Let Our Migrant Workers Out

As our country opens up, infection rates have spiked and people falling seriously ill have doubled and tripled within two weeks. However, our 81% vaccination rate must count for something. The quarantine process has eased for people (close contacts) on quarantine orders. I'm cheered to see steps outlined for home recovery processes for infected, but asymptomatic vaccinated people, and self-isolation permitted to be done at home if we won't infect others or put vulnerable family members at risk.  

Importantly, the Ministry of Manpower is finally taking steps to loosen movement restrictions for migrant workers living in dormitories. I get being in lockdown for a few months, for half a year. We went through the same didn't we? But now that numbers are controlled, we're mostly vaccinated, would you want to be locked down for 1.5 years? Imagine your own mental health if you're a foreign worker in another city segregated from the larger community, and not permitted to have any freedom of movement for 1.5 years. It has also resulted in dormitory managers going trigger-happy and arbitrarily 'locking up' their workers to 'adhere to regulations'. Do we need a study to remind policy makers that the mental health of the migrant workers is at stake?

In an article published on September 10, 2021, The Washington Post states it very clearly in ways that our national newspapers and media outlets don't often do so when it comes to issues the government deems as 'touchy'. They leave it to us to suss out facts and figures from the data publicly available, and they tend to adopt a less critical tone when policies and regulations imposed are done 'for the greater good'. 

For nearly 17 months, more than 300,000 low-income workers, mostly men from India, Bangladesh or China, have endured social distancing curbs stricter and longer than the wider population. Since April 2020 they have been largely confined to their dormitories, allowed to leave only for work, essential errands or to visit designated “recreation centers” once a week.

We have restrictions too. But these are minimal and necessary. We lead a fairly normal day-to-day life now. It feels like the pandemic split them into them and us. They've endured a lockdown far stricter than the rest of the Singapore population. Let's not forget that migrant workers have very little rights in Singapore. They work so hard, and are treated as invisible to the larger Singapore society, and when the pandemic strikes, they're viewed as abhorrent virus carriers. Hello, the virus doesn't discriminate okay. The irony- in this endemic form, the segregated Singapore community is passing the virus back to the migrant workers in the dormitory. 

Rights groups say the latest government measures are “long overdue” and don’t go far enough in addressing what they describe as a “cruel” policy that highlights the need for better safeguards and conditions for migrant labor in the Southeast Asian country of 5.7 million.

Over the four-week trial period, the program will benefit up to 2,000 workers — a slim fraction of those still confined in dormitories, said Alex Au, vice president of rights group Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2). He said the plan to bus workers out “like schoolchildren” to a particular locality in Singapore for a few hours at a time denies workers the chance to meet up with friends and relatives living in other dormitories, whom they might not have seen since April 2020.

The pandemic has highlighted the need for decent housing for our huge migrant worker population. I hope it translates into concrete policies and decisions by the employers. But we clearly don't think it's an issue ferrying migrant workers around in the back of lorries, without proper seats, shelter or a seatbelt. How many accidents do we need before we make it mandatory for employers to transport their workers safely? Isn't this common sense? Must we really put everything into legislation? 

To be frank, we don't pay decent wages to these laborers and workers. As a nation, we aren't fair employers and the average employers are so dumb as to rob their domestic help of many basic rights. We aren't very different from modern day slave traders then. For a country that relies so heavily on migrant labor in the construction, domestic services, and food and beverage industries, we really need to do better.