Singapore’s migrant workers deserve better than to be ferried like livestock
- The pandemic has served as a wake-up call to the level of dignity, or lack thereof, accorded to Singapore’s guest workers
- Now that the government has vowed to improve their living conditions, it should also ban employers from transporting workers on the back of cargo vehicles
I had mixed feelings when I pored over Bloomberg’s latest Covid-19 Resilience Ranking released this week.
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Bloomberg’s headline on the latest result read: “Singapore is now the world’s best place to be during Covid”. I cringed at that hyperbolic statement, wondering if the city state’s army of migrant workers thought the same.
There is no doubt that the global health crisis has served as a wake-up call of sorts to the level of dignity, or lack thereof, that is accorded to Singapore’s guest workers.
New complexes are being built, and older ones are set to be upgraded.
But the deaths last week of Kerala-born Sugunan Sudheeshmon, 28, and Bangladeshi national Tofazzal Hossain, 33, highlight that poor housing is not the only thing that ails foreign workers in the country.
The men died of injuries after an accident last Tuesday when they were being transported on the back of an open-backed cargo truck, known locally as a lorry. Fifteen others were injured, and in a separate collision on Saturday, 10 foreign workers were sent to hospital with injuries.
The back-to-back accidents have sparked an outcry and reignited a debate for the government to outlaw the practice of transporting people as if they were cattle.
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Calls to do away with this infuriating practice in rules-obsessed Singapore are decades-old, but apart from some piecemeal changes, things have stayed the same.
In 2010, an accident that killed three workers prompted the government to hasten implementing rules such as requiring these open-backed lorries to have higher side rails and canopies. Truck owners must also display a “maximum passenger capacity” label on their vehicles.
The construction industry says a wholesale ban on the practice will hurt its bottom line. But in all likelihood, the sector is alone in making that argument.
Deborah Fordyce, president of migrant worker advocacy group TWC2, echoed the views of many citizens when she said in a letter to The Straits Times newspaper last week that “considering migrant workers build our offices, homes, highways and physical infrastructure, they should be treated as better than human cargo”.
The Singapore government did the right thing when, faced with international criticism last year over the state of migrant workers’ lodgings, it responded with a detailed blueprint on how it planned to improve their living standards in the long term.
The same must be done to end the travesty of people being transported like livestock in one of the world’s most modern metropolises.
