Taina Teravainen, TCCS ’19 Student
Singapore is small in size, only 279 mi², but it is densely populated with approximately 5.6 million people living in this space. Over 245,000 people in this figure are “foreign domestic workers:” women who live in their employer’s homes, cook their meals, wash their clothes, and care for their children and elderly. “Foreign migrant workers,” on the other hand, make up the over 296,000 men who migrate to Singapore to labor in the booming construction industry.
As a Singaporean, I have often seen men squat by the side of the road with yellow hardhats waiting to be ferried back to their dormitories in the open-air back of lorries. In the evenings, they can be spotted playing cricket or having a beer in pockets of unused grassy spaces. The women gather en-masse on Sundays in public spaces that they rarely get to visit, except on their single day off. They have picnics with friends, attend religious services, and send remittances to their families in their home countries. This day off isn’t a certainty though.
Due to the precarious situation foreign domestic workers live in, the exploitation they face includes denial of time off, forced work without sufficient rest, and docked or withheld pay for months on end.
Due to the precarious situation foreign domestic workers live in, the exploitation they face includes denial of time off, forced work without sufficient rest, and docked or withheld pay for months on end.
When I asked my mother about how much time off the domestic worker of our extended family hired received, she said that the worker had chosen to forfeit her day off for increased pay. This is more than just industriousness, I know, but rather a necessity. She has her own children and parents in her home country who depend on the money.
Following independence from British colonial rule in 1965, Singapore’s rapid industrialization has firmly cemented its spot as a global financial centre and, in turn, created a segmented labor market that is filled by cheap and disposable labor from peripheral countries such as Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, China, The Philippines, and Myanmar.
While these workers provide essential labor and services for increasing production and economic growth in Singapore, they are also denied pathways toward citizenship and are viewed as unable to integrate to Singaporean society. This seems at odds with the Singapore government’s party line that the Singaporeans live in multiracial harmony and raises the question: Who gets to be included in this vision? The racial language used in anti-migrant sentiments raised by local Singaporeans, who themselves are mostly only a few generations removed from their immigrant ancestors, certainly does not support it.
Who gets to be included in this vision? The racial language used in anti-migrant sentiments raised by local Singaporeans, who themselves are mostly only a few generations removed from their immigrant ancestors, certainly does not support it.
Of course, similar migration structures exist in the U.S. and other countries worldwide, but because of land size, Singapore seems to exist as a microcosm of the larger problem of exploitation of migrant workers and a racial hierarchy that stems from it. While living in the small citystate ensures that locals are never too far from encountering a foreign worker, it remains easy enough to avert one’s gaze and one’s thoughts from the abuses that go on within boarded-up construction sites or other people’s private homes, especially if societal rhetoric is that migrant workers are to remain outsiders and less-than, always. More needs to be done by the government, the employers and local Singaporeans to confront the neoliberal ideologies that reduce migrant workers to their labor and erases their personhood.