THE POLITICS OF SILENCE: WHY INDIAN MIGRANT WORKERS ARE LESS LIKELY THAN BANGLADESHIS TO SEEK FORMAL REDRESSAL IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

Almost a fifth of Singapore?s population comprises low-wage migrant workers doing 3D (dirty, dangerous, demanding) jobs in the construction, shipbuilding, domestic work, and service sectors, without a minimum wage. Moreover, various policies render them occupationally immobile and deportable by their employers, leaving them vulnerable to employer exploitation. In response to increasing migrant labour unrest and advocacy against such labour conditions, the Singapore government has expanded its redressal-seeking bureaucracy over the years. Typically, workers wanting to seek state-help, first approach NGOs who then assist them in lodging their claims to the Ministry of Manpower (MOM). Despite these developments, and similar concentrations of Indian and Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore, up to 90% of non-domestic migrant workers that approach NGOs are Bangladeshis, with less than 10% comprising their Indian counterparts. This poses a challenge to NGOs that seek to advocate for all migrant workers in Singapore. Further, according to Bal, the state?s redressal seeking bureaucracy serves to depoliticise migrant workers? labour struggles so as to control their labour contestations. Given that the second-ever riot since the country?s independence, the 2013 Little India Riot, reportedly involved mostly Indian migrant workers, the relative dearth of Indian migrant workers being channelled from NGOs to the state is equally a concern of statecraft.

?Seeing? less like a state and more like a migrant worker, this paper conducts in-depth interviews with an interpretive ethnographic sensibility, to understand what shapes and constrains Bangladeshi and Indian workers? agencies, to produce variant responses to labour exploitation. Empirically, I argue that Indian migrant workers are less likely than Bangladeshis to seek formal redressal in Singapore because of a combination of three structural factors; their higher labour consciousness, lower recruitment costs and informal debt bondage, and higher vulnerability to co-national migrant capitalist control. This has theoretical implications, as these factors combine to produce different configurations of relative freedom for the workers, which both constitute and constrain their respective responses to exploitation. This paper thus makes the theoretical argument that variation in the forms of agency between migrant workers of different countries of origin working in similar industries in the host country, can be explained by discerning the configurations of relative freedoms produced by the most salient structural factors affecting the migrant workers . I use Quentin Skinner?s ?three concepts of freedom? framework to analyse relative freedom.