TR EMERITUS

When the vehicle skidded and tipped over off Singapore's Pan- Island Expressway in the morning rush hour of June 22, the workers were thrown from the lorry. Three Chinese nationals died, 14 of their colleagues were injured on their way to work. The fatal accident - the most recent in a spate of similar calamities - has once again stirred a debate in Singapore, where foreign workers crammed on the rear deck of open lorries, shielded from the blazing sun or torrential rain only by plastic bags, are a common sight. 'It's a gross anomaly that first-world Singapore is so third world in this respect,' said a comment in the mainstream Business Times newspaper, adding that 'even Bahrain ... has banned commuting in the back of open lorries.' 'How many foreign lives need to be lost before we do something?' asked a Singapore resident in a web forum 'Stop companies from killing any more workers,' said another. An estimated 200,000 foreign workers - mainly from Bangladesh and India - are being transported on lorries daily on Singapore's streets, according to the Ministry of Transport. Last year, 166 rear passengers had been killed or injured in open lorries or on cargo decks of pickups - down from 210 in 2008, according to police statistics, but no details were given for foreign workers involved. The Transport Ministry said that both fatality and injury rates of workers on lorries in the past several years 'were about six times lower than the average annual rates of all road accidents.' In September 2009, however, the authorities tightened the safety for the transport of foreign workers, lowering, for example, the maximum allowable height of a seated worker and implementing harsher penalties for breaching the regulations. Further measures, including the installation of higher side railings and canopies on lorries, are set to be implemented in September 2012. But following the June 22 accident, legislatures and worker- welfare groups put some pressure on the government, saying the new rules should kick in much sooner. 'The new safety measures should be implemented earlier,' said Halimah Yacob, chairwoman of the Parliamentary Committee for Manpower. She said that 2012 'is no longer a feasible date and the authorities should act quickly.' Jolovan Wham, executive director of the worker's advocacy group Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics, agreed. 'Every day that these measures are not in place means increased risk and potential loss of lives for workers,' he said, adding that the latest accident was 'a strong wake-up call.' The safety of foreign workers on Singapore streets 'is a very complex issue,' senior parliamentary Secretary for Transport, Teo Ser Luck, told parliament when presenting the new rules last year. 'We have to address not only the safety concerns, but also the concerns of the business sector,' he said, noting that ferrying workers on lorries 'has helped companies control business costs.' The authorities, therefore, gave employers three years to fully comply with the stepped-up measures. But Halimah said it was reasonable to put all new rules in place by the end of this year, because businesses had been given ample notice of the changes. 'So long as the law is not in place, the rules are not mandatory and companies will drag their feet to the detriment of the workers,' she said, adding that companies 'must be prepared to pay for the safe transportation of their workers.' Halimah also called for more stringent requirements 'before foreigners are allowed to drive such lorries, as this has been identified as one of the causes of the accidents.' Singapore's Land Transport Authority signalled it would consider doing more, 'including bringing forward the implementation of the remaining measures.' Transport Minister Raymond Lim said that, in the long run, the government should consider phasing out the use of lorries for ferrying workers. Halimah agreed, saying that the use of buses should be the ultimate goal, as 'lorries are designed to carry goods and not people.' The foreign workers were not just numbers, but human beings, she said. 'It is not good for Singapore and for them to come here to work and go back in coffins,' said Halimah.   By Kai Portmann  Read More →

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 Straits Times reported. 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."   by Peter Boyle Green Left Weekly   Editor's Note: Although this article appeared quite some time ago, it is of relevance now in light of the recent massive influx of foreign workers into Singapore.    Read More →

I Was an audit director for the Transport Accidents Commission of the state of Victoria in Australia, and I have seen thousands of files on traffic and transport accidents. When I first took up my role in Singapore two years ago, I was shocked that workers were crammed into open-top vehicles designed solely for the transport of materials. This situation seems incongruous with Singapore's image as a safe place to work. Government plans ('Worker-transport safety rules may come sooner'; June 26) to alleviate risk will make no difference to worker death or injury in the case of a major accident. The Government did not mention any improvement in the securing of workers in the vehicles, or in overhead roll protection. Instead of designing smokescreen regulations, like the proposed rule to increase space per worker in the back of open-top vehicles, which has no real major impact on safety, the Government should simply make construction companies pay for foreign workers to be transported on buses. Robert J. Cochrane Editor's Note: This letter is also published at ST Forum.  Read More →