Singapore's Extreme Neoliberalism and the COVID Outbreak: Culturally Centering Voices of Low-Wage Migrant Workers.

Mohan Jyoti Dutta

doi:10.1177/00027642211000409

Abstract

I draw on the key tenets of the culture-centered approach to co-construct the everyday negotiations of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) among low-wage male Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore. The culture-centered approach foregrounds voices infrastructures at the margins as the basis for theorizing health. Based on 87 hours of participant observations of digital spaces and 47 in-depth interviews, I attend to the exploitative conditions of migrant work that constitute the COVID-19 outbreak in the dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers. These exploitative conditions are intertwined with authoritarian techniques of repression deployed by the state that criminalize worker collectivization and erase worker voices. The principle of academic–worker–activist solidarity offers a register for alternative imaginaries of health that intervene directly in Singapore’s extreme neoliberalism.

Highlights

I draw on the key tenets of the culture-centered approach to co-construct the everyday negotiations of COVID-19 among low-wage male Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore
How can a public health infrastructure that is projected by global organizations such as the World Health Organization as a model for pandemic response be riddled with a fundamental failure in anticipating and addressing the health needs of its migrant worker population that forms the backbone of the economy? This failure in addressing migrant health is a direct result of Singapore’s exploitative structure of labor management anchored in its authoritarian neoliberalism (Bruff & Tansel, 2019; Dutta, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c; Juego, 2018; Tansel, 2017)
This interplay between the structural context of C19 and the layers of communicative erasures shapes the everyday negotiations of health and well-being among low-wage migrant workers in the middle of the pandemic

Summary

Introduction

I draw on the key tenets of the culture-centered approach to co-construct the everyday negotiations of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) among low-wage male Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore. Based on 87 hours of participant observations of digital spaces and 47 in-depth interviews, I attend to the exploitative conditions of migrant work that constitute the COVID-19 outbreak in the dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers These exploitative conditions are intertwined with authoritarian techniques of repression deployed by the state that criminalize worker collectivization and erase worker voices. In this article, drawing on in-depth interviews and a digital ethnography conducted amid low-wage migrant workers in Singapore (Dutta, 2018b), I will argue that the ongoing communicative erasure of hyperprecarious low-wage migrant workers from discursive spaces and policy registers interplays with structurally constituted labor exploitation to (re)produce the conditions leading to the C19 outbreak in dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers. They suggest that the poor infrastructures for migrant living are already

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