TR EMERITUS

A pile of bags and clothing on an old shop front verandah on Cuff Road in Singapore's Little India is "home" to a group of about 50 migrant workers who have been spat out by an economy that relies heavily on so-called "guest workers." All are men from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, lured to Singapore by shady labor agents who had extracted heavy fees from them. "When they landed, some found there were no jobs waiting for them. Others, unaware of regulations here, were tricked into entering on social-visit passes, which do not allow them to work. A few workers even claimed they were met at the airport by 'agents,' who took the return portion of their air tickets and disappeared," the Straits Times reported. Others worked legally for a while, but were tossed out by their boss after incurring work injuries. Jobless, desperate, homeless, and hungry, some of them tried to work illegally and were arrested, jailed, and flogged. Corporal punishment, like the death penalty, still remains a feature of modern Singapore law. To cap it off, some of these men are not allowed to leave Singapore because the labor ministry—which administers the approximately 900,800 transient migrant workers that comprise more that 40 percent of the island state's total labor force—requires them to stay to appear as witnesses in a string of court cases. "They find themselves in a debt trap, having borrowed money to pay agency fees and plane tickets; many continue to borrow money to pay for basic necessities now," explains Sha Najak from Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), a small charity which is helping feed the men and championing the cases. Receiving no funds from the Singaporean government and struggling to stay afloat, TWC2 was formed out of outrage following the 2001 killing of 19-year-old Indonesian domestic worker Muawanatul Chasanah, following months of brutal assault by her employer. Chasanah's autopsy revealed some 200 caning, scalding, punching, kicking, and burning injuries at the time of her death. Some 170,000 of the nearly one million transient workers work as domestics and one of TWC2's current campaigns is for these migrant domestic workers to be guaranteed at least one day off in a week! Model Program Yet Singapore's "guest worker" scheme is presented as a model for the world by some right-wing forces. An article in the January edition of the right-wing "libertarian" American magazine, Reason, supported President Bush's call for a guest worker scheme that would partly legalize the exploitation of "illegal" migrant workers in the United States, without ending the vulnerability and super-exploitation that arise from being denied the right to legally settle there. Similar arguments are now being raised by advocates of the Rudd Labor government's plan of continuing in substance (though under another name) the former Howard government's notorious 457 visa regime for temporary overseas workers. Singapore is seen as a model because it is a relatively wealthy island in South East Asia, with average incomes (adjusted for price parity) only slightly below that of the tiny oil-state of Brunei. The Reason article, by Kerry Howlett, argued that its guest worker scheme is a win-win solution. According to a 2008 report from the Asian Development Bank, "The Singapore government estimates that foreign labor contributed 3.2 percentage points of its annual growth rate of 7.8 percent in the 1990's." Singapore gets the hard and dirty jobs done and workers from poverty-stricken countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh get to send money home to their families. Across the causeway in Malaysia, the situation for "guest workers" is a lot worse, as Newsweek conceded in a March 15 article titled "Bottom of the Barrel," by George Wehrfritz, Erika Kinetz, and Jonathan Kent. Captives Malaysia is one of the "most notorious" host countries, according to the Newsweek article. It has an estimated 2.5 million foreign workers, many of whom fit the United Nation's definition of forced laborers. "Malaysian law effectively makes every foreign worker a captive of the company that hired him or her. In the name of immigration control, employers … are required to confiscate guest workers' passports and report any runaways to the police," Newsweek said. Newsweek cited the case of a local computer component manufacturing company—which probably made the casings for hard drives in many of the top-brand computers used around the world—which exploits a virtually enslaved migrant workforce. The article quotes a company executive pitying these workers who were "fooled hook, line, and sinker" by sleazy labor brokers. They had tricked the workers into paying huge placement fees for jobs that yield a net income close to zero. "This is the dark side of globalization: a vast work force trapped in conditions that verge on slavery," Newsweek said. "Most media coverage of human trafficking tends to focus on crime, like the recent scandals involving migrant laborers who were kidnapped and forced to work at brick kilns in China. And forced prostitution, of course, which accounts for roughly two million people worldwide, according to the United Nations' International Labor Organization.… The ILO reckons the worldwide number of forced laborers today at some 12.3 million. It's a conservative estimate; other approximations rise as high as 27 million."   by Peter Boyle Green Left Weekly   Editor's Note: Although this article appeared quite some time ago, it is of relevance now in light of the recent massive influx of foreign workers into Singapore.    Read More →

I Was an audit director for the Transport Accidents Commission of the state of Victoria in Australia, and I have seen thousands of files on traffic and transport accidents. When I first took up my role in Singapore two years ago, I was shocked that workers were crammed into open-top vehicles designed solely for the transport of materials. This situation seems incongruous with Singapore's image as a safe place to work. Government plans ('Worker-transport safety rules may come sooner'; June 26) to alleviate risk will make no difference to worker death or injury in the case of a major accident. The Government did not mention any improvement in the securing of workers in the vehicles, or in overhead roll protection. Instead of designing smokescreen regulations, like the proposed rule to increase space per worker in the back of open-top vehicles, which has no real major impact on safety, the Government should simply make construction companies pay for foreign workers to be transported on buses. Robert J. Cochrane Editor's Note: This letter is also published at ST Forum.  Read More →

I am so much troubled by a letter written by the IRAS to my mother regarding a HDB property of which she is recorded as a co-owner. The owner of the property is my sister. The letter states that there is an outstanding property tax for the period ending 31 December 2010. The letter stated that my mother is remind to settle the property tax before 21 Jul 2010 failing which after this date, the IRAS will take recovery action such as appointing her banks, employer, tenant, or any third parties to pay any outstanding tax from moneys held by him for or due to her. The irony in this case is that my mother is 80 years-old and I fail to understand why the IRAS is writing such a horrible letter to an old lady of 80-year old and does not feel any compassion about it. I am disappointed on the way the matter is being conducted. Being a taxpayer, I am questioning whether such an action by the IRAS is justified as far as spending of taxpayer’s money is concerned. Being illiterate, she is unable to know the contents of this letter and in the event that the tax should remain unpaid, as she has neither employer nor tenant nor money in the bank, will the IRAS be taking legal action against her then, as I believe this is the norm with this government agency. The problem here is not whether the property tax will eventually be paid by the concerned party but WHY IS SUCH A LETTER WRITTEN TO AN 80-YEAR OLD PERSON even though she is recorded as a co-owner? It this necessary? I believe that all our government offices and departments now are very well equipped with the latest IT solutions and machines and the most efficient of staff and I cannot believe that the people employed to take care of such matters do not take time to at least make a simple check to verify on the identification of the person they are writing to and spare elderly people the pain of such unnecessary administrative procedures. Or do the IRAS has to resort to such desperate measures as to threaten an old lady who could not even understand what wrong she had committed? Is the recovery of a mere $265 so important that they would not have second thoughts to deprive her of her old age money? My question here is that why do elderly people who had “lent” their name to their children for the purchase of HDB properties under the government requirement had to undergo such ridiculous prosecution. I am sure that many elderly people would have met with the same dilemma and I am sure that most taxes would be settled in due course by the parties concerned. I am requesting the IRAS to review their actions against elderly people and spare them unnecessary sufferings.   Leong WF  Read More →