study of Bangladeshi construction workers in Singapore, we discuss three interrelated themes: (a) the time-structuring mechanisms of the migration regime; (b) spaces of enclavement, exception, and enclosure; and (c) the governing of time discipline.

It has been half a decade since this article was published. Its central critique remains valid, which is that any legal framework premised upon the ability to sequester a massive migrant worker population from the general population, and thereby insulate the latter from any discriminatory impact of such a legal framework, is not viable in the long run. The backdrop for that critique was the Little India riots in 2013 [Chin and Chia, 2013], which gave the occasion for some soul-searching about the treatment of migrant workers, even if one could not directly make a connection between the riots and their labour conditions. As I argued in this article, the legal framework, which is typical of a guest-worker programme, sees migrant workers as temporary labour that can be returned to origin countries in the event of an economic downturn. Thus, there is an underlying assumption that by admitting foreign workers on short-term jobs and legalising their stay with contract-bound work permits, a receiving state could reap the benefits of migrant labour without necessarily having to bear social responsibilities towards these workers…

This article examines the legal framework regulating unskilled and low-skilled migrant workers in Singapore. It argues that the current legal framework discriminates against these migrant workers and conceptualizes them as undesirable for inclusion in the wider society. This, it is contended, is premised on the assumption that migrant workers could be sequestered from the local population to some extent. This article provides some challenges to this assumption, highlighting instead some of the broader social and political consequences of this exclusionary legal framework. Consequently, it is argued that a more inclusive and integrationist approach is needed, and some positive developments are highlighted.

COVID-19 has dramatically altered the manner in which migrant workers experience public space in Singapore. Between early April, with the lockdown of migrant dormitories and the introduction of “circuit breaker” regulations for all, and October 2020, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers have been disallowed from leaving their residences. Even as migrant workers returned to work, a September 2020 survey by Transient Workers Count Too [2020] indicated that only four out of 57 men surveyed (7%) were able to leave the dormitories for leisure. Many areas once frequented by migrant workers, including Little India, remain eerily empty…

While work on the securitization of migration has often held borders to be the site at which state power is most keenly felt, this paper draws on static and walking interviews with Bangladeshi male migrant workers in Singapore to understand their everyday experiences of the securitization within state territory. These narratives demonstrate how the Little India district in Singapore has been scripted as an exceptionally problematic space associated with dangerous migrant bodies, within which Bangladeshi migrants encounter state power in a variety of guises, ranging from police patrols to video surveillance technologies. They also reveal how Bangladeshi migrants continually struggle against these state-led scripts of insecurity, even if their sojourn in Singaporean territory is circumscribed by a condition of permanent temporariness. Through this discussion, the securitization of migration is conceptualized as an unfinished project that is often exerted unevenly and paradoxically within state territory. The security-migration nexus should also not only be understood with recourse to bodies deemed “illegal” and “unwanted” — such as asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants — but should also account for temporary labour migrants who have been legally admitted into state territory, whose labour power is central to the host state’s economy but who are disallowed from ever belonging within the countries they work in.

Low-wage migrant workers in Singapore are deportable — employment laws allow employers to unilaterally terminate work permits and repatriate workers on short notice. Employers have been commonly found to forcefully repatriate migrant workers as a means of settling employment disputes. In tandem with other political and economic factors, the deportability of migrant workers presents obstacles to accessing the few employment rights that they have. However, such arrangements have been challenged through the work of civil society actors [Koh et al., 2017]. The escalation of individual employment disputes has seen migrant workers seek help from independent non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that have played a critical role in advocating for the reform of employment and migrant labour laws [Bal, 2015]…

By severely constraining the political personhood of temporary migrant workers, states’ use of deportation laws seeks to curb agitation among these workers. Despite this, various episodes of unrest have been witnessed in both liberal and illiberal regimes across Asia. Drawing on a case study of Bangladeshi migrant construction workers in Singapore, this paper examines the development of migrant labour politics as deportation laws, and their enforcement, construct these workers as “use-and-discard” economic subjects. Data for the paper are drawn from multi-level sources — government, industry, media, and non-governmental organization (NGO) reports; interviews with key actors; and a participant observation stint in a construction firm — collected between 2010 and 2014. The paper argues that, rather than solely constraining, deportability serves as a constituent of certain forms of tactical worker contestations in the workplace. Specifically, under different workplace conditions, deportability can translate into differing forms of worker tactics, ranging from accommodation to confrontation and desertion. The outcomes of these strategies, in turn, have significant repercussions for the ways in which civil society groups and state-actors, respectively, challenge and reconfigure the political personhood of temporary migrant workers.

Singapore’s infrastructural development as a global ‘smart’ city is built on the backs of migrant workers, whose jobs put them at greater risk of workplace fatalities, injuries, and other threats to their health and well-being. This 2017 paper is based on the culture-centered approach (CCA) as a means of articulating the narratives of workplace conditions, injuries, and health risks, from the voices of Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore. In this paper, I discussed how this approach had co-created voice infrastructures for low-wage migrant workers in Singapore, in which advisory groups of workers collectively identified key challenges to workplace health and safety, and possible solutions. The narratives of the migrant workers include construction site injuries, living conditions such as food insecurity, lack of sleep, and transportation, as well as issues like communication barriers, misunderstandings, and workplace incivility…

Construction workers globally face disproportionate threats to health and wellbeing, constituted by the nature of the work they perform. The workplace fatalities and lost-time injuries experienced by construction workers are significantly greater than in other forms of work. This paper draws on the culture-centered approach (CCA) to dialogically articulate meanings of workplace risks and injuries, voiced by Bangladeshi migrant construction workers in Singapore. The narratives voiced by the participants suggest an ecological approach to workplace injuries in the construction industries, attending to food insecurity, lack of sleep, transportation, etc. as contextual features of work that shape the risks experienced at work. Moreover, participant voices point to the barriers in communication, lack of understanding, and experiences of incivility as features of work that constitute the ways in which they experience injury risks. The overarching discourses of productivity and efficiency constitute a broader climate of threats to worker safety and health.

In Singapore, the temporary labour migration regime admits foreign workers according to a hierarchy of skills and salaries with corresponding policies that govern their living and working conditions. Low-waged migrant workers admitted on short-term contracts are subjected to regulations that ensure their temporary socio-legal status in the city-state, keeping them disposable and deportable. Precarity is institutionalised in this regime, where migrant workers remain transient and excluded, and where they have to contend with the burden of debts to finance migration, limited options for job mobility, and constrained bargaining power in relation to workplace safety and risks, among others. These processes, occurring at different points in the migration trajectory, are mediated by state agencies, the migration industry, and labour markets…

Within the scholarship on precarity, low-waged contract-based migrants are recognized as centrally implicated in precarious employment conditions at the bottom of neoliberal capitalist labor markets. Precarity as a socially corrosive condition stems from both the multiple insecurities of the workplace as disposable labor, and a sense of deportability as migrant subjects with marginal socio-legal status in the host society. Our study of Bangladeshi construction workers in Singapore contributes to refining understandings of precarity by approaching labor migration as a cumulative, intensively mediated process, whereby risks and vulnerabilities are compounded across different sites in migrants’ trajectories, even as they enact themselves as mobile, aspiring subjects. As a condition-in-the-making, precarity is experienced and compounded, through a continuum beginning in pre-migration indebtedness, multiplying through entanglements with the migration industry, and manifesting in workplace vulnerabilities at destination. It is most finely balanced when predictability and planning yield to arbitrary hope.

Migrant workers form an important part of Singapore’s workforce. However, they also face a number of challenges as temporary migrant workers in the city-state, including access to health care coverage. For instance, they are not entitled to medical subsidies that are often covered by healthcare coverage for citizens. They also face risks of injury and infectious diseases in the workplace and in accommodations, and of psychological distress. This paper is based on a 2016 survey that we conducted in order to identify the factors that affect migrant workers’ access to healthcare in Singapore. We administered a survey of over 400 migrant workers at subsidised clinics, and at a foreign worker dormitory. Our findings suggest that their access to health care and psychological well-being are affected by economic and socio-cultural factors. In particular, low-wage migrant workers face economic challenges as part of the migration process, which is often debt-fuelled. The financial barriers due to indebtedness affect their health-seeking behaviour and mental well-being. Health literacy can also be a factor. For instance, several workers had insurance, but had limited to poor understanding of its inpatient and outpatient coverage. The information provided to them regarding insurance was also not in their native language. These factors interplay with their living, social, and work conditions in Singapore…

Background: Low-wage migrant workers are vulnerable to healthcare inequities. We sought to identify potential barriers to healthcare and risk factors for mental health issues in non-domestic migrant workers in Singapore, and identify high-risk subgroups.

Methods: A cross-sectional, interviewer-administered survey of 433 non-domestic migrant workers was conducted at subsidised clinics and a foreign worker dormitory from July to August 2016. Questions assessed healthcare usage patterns, affordability issues, barriers to care and psychological distress using a validated screening scale (Kessler-6).

Findings: Bangladeshi workers surveyed were more likely to be single, have more financial dependents, a lower level of education and salary and pay higher agent fees (p < 0.01). 61.4% of workers reported that they had insurance, but had poor understanding of whether it covered inpatient/outpatient expenses. The majority of workers had not, or were not sure if they had, received information about company-bought insurance (72.4%). Among those who had, most reported that information was not in their native language (67.7%). Non-specific psychological distress was found in 21.9%, as estimated by the Kessler-6 scale. Multivariate analysis found that psychological distress was independently associated with Bangladeshi nationals (OR 2.98, 95% CI 1.58 to 5.62; p = 0.001) and previous experience of financial barriers to healthcare (OR 3.86, 95% CI 2.25 to 6.62; p < 0.0001).

Interpretation: We identified gaps in non-domestic migrant workers' knowledge of healthcare coverage, and substantial financial barriers to healthcare. The Bangladeshi population in our study was at higher risk of such barriers and psychological distress. These represent areas for further research and intervention.

The outbreak of COVID-19 in migrant worker dormitories across Singapore has brought issues of everyday liveability as well as the larger structural conditions under which migrants’ labour has come under sharp scrutiny. What has been impossible to ignore is that the well-being of this migrant group is intrinsically connected to the larger public health of the nation-state [Kathiravelu, 2020]. Yet, the urban experience of pandemic has been divergent, disconnected, and differentiated by socio-economic and immigration status, signalled by the distinctions drawn between these ‘migrant dormitories’ and the larger ‘community’…

‘Liveability’ continues to attract considerable attention internationally, in the media, among urban policymakers and from academics. In this paper, we extend consideration of liveability beyond the elite, professional migrants who are the primary target of inter-urban competition to low-wage migrants in two different urban contexts in Asia. Drawing upon narratives of South Asian men in Dubai and Singapore, we highlight friendship and sociality as vital components of quality of life – in emotional and affective as well as practical or material terms. We highlight investments in spaces, times and technologies of friendship, and also in cultures of welcome and hospitality, as key ways of extending urban liveability. While recognising important critiques of liveability as seemingly irredeemably bound up with neoliberal inter-urban competition, we consider how such competitiveness and the ‘discursive power’ (McCann, 2004) of liveability may be steered towards the making of more welcoming and friendly cities.

In this 2017 article, we examined the mobile communication practices of low-skilled South Asian male migrant workers living and working in Singapore. In a global city where low-wage migrant workers are paradoxically admitted for their labour but excluded in local society, these migrants have turned to mobile phones as a way of dealing with their marginalised position in Singapore…

The unabated influx of transnational labour migrants has been accompanied by complex societal fissures, from differential policies to the creation of isolated cultural geographies. In Singapore, citizens voice their aggravation caused by transients’ lack of acculturation, and the resultant risks posed to the cosmopolitan vision of the state. We examine the intersection of transnational acculturation with mediated communication via mobile phones within the domains of life and work. Data from in-depth qualitative interviews (75) allowed for thick descriptions. We find that, despite encountering heterotopic practices, transnational migrant workers engage in a phenomenon we label ‘bounded cosmopolitanism’, or the ability to engage in learning, enjoy economic growth, and embrace cultural hybridity, to escape the shackles of race, class, and gender. Mobile phones play a significant role in providing open participatory spaces; yet; this phenomenon signifying openness, innovation, and acceptance is restricted to organizational workspaces. We therefore conclude with comments on the implications of applying management perspectives to broader societal challenges, and propose shifting of the discourse from the bounded confines of the organization to that of society.

Just as Third World women are positioned as being more suitable for particular types of work, social science research has shown that young, able-bodied men from developing economies are also being situated as more capable for certain types of work. Drawing upon qualitative data collected in Singapore over 14 months from 2009–2010, this paper explains migrant precarity by examining the complex, intertwined processes of class, gender, migration, and labour. Singapore’s development aspirations as a global city, along with a low-birth rate and ageing population, continues to industrialise by importing a growing number of migrants to its labour force [Ye, 2016]. The majority of these labour migrants are on the work-permit system, which means they are transient, low-waged, and often brokered through labour agents, such as the Bangladeshi men in this study…

Although there is a growing body of scholars who have examined the reproduction and experiences of masculinities, research on the experiences of migrant men remains relatively limited. While I continue to draw upon insights from these scholars of both migration and gender, my data show that there remains considerable potential to contribute to this research field, in particular, analysing the reproduction of masculinity through a class lens. Drawing upon migrants’ own narratives and notions of class by Bourdieu, I examine how Bangladeshi men make sense of their labour migration to Singapore, particularly after they fall out of work. Their responses are not only based upon instrumental calculation, but are also powerfully shaped by a complex set of normative gendered formations that can further constrain them.

In 2017, we wrote an article that highlighted the impact of remittances on the capacity of rural households to respond to economic and environmental challenges. Based on a study of rural migrant households in Bangladesh, our findings suggest that remittances enhance the social resilience of households, or the ability to respond to different challenges. Our analysis shows that monetary remittances boost migrant households’ ability to build other forms of economic, human, and cultural capital, which in turn contribute to the household social resilience in response to challenges. This involves different investment strategies that are shaped by gender roles in the household, and can relate to specific forms of capital, such as access to land for agricultural production or housing construction, or education which adds to human capital. Given the current challenge of COVID-19, we reflect on the pandemic’s impact on remittances and rural migrant households in Bangladesh…

Remittances from migration have significant impacts on economic livelihoods in developing countries. Yet, to date, scholars have paid little attention to the broader ways in which migrant remittances enable rural households to improve their capacity to respond and adapt to economic as well as environmental challenges. This paper draws upon ‘social resilience’ as a conceptual tool to investigate how monetary remittances are used by households to enhance their ability to respond to challenges, build economic, human and cultural capital, and plan for the future. Using data from a qualitative study of rural migrant households in Bangladesh, we provide an analysis of how different strategies for investing internal and international remittances contribute to household social resilience. Our analysis reveals that remittances in general contribute to improving the social resilience of migrant households. Remittances are important in building economic capital through accessing land for agricultural production as well as housing construction. Remittances also enable households to access education, and thus build their human capital. Nevertheless, the paper reveals an important gender dimension in the choice of investment strategies. Female-headed households tend to invest remittances in human capital, and such strategies may contribute to the reinforcement of existing gender inequalities and do little to improve resilience.