#7: If You're Not Angry, You're Not Paying Attention
Mask off!! But actually please keep your masks on.
The person behind this newsletter believes that everybody deserves food, housing, and healthcare. I think most people would say that they believe the same. Let’s go a step further. The person behind this newsletter believes that everybody deserves food, housing, and healthcare regardless of their citizenship and ability to pay. I think this is challenging for some people.
This is a great time to test your beliefs. If you haven’t already heard, Singapore’s sizeable foreign worker population is facing an unprecedented health and safety crisis. It’s been no secret that the living conditions in the dormitories have been unacceptable for a long time. All the pandemic is doing is accelerating the pace at which these conditions cause harm to those living in the dormitories. Transient Workers Count Too, one of the NGOs working with the foreign worker population in Singapore, wrote this op-ed in the Straits Times in March, just a few days before infections started spreading through said dormitories. Many, many people have written about the migrant population and the risks they face due to COVID-19. I’ll put links to these articles in the Further Reading section.
This is absolutely a race issue. Work visas for the jobs that these migrant workers do are only issued to citizens of certain countries. The laws governing their employment are different from the ones that apply to citizens. And the men housed in these dormitories have been painted as threats to public safety before. MP Denise Phua famously referred to the crowds in Little India as “walking time bombs” and “public disorder incidents waiting to happen” after the riot in Little India. The area has seen a six-fold increase in surveillance cameras since 2016, a move which suggests that authorities might be bracing themselves for further “public disorder incidents”. Singaporeans, even the “well-meaning” ones, regularly admit to thinking poorly of migrant workers. (Incidentally, the term “migrant worker” tends to only be used for lowly paid blue collar workers from countries like Bangladesh and India and does not get applied to white collar immigrants from Europe, for example.) A Straits Times piece from January interviewed a member of Migrant x Me, an initiative that connects Singaporeans with migrant workers, where he admits to having believed that migrant workers were “all criminals” up until his days as a university student. There is something clearly rotten in the state of Singapore society if someone at the big age of 23 believed that migrant workers were criminals sent to do poorly paid jobs as punishment. Seriously? I’m furious, not sure if you can tell.
Just this week, the MP for Jalan Besar GRC Yaacob Ibrahim made a Facebook post that was in incredibly poor taste and revealed some abhorrent views about foreign workers.
He has, of course, since apologised for the statement.
I can’t even begin to go into all the details about how this group of people has been mistreated. Some reports from dormitories indicate that the food that workers have been given under quarantine is dreadfully inadequate. There’s a video currently circulating (my apologies if the link has been taken down by the time you read this post) that shows migrant workers being crowded into a carpark for temporary accommodation as part of social distancing measures. The Ministry of Manpower has posted an update indicating that more is being done to improve the conditions of quarantine but activists have been sounding the alarm about inhumane living conditions for years.
The coronavirus is not a “great equaliser”. While anybody can be infected, some people are less able to shelter in place. Some people are less able to access healthcare, less able to practice social distancing, less important in the eyes of the state. Foreign workers deserve humane living conditions. And not just because they “build our city” and “clean our roads”. Fuck that. They deserve to be treated with dignity because they are human beings. We will not attach conditions to rights.
Singaporean civil society has really stepped up. There are fundraisers and volunteer drives to ensure that the migrant workers stuck in quarantine have their needs met. This is a spreadsheet consolidating some of the needs of the migrant worker community. Here’s the largest fundraising effort I’ve seen. It helps channel funds to HealthServe and TWC2. It’s coordinated by Preeti Nair, I recommend watching her explainer video for more information on the current situation. Donate if you can. We are learning that we’ve always had the resources to address these issues. We also seem to have the collective will to do so. Civil society, however, does not have the ability to plug all the gaps. It cannot circumvent or write new legislation. It cannot force errant employers to comply with existing laws. It cannot redistribute resources with the same efficiency as the state.
One-sixth of all residents in Singapore are low wage migrant workers. Our economy is literally carried on the backs of these labourers. The high turnover of fancy buildings here wouldn’t be possible if there wasn’t a large pool of construction workers to draw upon. Singapore’s reputation as a Clean and Green City wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for underpaid janitorial staff. The Singaporean status quo would not be possible if this group of people was paid fairly and housed safely. These are the choices we made to have the economy that we have.
Today, National Development Minister Lawrence Wong, who is the politician spearheading the government’s response to COVID-19, described the situation as “two separate infections”.
It’s too late for us to pretend that this is true. The migrant worker population got infected because of the virus’s spread through the country. It is possible to separate the migrant workers from the rest of the Singaporean population, yes. That is exactly what many dormitories were built for. But the number of infections will increase if the migrant worker population doesn’t have access to the same sort of social distancing measures as the rest of the Singaporean population. We will have to treat the sick. If numbers continue to rise rapidly – we hit a new record for COVID-19 cases today, most of the infected are migrant workers unsurprisingly – will we have to decide who to allocate healthcare resources to? Will we decide to deport workers to fend for themselves, potentially causing them to spread the disease to vulnerable populations in their own countries? Will we decide to adopt social distancing as the official policy for one population and herd immunity for another?
Keep making noise. Countries with electoral systems tend not to consider the needs of non-voting populations. Let’s make the health and safety of our non-citizen population our concern then.
Further Reading
I’m just including a bunch of links from a spread of news outlets. A lot of people are writing about the migrant worker situation. Good.
We shouldn’t need COVID-19 to see migrant workers’ humanity
Migrant workers fear massive Singapore dormitory lockdown is coronavirus time bomb
Singapore: Let’s not ignore the downtrodden; nor those who speak up for them (teacher recommended)
Singapore’s cramped migrant worker dorms a ‘perfect storm’ for rising coronavirus infections
Singapore's migrant workers on front line of coronavirus shutdown
Kirsten Han’s Twitter thread on migrant workers in Singapore during the pandemic