Coronavirus: Singapore imposes strict measures on migrant workers as it looks to resume some construction in June
- Only those who have recovered from the virus or tested negative will be allowed to return to work – and they must adhere to new guidelines
- Employers will need to assign them to specific work zones and stagger break times to ensure they cannot mingle
All workers on one project must be housed in the same accommodation. They must go for regular coronavirus testing and return on designated transport to their living quarters. Employers will need to assign them to specific work zones and stagger break times to ensure they cannot mingle. Workers will be given individually packed meals and cannot socialise with people outside their immediate teams of workers since break times are also staggered.
This is “so that even if transmission were to happen on the worksite, it will not go back and infect multiple dormitories, it will be contained,” National Development Minister Lawrence Wong said.
John Gee, former president of non-profit migrant worker group Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), said such restrictions can only be in place for the short term to prevent workers from becoming unhappy.
“They are so stringent and restrictive that they are bound to be resented by many workers if implemented for more than a brief period and they will be unenforceable without the ready cooperation of the workers,” he said.
Besides, Gee said it would be hard to prevent workers from mingling across work sites when the mega-dormitories they are currently housed in have tens of thousands of people from a variety of projects. “Unless there has been an enormous sorting out of accommodation according to employer during the past two months, it is hard to see how this can be implemented effectively,” he said.
In the longer term, he suggested, workers from the same project could be housed together near their work site “not least because it can spare the workers long journey times before and after work, but when they are not working, they should be able to relax and socialise freely, as locals expect to do”.
Hundreds of thousands of Singapore’s 1 million low-wage migrant workers are employed in construction. Currently, only about 5 per cent of the construction workforce – or 20,000 workers – are working on critical infrastructure projects, according to the Building and Construction Authority, which is aiming for an additional 5 per cent to resume work next month.
The authority said projects that will be restarted first include those that are important and time sensitive, such as building train lines, tunnelling projects for sewer systems and residential renovation works.
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The new measures for migrant workers come as Singapore continues to grapple with an outbreak of coronavirus among the community that has resulted in the city state having the highest per capita infection rate in Asia.
Nearly 90 per cent of its 26,891 coronavirus cases are workers in jobs shunned by Singaporeans, including in construction, marine engineering and cleaning. Most live in cramped rooms with bunk beds in 43 mega dormitories, while others live in smaller quarters. The government has said it aims to test all 323,000 workers living in dorms.
New requirements have also been introduced for the commercial operators of the mega dorms. They must designate specific blocks for recovered workers and those who have tested negative to keep them apart from those who have not yet been tested. Across the blocks, social interaction for workers should be limited to within their rooms, with each room of workers given access to designated showers, toilets, wash basins and stoves.
Authorities said the workers would be tested regularly, and they must also report their temperatures, blood oxygen levels and heart rates daily. If a new Covid-19 case is found, the worker’s contacts would be quickly quarantined.
Singapore, which implemented its circuit breaker measures in early April, is expected to ease social distancing restrictions after June 1. On Friday, Health Minister Gan Kim Yong said these needed to be lifted “carefully and slowly”.
While infections among non-migrant workers in the city state have remained in the single digits in recent days, Gan said these numbers were “likely to increase” once safe distancing measures were lifted.
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“We have to bear in mind that today, the community cases are low, primarily because of the circuit breaker measures that we have put in place, including that we have actually moved a lot of the working environment to home-based telecommuting, and we have actually stopped the bulk of the construction work in Singapore,” he said.
“We have to find ways to live with the virus for now, and this is the new normal,” said Takeshi Kasai, the World Health Organisation’s regional director for the western Pacific on Thursday.
“As long as the virus is circulating in this interconnected world, and until we have a safe and effective vaccine, everybody remains at risk.”
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