Low-wage migrant workers in Singapore have long suffered from a litany of abuses – low, stagnant, and unpaid wages; unreported and mismanaged work injuries; kickbacks for employment and high recruitment fees; and forceful repatriation, amongst others. They face significant obstacles to accessing the few labour rights they have, due in large part to the risk of deportation, occupational immobility and the debt burdens they take on to secure employment.
Since the 2000s, independent migrant labour activism, carried out by NGOs such as Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics (HOME) and Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2) on behalf of migrant workers, sought to alleviate some of these abuses. This activism took the form of providing direct services (legal aid, soup kitchens, shelters) to migrant workers and advocacy targeting government bodies to reform migrant labour laws and regulations.
This occurs within the strict and narrow confines of authoritarian political control in Singapore – strikes, protests and demonstrations are often criminalised; the party-state exercises near-complete political control over organised labour; migrant workers and activists face implicit threats when contesting labour conditions; as well the absence of strong public support for migrant worker rights.
NGO advocacy, particularly in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis (2007-2008), produced modest but significant reforms to migrant labour laws and regulations, with the criminalisation of kickbacks and the liberalisation of the change-of-employer (COE) framework representing the main gains.
The pandemic and its control measures have shaped migrant labour politics. We argue that the pandemic and its dreadful impacts on migrant workers have seen the emergence of new and heterogeneous social forces whilst simultaneously heightening ongoing contestation over working and living conditions.
Notably, migrant workers have emerged as a social force and started to participate in advocacy efforts to make policy demands on the state openly. Public opinion, long apathetic towards migrant workers, has begun to turn against their appalling treatment. This has seen the emergence of diverse social actors of varying persuasions and modes of activism seeking to change how migrant workers are treated.
In response, the government has sought to expand state-sponsored spaces of political participation within the ambit of containing contestation and problem-solving, curtailing the drive for further progressive and significant reforms.
The Emergence of New Social Forces
Migrant Workers’ Self-Organisation
Independent Singaporean-led NGOs and activists have long advocated for migrant workers’ rights in Singapore on behalf of migrant workers. Strict freedom of association laws and the implicit threat of deportability have made it fiendishly difficult for migrant workers to organise for change. Despite these restrictions, migrant workers have always found creative ways to come together informally and formally.
Within Singapore’s authoritarian context, community organising (as opposed to explicit labour organising) has proven to be the most effective means of bringing workers together to act on their shared concerns. By ‘community organising’, we refer to the tactic of openly rallying workers around shared concerns as a ‘migrant worker community’ rather than workers in a particular company. Done this way, it is more difficult for authorities to accuse workers of illegal independent trade union activity.
Migrant worker community organising is not new. Nationality-based women’s groups, composed of migrant domestic workers (MDWs), have existed since the early 2000s. Similar community groups for male migrant workers have a relatively shorter history. Although male migrant workers have a rich history of organising sit-ins, strikes, and other forms of work stoppages that sometimes lead to labour concessions or see successful reform take place, most of these actions are often ad-hoc or spontaneous.
Because such actions are illegal, most, if not all, workers are quickly deported, stymying any form of consolidation of workers’ power into associations or organisations. As a result, networks of male migrant workers have historically remained informal. It was not until the founding of Migrant Workers Singapore (MWS) in 2018 that some of these informal networks of male Bangladeshi migrant workers coalesced into a migrant-worker-led association that openly expressed demands for better policies for migrant workers living in Singapore.
MWS was developed with support from local independent NGOs and activists who provided material resources to sustain their activities. MWS trained a team of predominantly male Bangladeshi migrant workers to do casework (in Bengali) previously only done by NGOs staffed by Singaporeans (often in English or through informal translators). It was thus no surprise that during the pandemic, when male migrant workers were confined in their dormitories, MWS functioned as an essential node that rendered direct material and legal aid to them in ways that may have even been more effective than professional case workers in established NGOs.
With its relationship with local NGOs, social enterprises, charities, and activists, MWS could also reach out to Singaporeans about the plight of migrant workers. With a social media presence, MWS quickly became a powerful basis of mobilisation that more directly represented migrant workers’ concerns during the pandemic through the consistent platforming of migrant worker voices. Since 2020, MWS has advocated for the government to allow migrant workers to change jobs without employer consent and to be allowed to move out of dormitories freely. These demands were made either directly through social media posts or indirectly through petitions organised by Singaporean activists.
In the face of severe structural impediments, community organising is carried out in creative ways that help consolidate common migrant worker grievances and collective positions on key issues. A recent example would be ‘Journey by Lorry’, an art competition organised in September 2022 by migrant workers connected to MWS. Organisers invited both migrant workers and Singaporeans to submit creative entries about the issue of unsafe transportation of migrant workers on the backs of lorries.
Their efforts amassed over 100 entries, mostly from Bangladeshi workers nationwide. They hosted a series of panel discussions about migrant workers’ safety to accompany a gallery of the top 30 responses shortlisted by a group of Singaporean and migrant judges (note: the first author was one of the judges). Such events, in tandem with case-work support, workshops and social media activism, allow migrant worker community groups to build a modicum of collective’ class capacity’ that could drive progressive change.
These developments are politically significant because MWS is the first migrant-worker-led organisation to make demands on the Singapore government openly. In Singapore, both employers and the state have the unilateral right to terminate or reject the renewal of a workers’ work permit, making migrant workers essentially ‘use-and-discard’ subjects without political rights. This has severely restricted migrant workers’ ability to make collective demands independently.
The criminalisation of independent industrial action makes it difficult for workers to consolidate themselves into any sustained organisation. It is because of this that advocacy was previously solely conducted by Singaporean-led NGOs on behalf of migrant workers. Through the formation of MWS, however, male migrant workers could openly organise themselves to deliver direct services and consolidate support from broader segments of society to support their advocacy efforts.
Public Opinion and Opposition Lawmakers
Public opinion in Singapore towards low-wage migrant workers appears to be mainly between ambivalent and antipathetic. Migrant workers are commonly seen to be either victims of unscrupulous employers or threats to public safety. Independent NGOs, such as HOME and TWC2, advocating for migrant worker rights have never enjoyed widespread public support.
This changed significantly during the pandemic as stories in social, local and international media on the conditions of migrant workers went viral. These included photographs of the poor quality of food delivered to migrant workers in lockdown, accounts of workers crowded together in dormitories without the ability to safe distance, and the subsequent explosion of virus transmission in these dormitories.
As these events unfolded during the first year of the pandemic, the media coverage of the Parti Liyani case – an Indonesian MDW acquitted by the High Court of her earlier conviction for stealing from her employers – gave the public a sense of how systemic inequalities in the country’s criminal justice system proves deleterious for low wage migrant workers.
These developments drove a significant shift in broader societal opinion towards low-wage migrant workers as international and local media kept the issue firmly in the spotlight. A public petition by Singaporean activist Kokila Annamalai in April 2020 making eight key demands of the government received 30,000 signatures within a week, something that would not have been possible just several months earlier.
Caught off-guard, despite long-term NGO advocacy on the dreadful state of migrant worker housing pre-pandemic, the government met a number of the petition’s demands, including large-scale testing, WiFi provision, and, to an extent, job and wage protection. Public opinion had shifted to such an extent that a tone-deaf parliamentary reply from the then-Manpower Minister, Josephine Teo, on the issue of an apology to migrant workers for their plight during the pandemic was met with derision.
This shift in public opinion had two key knock-on effects. The first was the proliferation and expansion of Singaporean-led NGOs, social enterprises, and informal groups that provided relief to migrant workers. These included groups such as Welcome In My Backyard (WIMBY), It’s Raining Raincoats (IRR), Sama Sama, Migrant X Me (MXM), Here With You (Migrants Helpline), Migrant Mutual Aid SG (MMA), and Geylang Adventures (GA).
The key difference between most of these nascent groups and the relatively more established independent NGOs (HOME, TWC2) was that the former largely focused on changing local attitudes towards migrant workers and helping to channel aid relief towards migrant workers under lockdown. Also, unlike HOME and TWC2, a majority of these newer groups did not engage in confrontational advocacy towards the state and tended to work within prescribed political boundaries.
MMA is one such exception to the rule. A nascent group, MMA channels material aid while publicly raising awareness about the structural challenges migrant workers face and the required policy changes to address them through its regular newsletters and social media channels.
During the pandemic, some of these groups (including GA, IRR, and MXM) formed the Covid Migrant Support Coalition (CMSC) to assist in the delivery of material goods and services to migrant workers confined in their dormitories. Although initially formed to deliver material assistance, groups involved in CMSC gradually began to be consulted by the government on migrant labour policy.
The second consequence was that opposition lawmakers – mainly from the country’s largest opposition party, the Workers’ Party (WP) – started speaking up publicly on the treatment of migrant workers for the first time. While opposition lawmakers have been few in Singapore’s parliaments, the 2020 general election (held during the pandemic) saw the WP capture 10 of 83 seats – the largest number of seats ever by an electoral opposition since 1968 – within the context of deepening social inequalities in the city-state.
While a small handful of opposition lawmakers had been in parliament since 1981, and Singapore had long been dependent on low-wage migrant workers since independence, opposition lawmakers had never spoken up for migrant workers until the pandemic. Much of this changed in 2020. The WP’s 2020 and 2021 Labour Day messages included calls to improve “laws, regulations, and attitudes” towards migrant workers, with these views being echoed by the only other opposition party currently in Parliament, the Progress Singapore Party (PSP).
Beyond rhetoric, both the WP and the PSP have spoken up for migrant workers’ rights and welfare in parliament, including challenging the policy of restricting migrant workers’ movement, dormitory living conditions, the quality of catered food in dormitories, and access to COVID-19 vaccines. Parliamentary questions and debates were not narrowly restricted to pandemic-specific issues but were increasingly focused on deeper systemic issues facing migrant workers.
Prompted by the acquittal of Parti Liyani in October 2020, the WP filed an adjournment motion calling for greater equity in the country’s criminal justice system, with the PSP calling for an independent review of Parti Liyani’s case. From 2020, longstanding issues plaguing migrant workers, such as exorbitant recruitment fees and unsafe transportation, were also raised by both opposition parties. With regard to the latter, the PSP called for the repealing of an exception in the law that allowed workers to be transported in goods vehicles, with both the PSP and WP proposing that migrant workers be transported in under-utilised tour buses.
These issues, previously only discussed in closed-door meetings between activists and government bureaucrats, with the occasional appearance in the media, were now being debated in parliament.
Reforms and the Politics of Exclusion
The emergence of new social forces – migrant worker self-organisation, as well as nascent NGOs engaged in aid relief and pressure from opposition lawmakers amid shifting public opinion – presents unprecedented momentum for reform to migrant labour policies and regulations, but also opportunities for government authorities keen on dissipating dissent and reinforcing labour controls over the country’s migrant labour force. A range of calibrated government responses – minor concessions, and the selective cooptation and repression of activists – severely limits the broader potential for change that these developments present.
As a result of considerable pressure from NGOs, opposition lawmakers, and migrant workers themselves, movement restrictions on migrant workers were finally relaxed. In February 2023, a parliamentary question by Workers’ Party MP He Ting Ru prompted a written reply from the Minister of Manpower indicating that the Popular Pass Scheme, the last vestige of migrant workers’ movement restrictions, had effectively become un-enforced. Worryingly, despite the minister declaring the policy “dormant”, the policy remains there in name.
Similarly, in response to advocacy and public pressure on migrant worker living conditions, the government enacted the Foreign Employee Dormitories Act (FEDA) in 2021. In addition to existing regulations on dormitories, the FEDA seeks to improve the overall living standards for migrant workers by setting out a set of base standards including minimum space per resident, maximum room occupancy and cleanliness and ventilation. While initially only covering large dormitories, the Act was expanded in September 2022 to include those with seven or more beds.
Beyond these minor concessions, the government has responded to pressures for reform by expanding spaces for its engagement with civil society. However, these new state-sponsored spaces work to selectively exclude groups with agendas not deemed acceptable to the government in order to limit the scope of emergent contestations. With the onset of the pandemic, the Ministry of Manpower significantly expanded its regular closed-door meetings with NGO activists, but with the exclusion of certain groups. NGOs also had to be white-listed to access and provide direct aid to migrant workers locked down in dormitories.
These expansions of participatory spaces whilst limiting the scope of contention are not new in the country’s migrant labour politics. The pandemic saw its further refinement and deepening. In August 2020, the inter-agency task force, Assurance Care and Engagement (ACE) Group, was set up composed of high-ranking officers from the Manpower, Health, and Communications Ministries, as well as the Singapore Armed Forces. Essentially, the ACE Group directed dormitory operations during the pandemic to purportedly safeguard the well-being of migrant workers. While initially appearing to be a temporary measure, it was made permanent in 2021 as a new division under the Ministry of Manpower, and with over 2000 staff, was described as being larger than some ministries. As a critical part of its operations, ACE recruits migrant workers to voluntarily share information about migrant workers’ welfare with them. Many activists responsible for the solidarity and awareness raised during the pandemic, including the most active members of MWS, were subsequently recruited into the ACE ranks as volunteers, effectively co-opting agents for change into government problem-solving agendas.
These measures were complemented by the selective repression of activists. In June 2022, the government declined the work permit renewal of Zakir Hossain, a prominent migrant worker, poet, and activist with a significant media presence. In the rejection, the government noted that Hossain had an “adverse record with a government agency”. Following a public outcry, the Ministry of Manpower clarified that Hossain’s renewal was rejected because he had allegedly made false claims in a poem that he posted on social media, and in doing so had “overstayed his welcome”. The powers that the government has to approve the renewal of work permits constantly hangs over the heads of many migrant workers engaged in activism. Given Hossain’s relatively balanced approach to managing relationships with the government, his subsequent work-permit cancellation sent a stark warning to many migrant workers.
In 2024, another prominent migrant worker writer and activist was repatriated. Having worked in the construction sector since 2008, Md Sharif Uddin had written extensively about life as a migrant worker, authoring two books entitled ‘Stranger to Myself’ and ‘Stranger to My World’. The former won the Best Non-Fiction Title at the 2018 Singapore Book Awards – the first time this prize was awarded to a migrant worker. The circumstances under which Sharif had his employment terminated remain mysterious and are best explained elsewhere. Despite some concerted online campaigning by workers’ rights groups , and even a late written appeal by the Prime Minister, Sharif was repatriated on 31 May 2024, producing yet another implicit warning to migrant workers activists in the country.
While the emergence of new social forces in the wake of the pandemic has heaped pressure on the government to enact reforms, authorities have responded by selectively co-opting and repressing these emergent social forces through shifting spaces of participatory inclusion and exclusion. The implications of these dynamics are dire – while spaces and opportunities for contestation have been opened up, rights advocacy continues to be perilous, and prospects for progressive change continue to remain limited. Despite these limits, migrant worker self-organisation through community organising appears here to stay.
Disclosure and Disclaimer:
Suraendher Kumarr is currently serving as a board member of HOME. Charanpal Bal was previously employed by HOME as a community worker between 2007 and 2009. The ideas expressed in this article are the personal views of the authors and do not reflect the views of any organisation they have been or remain affiliated to.
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