Debt, precarity and gender: male and female temporary labour migrants in Singapore

ABSTRACT

As one of Asia’s key hubs for transient workers, Singapore’s migration regime creates particularly gendered streams of labour, especially among lower skilled occupations, as is apparent in two key sectors – domestic work and construction work. Drawing on surveys with Bangladeshi construction workers and Indonesian domestic workers based in Singapore, as well as in-depth interviews with each group, this paper examines gendered issues of temporary labour migration, precarity and risk, as they occur against a backdrop of migrant indebtedness. In this paper, we argue that migrant indebtedness occurs along a spectrum that ranges from less visible, or what we call ‘silently’ incurred forms of debt, through to more ‘resonant’ types of debt that are acquired upfront and thus more readily quantifiable. Using this spectrum of migrant indebtedness, we aim to complicate debates about debt-financed migration by underscoring the ways in which notions of debt and unfreedom can be imbricated with both constraints and opportunities for migrants’ agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Debt
• migration
• gender
• precarity
• low-skilled labour

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dorte Thorsen, Priya Deshingkar and the three reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Percentages are rounded off to the nearest whole number.

2. While the Ministry of Manpower receives about 2000 foreign domestic worker-related complaints a year, only 90 such cases have been the subject of cases in court over a five-year period (The New Paper 2015), suggesting that most cases have been resolved or abandoned prior to being escalated to a more serious level of complaint.

3. Money is expressed in Singapore dollars (S$) unless otherwise specified.

4. Only male migrants of particular nationalities may be recruited as foreign construction workers in Singapore.

5. While male foreign domestic workers are present in Singapore, this is a relatively new phenomenon and as of 2013, it was estimated that there were fewer than 40 such domestic workers (The Straits Times 2013).

6. The approximate conversion rate between Bangladeshi taka and Singapore dollars used in this paper is S$1 to BDT 61.50

7. This sample included 16 women who reported receiving no allowance at all during this time.

8. Basic salary is calculated on a daily rate, and excludes overtime pay.

9. The comparison between monthly and daily wages between men and women is based on the fact that while women are paid a set monthly salary, men’s work is paid on a daily basis and their monthly wages may vary, depending on how many days they work per month.

10. It is important to note that this is not always the case for domestic workers who have travel documents confiscated by employers and who may lack the confidence and financial means to abscond (Anggraeni 2006).

Additional information

Funding

This work has been funded by UK aid from the UK government through the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium; however the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the UK government's official policies.