Singapore’s Extreme Neoliberalism and the COVID Outbreak: Culturally Centering Voices of Low-Wage Migrant Workers

Abstract

I draw on the key tenets of the culture-centered approach to co-construct the everyday negotiations of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) among low-wage male Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore. The culture-centered approach foregrounds voices infrastructures at the margins as the basis for theorizing health. Based on 87 hours of participant observations of digital spaces and 47 in-depth interviews, I attend to the exploitative conditions of migrant work that constitute the COVID-19 outbreak in the dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers. These exploitative conditions are intertwined with authoritarian techniques of repression deployed by the state that criminalize worker collectivization and erase worker voices. The principle of academic–worker–activist solidarity offers a register for alternative imaginaries of health that intervene directly in Singapore’s extreme neoliberalism.

Keywords

migrant workers migration COVID-19 pandemic culture-centered approach

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Baey

Yeoh

B. S. A.

(2015, February). Migration and precarious work: Negotiating debt, employment, and livelihood strategies amongst Bangladeshi migrant men working in Singapore’s construction industry (Migrating out of Poverty Working Paper 26). University of Sussex, Brighton, Sussex, UK. http://migratingoutofpoverty.dfid.gov.uk/documents/wp26-baey-yeoh-2015-migration-and-precarious-work.pdf

Baey

Yeoh

B. S. A.

(2018). “The lottery of my life”: Migration trajectories and the production of precarity among Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore’s construction industry. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 27(3), 249-272. https://doi.org/10.1177/0117196818780087

Bal

C. S.

(2015). Production politics and migrant labour advocacy in Singapore. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 45(2), 219-242. https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2014.960880

Basu

Dutta

M. J.

(2011). “We are mothers first”: Localocentric articulation of sex worker identity as a key in HIV/AIDS communication. Women & Health, 51(2), 106-123. https://doi.org/10.1080/03630242.2010.550992

Bates

B. R.

Marvel

D. L.

Nieto-Sanchez

Grijalva

M. J.

(2019). Painting a community-based definition of health: A culture-centered approach to listening to rural voice in Chaquizhca, Ecuador. Frontiers in Communication, 4, 37.

Beaubien

(2020, May 3). Singapore was a shining star in COVID control—until it wasn’t. National Public Radio. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/849135036

Bruff

Tansel

C. B.

(2019). Authoritarian neoliberalism: Trajectories of knowledge production and praxis. Globalizations, 16(3), 233-244. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2018.1502497

Cai

Lai

K. K. R.

(2020, April 28). Packed with migrant workers, dormitories fuel coronavirus in Singapore. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/28/world/asia/coronavirus-singapore-migrants.html

Dutta

M. J.

(2004a). Poverty, structural barriers, and health: A Santali narrative of health communication. Qualitative Health Research, 14(8), 1107-1122.

10.

Dutta

M. J.

(2004b). The unheard voices of Santalis: Communicating about health from the margins of India. Communication Theory, 14(3), 237-263.

11.

Dutta

M. J.

(2007). Communicating about culture and health: Theorizing culture-centered and cultural sensitivity approaches. Communication Theory, 17(3), 304-328. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2007.00297.x

12.

Dutta

M. J.

(2008). Communicating health: A culture-centered approach. Polity Press.

13.

Dutta

M. J.

(2016). Neoliberal health organizing: Communication, meaning, and politics (Vol. 2). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315423531

14.

Dutta

M. J.

(2017a). Migration and health in the construction industry: Culturally centering voices of Bangladeshi workers in Singapore. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14(2), 132. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14020132

15.

Dutta

M. J.

(2017b). Negotiating health on dirty jobs: Culture-centered constructions of health among migrant construction workers in Singapore. In Yuping

Rukhsana

(Eds.), Culture, migration, and health communication in a global context (pp. 45-59). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315401348-4

16.

Dutta

M. J.

(2018a). Culturally centering social change communication: subaltern critiques of, resistance to, and re-imagination of development. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 13(2), 87-104. https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2018.1446440

17.

Dutta

M. J.

(2018b). Culture-centered approach in addressing health disparities: Communication infrastructures for subaltern voices. Communication Methods and Measures, 12(4), 239-259. https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2018.1453057

18.

Dutta

M. J.

(2019a). Digital transformations, smart cities, and displacements: Tracing the margins of digital development. International Journal of Media Studies, 1, 1-21.

19.

Dutta

M. J.

(2019b). What is alternative modernity? Decolonizing culture as hybridity in the Asian turn. Asia Pacific Media Educator, 29(2), 178-194. https://doi.org/10.1177/1326365X19881256

20.

Dutta

M. J.

(2020a). COVID-19, authoritarian neoliberalism, and precarious migrant work in Singapore: Structural violence and communicative inequality. Frontiers in Communication, 5, Article 58. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2020.00058

21.

Dutta

M. J.

(2020b, April 13). Infrastructures of housing and food for low-wage migrant workers in Singapore (CARE White Paper Issue 6). Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE). https://carecca.nz/2020/04/13/care-white-paper-issue-6-infrastructures-of-housing-and-food-for-low-wage-migrant-workers-in-singapore/

22.

Dutta

M. J.

(2020c, April 22). Structural constraints, voice infrastructures, and mental health among low-wage migrant workers in Singapore: Solutions for addressing COVID19 (CARE White Paper Issue 8). Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE).

23.

Dutta

M. J.

Kaur-Gill

(2018). Precarities of migrant work in Singapore: Migration, (im)mobility, and neoliberal governmentality. International Journal of Communication, 12, 4066-4084.

24.

Dutta

M. J.

Pandi

A. R.

Mahtani

Falnikar

Thaker

Pitaloka

Dutta

Luk

Sun

(2019). Critical health communication method as embodied practice of resistance: Culturally centering structural transformation through struggle for voice. Frontiers in Communication, 4, Article 67. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00067

25.

Han

(2020, May 6). Singapore is trying to forget migrant workers are people. Foreign Policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/06/singapore-coronavirus-pandemic-migrant-workers/

26.

Huat

C. B.

(1998). Asian values: Restraining the logic of capitalism? Social Semiotics, 8(2-3), 215-226.

27.

Huat

C. B.

(2017). Liberalism disavowed: Communitarianism and state capitalism in Singapore. NUS Press. https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501713453

28.

Juego

(2018). Authoritarian neoliberalism: Its ideological antecedents and policy manifestations from Carl Schmitt’s political economy of governance. Administrative Culture, 19(1), 105-136. https://doi.org/10.32994/ac.v19i1.209

29.

Kaur

Tan

Dutta

M. J.

(2016). Media, migration and politics: The coverage of the little India riot in The Straits Times in Singapore. Journal of Creative Communications, 11(1), 27-43. https://doi.org/10.1177/0973258616630214

30.

Koh

C. Y.

Wee

Goh

Yeoh

B. S.

(2017). Cultural mediation through vernacularization: Framing rights claims through the day-off campaign for migrant domestic workers in Singapore. International Migration, 55(3), 89-104. https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12332

31.

Kong

(2018). The ideological alignment of smart urbanism in Singapore [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVTaChMuZKs

32.

Kong

Woods

(2018). The ideological alignment of smart urbanism in Singapore: Critical reflections on a political paradox. Urban Studies, 55(4), 679-701. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098017746528

33.

Lewis

Dwyer

Hodkinson

Waite

(2015). Hyper-precarious lives: Migrants, work and forced labour in the Global North. Progress in Human Geography, 39(5), 580-600. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132514548303

34.

Lindquist

Xiang

Yeoh

B. S.

(2012). Opening the black box of migration: Brokers, the organization of transnational mobility and the changing political economy in Asia. Pacific Affairs, 85(1), 7-19. https://doi.org/10.5509/20128517

35.

Lyons

(2005). Transient workers count too? The intersection of citizenship and gender in Singapore’s civil society. Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 20(2), 208-248. https://doi.org/10.1355/SJ20-2E

36.

Ortmann

(2012). The ‘Beijing consensus’ and the ‘Singapore model’: Unmasking the myth of an alternative authoritarian state-capitalist model. Journal of Chinese Economic and Business Studies, 10(4), 337-359.

37.

Pow

C. P.

(2014). License to travel: Policy assemblage and the “Singapore model.” City, 18(3), 287-306. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2014.908515

38.

Rahim

L. Z.

Barr

M. D.

(2019). Introduction: Authoritarian governance in Singapore’s developmental state. In Rahim

Barr

(Eds.), The limits of authoritarian governance in Singapore’s developmental state (pp. 1-25). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1556-5_1

39.

Ratcliffe

(2020, April 23). “We’re in a prison”: Singapore’s migrant workers suffer as COVID-19 surges back. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/23/singapore-million-migrant-workers-suffer-as-covid-19-surges-back

40.

Springer

(2012). Neoliberalising violence: Of the exceptional and the exemplary in coalescing moments. Area, 44(2), 136-143. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2012.01084.x

41.

Springer

(2015). Violent neoliberalism: Development, discourse, and dispossession in Cambodia. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137485335

42.

Sturmer

(2020, April 25). Singapore was the envy of the world when it came to coronavirus, but then the second wave hit. ABC Net. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-25/singapore-hoped-they-contained-coronavirus-but-second-wave-hit/12172446

43.

Tan

(2020, September 17). COVID-19 Singapore: A pandemic of inequality exposed. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-54082861

44.

Tansel

(2017). Authoritarian neoliberalism. In Tansel

(Ed.), States of discipline: Authoritarian neoliberalism and the contested reproduction of capitalist order (pp. 1-28). Rowman & Littlefield.

45.

Thompson

M. R.

(2019). Singapore and the lineages of authoritarian modernity in East Asia. In Rahim

L. Z.

Barr

(Eds.), The limits of authoritarian governance in Singapore’s developmental state (pp. 29-48). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51167-6

46.

Vosko

L. F.

(Ed.). (2006). Precarious employment: Understanding labour market insecurity in Canada. Montreal, CA: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

47.

Wham

(2019). First world authoritarianism: Lessons from Singapore (Public talk: Activist-in-Residence Series). Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation. https://carecca.nz/2019/11/26/care-public-talk-on-first-world-authoritarianism-by-jolovan-wham-is-live-now/

48.

Yea

(2017). The art of not being caught: Temporal strategies for disciplining unfree labour in Singapore’s contract migration. Geoforum, 78(1), 179-188. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.05.003

49.

Yea

Chok

(2018). Unfreedom unbound: Developing a cumulative approach to understanding unfree labour in Singapore. Work, Employment and Society, 32(5), 925-941. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017017738956