Asia-Pacific

'Guest Workers' or Modern Slavery?

Peter Boyle
Green Left Weekly (radical newspaper)
New South Wales, Australia
May 27, 2008

Foreign workers prune plants at a newly built office building in Singapore. (Photo: Roslan Rahman / AFP-Getty Images)

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 local Straits Times reported on March 18.

Article Continues

Advertiser Links

Links open in new window.

Credit Card Search - Search and compare credit card offers

CreditLoan: Finance Advice, Car Loans & Bad Credit Debt Loans

RAM Memory for Computers, Laptops, and Printers. Wholesale!

Travel to Russia: Tickets, Hotels, Tours

Medical Supply

Laptop Batteries Camcorder Batteries

Mortgage Payment Calculator

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."

From Green Left Weekly.




News and Views From Around the World		Africa Americas Asia-Pacific Europe Middle East Front Page