Singapore's Labour Research Articles

Between Land Reclamation and Labour, Empathy and Asian New Wave Film: Fungibility in Yeo Siew Hua’s A Land Imagined 幻土

Yeo Siew Hua's film A Land Imagined (2018) is interspersed with long scenes at a work site. The camera often rests on the droning work of machines and workers carting and sorting gravel. But for all the movement that is displayed, no change has taken place. Piles of gravel are demolished and moved to make new piles. The persons in the film appear similarly fungible: an injured laborer can become a driver, a corpse may or may not explain a disappearance. Ultimately, the site is revealed to be a land reclamation site which reveals that movement of gravel is not a closed innocuous system, but is part of a zero-sum game, in which one country grows bigger by cannibalizing those around it. Using Sadiya Hartman's work on fungibility as a lens through which I consider the modern-day ‘coolie' in the film and Lisa Lowe’s writing on immigration and citizenship, I argue that Yeo allegorizes the movement of land across bodies of water for the similar movement of indentured laborers in order to critique the invisibility of foreign low-wage labor in Singapore, at the same time that the products of their labour are put on brash display. Critics like Hartman and Lowe, whose critical interests connect exchange, labor, and transnational movement across oceans and bodies of water, offer a critical framework with which we can think about how the film takes up the racial, national, and gendered intersections of these issues. Finally, in drawing from and inserting itself within an extant body of work by Asian New Wave directors, A Land Imagined ultimately enacts an imaginative and responsible form of transnational assemblage, connecting cultures and people across oceans not through labour or even soil, but through art.

ANALYSIS OF THE NEED FOR LABOR MIGRATION POLICY IN SINGAPORE

Singapore is categorized as a Developed Country because of its developed trading industry among Southeast Asian countries. The existence of Singapore is inseparable from the presence of residents. As is known, most residents of Singapore are the result of migration policies due to the lack of population. Singapura recorded a record decline in people over the past year. The government's annual brief report revealed that the restrictions and conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic were one of the leading causes. Singaporean population also fell 0.7% to 3.5 million, while permanent residents (PR) fell 6.2% to 0.49 million. This is the first drop from YoY, both in population and population since data was collected in 1970. Migration is the movement of people from one area to another aimed at living sedentary, which goes beyond the administrative/political boundaries. The move made by a resident is usually immigrant because he has the desire to live a sedentary life for a long time. This research uses a qualitative descriptive method with literature review research. The results showed that one of the factors driving migration from Indonesia to Singapore was the lack of labor in Singapore. The process of self-formation into a Singaporean identity through migration, adaptation, and integration stages. Singapore has a policy toward migrant workers. The policy is specifically related to skills and age. If workers’ skills do not meet the criteria, the Government applies a policy to upgrade skills by conducting certified training. The Basic Skill Certificate (BSC) and Skill Evaluation Certificate (SEC) have been implemented since 1998.

Atmospheric conditioning: Airport automation, labour and the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper contributes to debates on human–technologies relations and labour geographies. It thinks through how the adoption of automation is mediated by the conditioning effects of atmospheres in space. Taking the occassion of the COVID‐19 pandemic, the paper presents a case of how atmospheres are capable of determining the trajectories of automation, and providing the guiding backdrop for technological (un)development. Drawing on 40 semi‐structured interviews conducted with airport labour in Singapore in 2020 at the height of the COVID‐19 pandemic, the paper offers an analysis of how airport workers variously and viscerally capitulate to, abandon, and/or desire to collaborate with automation, in ways that are both unstable and atmospherically implicated. To the extent that these affective responses have the potential to change the course of technological and labour futures in airport infrastructures, atmospheres — especially those deliberately advocated by the state and airport management — are also a political force to be reckoned with. The paper concludes with a discussion on how a focus on atmospheres can push geographic research on automation in productive and interesting directions. It views automation not just as a collection of abstract artefacts, but projects constantly subject to the conditioning effects of invisible atmospheres.

Soft violence: migrant domestic worker precarity and the management of unfree labour in Singapore

ABSTRACT In Singapore, the temporary legal status of migrant domestic workers binds them in servitude to their employer-sponsor as their residency is contingent on their continuous and sole live-in employment with a sponsor whose permission they must secure in order to transfer jobs. This legal status technically renders domestic workers unfree and precarious as it gives employers tremendous power over domestic workers. Based on 30 in-depth interviews with employers, this article examines how employers in Singapore negotiate their power over domestic workers. We identify ‘soft violence’ as a tool that employer’s utilise in their management of domestic workers. By ‘soft violence’, we refer to the practice of cloaking the unequal relationship in domestic work via the cultivation of a relationship of ‘personalism’ while simultaneously amplifying one’s control of domestic workers. Representing a strategy utilised by employers to maximise the labour of domestic workers, ‘soft violence’ emerges from the paradoxical relationship of simultaneously relieving and amplifying servitude.

Trading Sand, Undermining Lives: Omitted Livelihoods in the Global Trade in Sand

Sand is a scarce resource, extracted from rivers and coasts at rates that exceed its natural renewal. Yet, little is understood about the political economy of sand extraction, the livelihood vulnerabilities produced, or why sand grabbing is occurring at unprecedented rates in particular locations. Drawing together literature on global production network approaches in economic geography and debates on sustainable livelihoods in development geography—two literatures rarely in conversation with one another—we reveal the links between new, globalized, cross-border articulations of poverty and prosperity and the sand trade. We situate our sand case in Southeast Asia across three sites, namely, in Singapore, the world’s top sand importer; Cambodia, a top-ten global exporter of sand; and an emerging exporter, Myanmar. We examine how sand mining affects, directly and indirectly, a range of livelihoods, specifically fisheries in Cambodia, riverbank agriculture in Myanmar, and migrant labor in Singapore. Drawing on our empirical work, we argue that linking these two literatures with empirical data on sand provides an approach that is broad in its connections and simultaneously grounded in specific practices, places, and people. This enables us to better account for often overlooked aspects in the production, erosion, and transfer of value. Key Words: global production networks, livelihoods, precarity, sand mining, Southeast Asia.

Precarious Work and its Complicit Network: Migrant Labour in Singapore

ABSTRACTHow does precarious work entail social vulnerabilities and moral complicities? Theorists of precarity pose two challenges for analysing labour conditions in Asia. Their first challenge is to distinguish the new kinds of social vulnerability which constitute precarious work. The second is to assign moral responsibility in the social network that produces vulnerability in depoliticised and morally detached ways. In this article, the social and normative dimensions of precarious work are connected through a conceptual investigation into how Singapore allocates responsibility for managing temporary migrant labour. First, it analyses how various management strategies, driven by globalisation and government deregulation, increase worker vulnerabilities. These strategies intensify relations of dependence, disempowerment and discrimination, which the workers may accommodate or resist in limited ways. Second, it assesses why the strategies leave the state, employers, agents and others complicit in producing the vulnerabilities. These actors enable, collaborate with, or condone the production of precarity. Their complicity is complicated by varying support or resistance to reforms. The result is a novel conceptual scheme for analysing the complicit network behind precarious work, which can be used in other sites of precarity where some are complicit in the vulnerability of others.

Indonesian Worker Protection from Labour Exploitation in Singapore

Since 2017, Indonesian labour in Singapore has been getting a salary of SGD 550 excluding the compensation for overtime work. It has attracted Indonesian citizens to work in Singapore. However, they experience exploitation from their employers and, based on the survey, they work over time, receive low salaries and a little time off even some of them experience physical or verbal abuse. The regulations issued by Indonesia have not been able to protect the rights of its migrant workers in Singapore. This is due to the weakness of legal enforcement. To get the protection, the victims require long and strenuous efforts. This is very aggravating for Indonesian labour, considering they are in a state of fear. Indonesian government should learn from the experience of the Philippines, in which the sender of the labour is the government of the Philippines which has been recognized by ILO.Keywords: Protection, Indonesian labour

Unfreedom Unbound: Developing a Cumulative Approach to Understanding Unfree Labour in Singapore

This article proposes a cumulative approach to contemporary manifestations of unfree labour based on an exploration of dynamic combinations of common elements of the phenomenon. This understanding challenges enumerative and depoliticized tendencies in current approaches to both characterizing unfree labour and identifying victims. A cumulative approach recognizes the interlocking impacts of multiple forms of compulsion and duress, which shape the choices migrant workers make when their alternatives are severely limited and agency constrained. To illustrate this approach the article draws on a case study of Bangladeshi contract migrant construction workers in Singapore.

Determinants of Corporate Social Responsibility of a Social Enterprise: An Empirical Analysis

This paper makes an attempt to estimate the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of a social enterprise in Singapore. Following the literature, we measure CSR based on a set of standard questions to gauge how the public values CSR according to these standard questions. The social enterprise being studied is NTUC Fairprice. NTUC is Singapore's labor movement which is a macro-focused union that works well with the government to achieve growth with equity ([Yao, S and SB Chew (2014). A mathematical model of a macro-focused labour union. Singapore Economic Review, 59(4), 1–13] for the theory of the macro-focused union). In this study, we also measure the CSR of Giant, another supermarket which is a commercial firm. A comparative analysis of the estimate of the CSR of these two firms is then made. The main finding is that, based on a field survey, Singaporeans value the CSR of NTUC Fairprice more highly than that of Giant. Our regression analysis reveals that the CSR valuation of NTUC Fairprice is basically determined by how people perceive NTUC Fairprice in terms of their sentiments. On the other hand, the only variable that is statistically significant in explaining changes in the CSR valuation of Giant is Malay respondents. The study also finds that, based on the second field survey, almost 85% of respondents chose to become members of NTUC because of non-collective bargaining benefits and only 10% joined the union because of sentiment. The main conclusion is that it pays for an organization to be known as a social enterprise. As NTUC Fairprice is a social enterprise of the labor movement in Singapore, union members are always supportive of the social effort of its cooperatives, of which NTUC Fairprice is one. An important incentive for workers to become union members is the provision of non-collective bargaining benefits provided by the labor movement.

Becoming cosmopolitan: encountering difference in a city of mobile labour

ABSTRACTMany who move countries today do so for work, and labour mobility – both temporary and permanent – is the mechanism by which countless people (both movers and stayers) come into contact with cultural difference. The domain of mobile labour is thus an important context through which to consider the transformative possibilities of encounters with racial and cultural difference. Situated within debates on everyday multi-culture and vernacular cosmopolitanisms, this essay considers the question of intercultural encounter at work in relation to the layered histories of race and variegated citizenships of mobile labour in Singapore. Exploring the micro-nature of cosmopolitan practices, the paper considers under what labour conditions might an outward-looking cosmopolitan sensibility and a convivial openness to otherness emerge among migrant workers, as against a set of survival-based intercultural capacities. I reflect specifically upon two cases of ‘incongruous encounter’ in workplaces reliant on precariously employed migrant labour: a mainland Chinese man and a Filipina woman who, because of Singapore’s racialised system of work visas, find themselves working in South Asian restaurants in Singapore’s Little India. They both engage ‘cosmopolitan practices’, yet their sensibilities differ sharply. Their stories highlight how, in a place like Singapore, the ‘encounter’ needs to be understood within a regime of mobile labour, situated racial hierarchies, and a highly stratified system of work visas. I further suggest that situational factors such as the nature of work including its spatial and temporal qualities, the mixture of co-workers, and recognition relations with superiors all mattered in framing the affective atmospheres of encounter. In a context of forced encounter, I argue that learnt capacities to function and interact across difference should not necessarily be romanticised as a cosmopolitan sensibility.

The art of not being caught: Temporal strategies for disciplining unfree labour in Singapore’s contract migration

Adopting a case study approach, this paper examines unfree labour amongst labour migrants from a temporal perspective. I draw on the notion of temporality specifically to refer to the spontaneous and arbitrary imposition of strategies by employers as a response to situations in which workers attempt to bargain to ameliorate exploitation in the workplace or in response to workplace injuries. Although there is a significant literature discussing employer tactics to control and discipline workers, very little of this specifically addresses migrant workers or proceeds through a thick description of individual company strategies. I suggest that strategies to discipline migrant workers are often embedded in the broader migration regimes and state laws that underwrite migrant workers’ positions, and should be attributed equal weight in understanding how unfree labour is produced and maintained in practice. The case studies are taken from experiences of South Asian male migrant workers in four different small-medium enterprises (SMEs) that are subcontracting companies (sub-cons) in the construction and shipyard sectors in Singapore, and one man who suffered serious injury as a result of his work. Through these five case studies I hope to develop a characterization of migrant worker unfreedom that goes beyond descriptions of broad structural factors that discipline migrant workers, or characterisations of migrant worker conditions, to an examination of the micro-dynamics of workplace discipline. In this understanding I extend current conceptualisations of unfree labour by arguing that unfreedom must, in part, be understood as the inability to contest exploitation, including the strategies companies impose on workers at specific times to enable this.

Micro­microcelebrity: Branding Babies on the Internet

Micro­microcelebrity: Branding Babies on the Internet

LABOR, PRODUCTIVITY AND SINGAPORE'S DEVELOPMENT MODEL

This paper discusses how Singapore's labor market policies since independence have been molded by the state-driven, foreign investment-led, export-oriented, manufacturing-focused development model the country has followed over the past fifty years. The literature we review shows that high GDP growth has been achieved through factor accumulation rather than productivity increase, a strategy of extensive growth that has now run into diminishing returns as well as political, social and resource constraints. Prolonged heavy dependence on imports of foreign labor and skills to attract foreign investment has contributed to low, declining and even negative productivity growth, with low real GDP growth in recent years. In response, the government is pursuing renewed economic restructuring, limiting foreign labor inflows, targeting investments more selectively, and promoting productivity and innovation, so far with uncertain results. This paper suggests that Singapore should let market forces propel the economy toward services, domestic consumption and regional trade, led by domestic private enterprise. But the retreat from established state industrial and social policies will be difficult.

The institutional sphere of the labour market of a highly competitive economy – the case of Singapore

For years Singapore has ranked at the top the global competitiveness rankings and labour market eciency rankings developed by the World Economic Forum. e paper aims to present Singapore's labour market institutional infrastructure and iden- tify the underlying reasons for the good situation in its labour market. It discusses the assumption that the high eciency of Singapore's labour market, contributing to the country's global competitiveness, stems from a specic approach to labour market institutions, which involves using the alternative labour market regulation mecha- nisms, such as the promotion of good practices, to increase relatively low work stand- ards. Based on the breakdown of labour market institutions into formal and informal, the theoretical interpretation of the analysed mechanisms is presented. e conclu- sion indicates the direction for further research on labour market institutions in other Southeast Asian countries. Even though the labour market model in Singapore as such does not seem to be suitable for European economies, it is still a useful reference while shaping their labour markets.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMPLOYMENT AND EARNINGS IN SINGAPORE: 1991–2012

Since its formation in 1972 under the leadership of its founding chairman, Professor Lim Chong Yah, the NWC has been a major force in ensuring the stability of the labor market. A key recommendation which the NWC pushed for as a means of saving jobs in the recessions has been the reduction of the cost of labor to employers. The underlying assumption was that the reaction of demand to reduced labor costs would be large enough to justify such an approach. The main aim of this paper is to derive estimates of the elasticity of demand for labor using a suitable time-series econometric approach. The estimates imply that the elasticity of demand for labor in Singapore is less than but close to being unitary in magnitude.

Labour recruitment practices and its class implications: A comparative analyses of constructing Singapore’s segmented labour market

This paper contributes to the literature on labour migration by considering the class commonalities and differences as refracted through gender that are embedded within recruitment practices of different workers. Recent writings on the recruitment of labour migrants often distinguish between low-waged and middle-income workers without clearly addressing the linkages between recruitment practices of both. By adopting a comparative framework between Bangladeshi male migrants and transnational financial professionals, I draw out the varied configurations of gender and class that are deployed in recruitment processes that contour the existing division of labour in Singapore. For both groups of workers, their access to work is conditioned not only by technical skills but by their social and cultural capital as well. Through the analyses of the mesogeography of labour assembly, recruitment methods become crucial channels the realms of economic production and social reproduction are intertwined. This accounts for the segmented social space that is the labour market by demonstrating that recruitment processes are themselves embedded with specific class intersections as deployed through varied gender constructions.

Migrant masculinities: Bangladeshi men in Singapore's labour force

Although there is a growing body of scholars who have examined the reproduction and experiences of masculinities, research on the experiences of migrant men remains relatively limited. While I continue to draw upon insights from these scholars of both migration and gender, my data show that there remains considerable potential to contribute to this research field, in particular, analysing the reproduction of masculinity through a class lens. Drawing upon migrants' own narratives and notions of class by Bourdieu, I examine how Bangladeshi men make sense of their labour migration to Singapore, particularly after they fall out of work. Their responses are not only based upon instrumental calculation, but are also powerfully shaped by a complex set of normative gendered formations that can further constrain them.

Economic growth and inequality in Singapore: The case for a minimum wage

Abstract.In the context of Singapore's ageing population, the employment of large numbers of low‐skilled foreign workers is proving to be a major challenge to inclusive growth because of the stagnation of low‐wage workers' incomes. In order to address this problem, the author makes the case for introducing a minimum wage to complement existing in‐work benefit schemes. After addressing the commonly voiced objections to a minimum wage system, he suggests ways in which a minimum wage could be implemented in Singapore. New measures to enhance the social safety net and foster more sustainable economic growth are also proposed.

The determinants of training participation in Singapore

This article uses the Singapore Labour Force survey data to examine the determinants of workers’ participation in training programmes in Singapore. The results show that different socio-demographic and employment related characteristics affect the training participation of workers. Well-educated and better paid workers are much more likely to participate in training programmes than others. Age has a positive impact on training participation for younger workers (under 37 years), but a negative effect on older workers’ participation. The results also indicate that occupational affiliations have a significant impact on training participation. We also find that married workers seem to be less likely to participate in training programmes, but the difference between married and single is only significant at the 10% level. Finally, gender does not have any significant effect at any conventional level although the coefficient on the female dummy is positive, suggesting females might be slightly more likely to participate in training programmes.

Embeddedness and Restructuring: Case Studies from Singapore

Free market ideology has continued its hegemonic reign notwithstanding considerable opposition. Under capitalism, the relationship between the political and economic realms is intricate. This inquiry on corporate restructuring in Singapore between the late 1990s and the early 2000s scrutinizes how a dominant state collaborated with the multinational corporations to reconstitute their accumulation regimes to outlast the business cycles. Based on six cases, the findings underscore the critical role of the state on the subject of restructuring. The peculiar configuration of the relations between the state and labour in Singapore shaped how they negotiated the restructuring process with the companies. While those involved reckoned that training, research and technology were pivotal, the foregoing were not the panacea that optimistic consultants had made them out to be. The interactions among capital, labour and the state remained the underpinnings of solutions.