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

Abstract

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.

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

“…Constituted amidst these strategies of calibrating authoritarian control are the experience of communicative violence expressed by the low-wage migrant workers in Singapore, not knowing whom to go to raise their complaints, frightened to raise complaints because of the precarity of their work, and often living amidst structurally constituted communicative gaps. These forms of communicative violence are situated amidst structural violence that is magnified by the trajectories of COVID-19, and that forms the hegemonic organizing of "unfree labor" in Singapore (see Yea and Chok, 2018). Communicative inequality, inequality in distribution of information and voice infrastructures, is intricately tied to the material inequalities experienced by low-wage migrant workers (Dutta, 2008).…”

“…Low-wage contract-based migrant workers in Singapore perform precarious work, work that has "limited social benefits and statutory entitlements, job insecurity, low wages, and high risks of ill health" (Vosko, 2006, p. 4). The everyday work experiences of low-wage migrant workers are constituted amidst vast imbalances in distribution of power, with the control over their short-term work permits held by the employer (Yea and Chok, 2018). Amidst restrictive migration laws that promote temporariness and preclude pathways of mobility into citizenship, complex, and interconnected webs of brokerage constitute the tenuous conditions of low-wage migrant labor in Singapore (Lindquist et al, 2012;Yeoh, 2015, 2018).…”

“…Lewis et al (2015) depict these conditions of low-wage migrant labor as "hyper precarious, " reflected in "deportability, risk of bodily injury coupled with restricted access to healthcare, and transactional relationships" (p. 593). Hyper precarious work is marked by the absence of protections, and a fundamental condition of "unfreedom" (Yea, 2017;Yea and Chok, 2018). The linkages of brokerage, materialized in the form of recruitment, training, and travel agencies, impose significant front-end investments on low-wage contract-based migrant workers, which are often secured by going into debt, selling the limited ancestral land, or selling household possessions The hyper-precarity of low-wage contract-based migrant work in Singapore is further exacerbated by the individualization of the risks on the worker, with the absence of systemic infrastructures for workers to address their labor-related needs, the absence of state-based infrastructures directly accessible to workers, and the absence of clear policy oversight that holds the employers, dormitories, and caterers accountable.…”

“…Migrating from Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Malaysia, and China, low-wage migrant workers labor in precarious positions in Singapore, building the infrastructures of Singapore's neoliberal economy. Toiling in transient conditions without access to pathways of citizenship, without labor rights, and without the access to communication infrastructures for voicing the challenges to their health and well-being, low-wage migrant workers live in a climate of fear, amidst systemic threats to their employment, health, and well-being (Dutta, 2017a,b;Yea, 2017;Yea and Chok, 2018). The everyday struggles for migrant health in Singapore are constituted amidst a climate of authoritarian state management that produces worker precarity to facilitate capitalist extraction.…”

Production Politics and Migrant Labour Regimes: Guest Workers in Asia and the Gulf (Critical Studies of the Asia-Pacific). Charanpal S. Bal. Palgrave Macmillan, London, UK, 2016. 250 pp. $120 (hardcover)

“…The use of migrant workers in low paid and highly insecure jobs has been a widespread practice in developed and developing countries. In 2016, Singapore alone had 1.4 million foreign work pass holders among whom more than 70% were employed in low wage jobs across the construction, manufacturing, marine, and service sectors (Yea & Chok, ). In the midst of the rising share of migrant workers and increasing precarity, Bal aims to explain the growing labor unrest, the particular forms of struggle it takes and the differentiated outcomes it generates in Asia and the Gulf.…”