The city eats the worker: migrant negotiations of COVID-19 and resistance amidst the COVID-19 crisis

ABSTRACT

This essay draws upon a digital ethnography and in-depth interviews with Bangladeshi low-wage migrant workers in Singapore to theorize the COVID-19 outbreak in dormitories housing the workers as a crisis of the consuming city. Building on the concept of extreme neoliberalism, we examine the ways in which the erasure of worker voice as a technique of smart governmentality coded into the “Singapore model” underlies the pandemic outbreak. The in-depth interviews document the ways in which the poor infrastructures for migrant living are already always in crisis because of their exploitative design that maximizes profits while undermining the health, wellbeing, and dignity of workers. In this backdrop, the workers narrate strategies of resistance, enacted in articulations that resist and disrupt the smart propaganda crafted by the authoritarian state.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• migrant worker
• precarity
• pandemic
• neoliberalism
• culture-centered approach
• Singapore model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Neoliberalism is a form of political-economic governmentality that centers the free market as the central organizing infrastructure of societies and communities. It reduces lived experiences to individualistic negotiations mediated through the market, simultaneously attacking public welfare infrastructures and spaces of worker organizing.

2 Consider the statement by Mr. Lawrence Wong, Chair of the C19 taskforce, that the outbreak could not have been foreseen (https://mothership.sg/2020/04/lawrence-wong-do-things-differently-foreign-workers/). In April 2022, Wong had been named as the leader of the People's Action Party (PAP) fourth-generation (4G) team, paving the way for him to become the next prime minister.

3 The findings reported in this manuscript formed the basis of two policy briefs directed at addressing the structural contexts of the COVID-19 outbreak in low-wage migrant worker dormitories.

4 Names of particular projects, buildings etc. have been changed to protect the anonymity of the workers.

5 During the course of the publication of this article, one of the migrant poets, Zakir Hossain Khokan, did not have his work pass renewed for speaking out about the presence of police in a dormitory where the workers protested the poor quality of food (see https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/migrant-worker-advocate-who-did-not-get-work-pass-renewed-made-misleading-false-public-posts-mom)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Massey University.

Notes on contributors

Mohan J. Dutta

Mohan J. Dutta is Dean's Chair Professor of Communication at Massey University. He is the Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), developing culturally-centered, community-based projects of social change, advocacy, and activism that articulate health as a human right.

Md. Mahbubur Rahman

Md. Mahbubur Rahman is a doctoral student and researcher at CARE, Massey University.