COVID-19, Authoritarian Neoliberalism, and Precarious Migrant Work in Singapore: Structural Violence and Communicative Inequality

Mohan Jyoti Dutta

doi:10.3389/fcomm.2020.00058

Abstract

Drawing upon an ongoing ethnography with low-wage migrant workers in Singapore, this article builds on the theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach (CCA) to explore the experiences of the workers amid COVID19 outbreaks in dormitories housing them. The CCA foregrounds the interplays of communicative and material inequalities, suggesting that the erasure of infrastructures of voices among the margins reproduces and circulates unhealthy structures that threaten health and wellbeing. The voices of the low-wage migrant workers who participated in this study document the challenges with poor housing, poor sanitation, andfood insecurity, that are compounded with the absence of information and voice infrastructures. Amid the everyday precarities that are generated by neoliberal reforms across the globe, the hyper-precarious conditions of migrant work rendered visible by the trajectories of COVID19 call for structurally transformative futures that are anchored in the voices of workers at the margins of neoliberal economies.

Highlights

Shameem had traveled to Bangladesh 11 years ago
Following an immersed 6 month ethnography with low-wage migrant workers in Singapore conducted in 2008, between 2012 and 2018, an advisory group of low-wage migrant workers that had been formed as part of the ongoing culture-centered intervention developed by the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) sought to cocreate everyday solutions of health and well-being, resulting in a national-level health campaign, “Respect our rights” seeking to transform the unhealthy structures of migrant work
The structural violence that is exacerbated amidst COVID-19 is placed amidst symbolic violence, the absence of infrastructures of information and voice articulated by the low-wage migrant workers

Summary

Introduction

Shameem had traveled to Bangladesh 11 years ago He has lived in a wide range of accommodations in Singapore. He shares that he shared the space in the container with rodents and cockroaches. When he compares life in the container with life in the dormitory he lives in not much has changed in the decade. He voices how workers are piled on “top of each other” in the room, with little room to move. The plight of the worker is not visible to anyone in Singapore (fieldnotes, April 25, interview)

Methods

Results

Conclusion