Production Politics and Migrant Labour Advocacy in Singapore

Abstract

Since 2005, NGO activism, calling for greater legal protection for contract migrant workers has been the most concerted challenge to Singapore’s migrant labour regime. Despite a severely restricted civil society space, migrant labour advocacy has delivered small but significant reforms to laws covering migrant labour. The existing literature on migrant labour advocacy focuses on the importance of civil society space in determining the outcomes of organised contention. In the Singapore context, the limitations of advocacy are emphasised and explained in terms of the illiberal nature of the People’s Action Party-state and the strategies deployed by non-governmental organisations. Such an approach is limited in its explanatory potential as it only states what political spaces are not available without examining how spaces for contention are created. In contrast, this article identifies the production politics between migrant workers and their employers as crucial in influencing the extent to which spaces for non-governmental organisation contention can be carved out. Accordingly, this article argues that forms of production politics leading to worker desertion from the workplace, rather than tactical accommodation, have provided non-governmental organisations with the impetus to push forward reform agendas within an authoritarian political environment.

Key Words:

• Migrant labour
• labour politics
• non-governmental organisations
• activism
• Southeast Asia
• Singapore

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Jane Hutchison, Garry Rodan, Kevin Hewison and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable insights and feedback. Gratitude also goes to Kirat Kaur for her support in the writing process.

Notes

¹ Rodan and Jayasuriya (2012, 186) argue that the interests of Singapore’s domestic bourgeoisie are conditioned by and, hence, dependent on state capitalism.

² For a concerted debate on this issue, see the exchange between Yee and Lyons (2009). Yee argues that such NGO strategies are necessary given tight state controls on political expression while Lyons argues that these strategies reproduce dominant (state) discourses on gender, citizenship and civil society. Crucially, neither deeply explores the driving forces behind advocacy on behalf of migrant domestic workers.

³ See Piper (2005) for a broad outline of the activities of these various groups and Lyons (2009, 97–103) for a more updated view of the activities of TWC2 and HOME.

⁴ While their substantive focus is on migrant domestic workers and migrant non-domestic workers (such as those in the construction and shipbuilding industry) they have also taken up the concerns of asylum seekers, fishermen and victims of human trafficking.

⁵ While NGO calls for COE were initially rejected by the ministry – initial batches of under-deployed workers were repatriated without benefits – the latter subsequently did make this exception. The gains of advocacy during the GFC are further elaborated on later in this section and in subsequent sections.

⁶ The ministry’s conditions were that the workers had a given period of time (less than a month) to source their own jobs within their existing industry sector (such as construction or shipbuilding) and that their potential employers had to be eligible to hire additional workers.