Bifurcated Labour: The Unequal Incorporation of Transmigrants in Singapore

Abstract

Following a brief background on Singapore's development from a product of overlapping diasporas to a multiracial nation, this paper gives attention to the dynamics of renewed streams of transnational labour flows in the current decade in the shaping of the global city. It examines the bifurcated nature of Singapore's foreign labour policies and how the transience/permanence divide is predicated on 'skill'. On the one hand, structural (non)incorporation of contract workers as they are inscribed into (and simultaneously proscribed by) the host society results in vulnerability among what are already heavily marginalised and 'flexibilised' workers with little job security and no opportunities for social advancement within the host society. On the other hand, building a nation in the image of globalisation also requires selectively inclusionist projects to entice foreign talent - highly skilled professional workers, technopreneurs, entrepreneurs and investors - in order to keep Singapore in the global race. These differential politics of inclusion and exclusion lock transmigrants into two structurally determined sectors of society and the economy, with, currently, no possibility of interpenetration. Copyright (c) 2006 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.

Migrant masculinities: Bangladeshi men in Singapore's labour force

“…The high demand for migrant workers on work permit illustrates not only the low wages but also what is deemed acceptable by these low-status workers, and consequently, what is unacceptable for Singaporean workers. They mostly take on jobs that require manual labour or shift work in the sectors such as manufacturing, construction, shipbuilding, personal services as well as domestic work (The Straits Times, December 9, 2009;Yeoh 2006). Gender, nationality and ethnicity profiles shape the overall form of work permit holders.…”

“…The workforce has been rigorously configured to incorporate a significantly large foreign labour pool that can be broadly divided into two strands: foreign talent and foreign workers. Both strands of workers are brought into Singaporean space strategically and they are administered very differently, although there is no space for me to elaborate on their differences here (see, e.g., Yeoh 2006). The state's management of its migrant populations requires different modalities of government based on various mechanisms of calculation, surveillance, control and regulation that create a graduated system to which different migrants are incorporated (Ong 2000).…”

Guest Editors’ Introduction

“…also a number of countries which have explicit policies to attract the highly skilled, as well as to encourage the return of its own citizens who have emigrated. Singapore tops the list of Asian countries in terms of deliberate, broadly scoped measures to woo (and retain) global talent, not only through immigration, labour augmentation and permanent residency policies but also in terms of strategies to enhance and promote urban aesthetics and creative arts in the city-state (Yeoh 2005(Yeoh , 2006. In its efforts to reverse 'brain drain', the Taiwan government has actively established economic policies that will complement 'talent scouting', with its recruitment efforts mainly directed at overseas Taiwanese (Tzeng 2006).…”

Faith and uncertainty: migrants’ journeys between Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore

“…Few studies have foregrounded risk as an explicit conceptual problem. Among those, some studies deal with risk pooling strategies in migrant social networks (Mazzucato 2009 In the context of Southeast Asia, researchers have drawn on the concept of governmentality to stress the unequal distribution of social vulnerabilities across the political body according to nationality, ethnicity, gender, religion, and occupation (see for instance : Yeoh 2006;Kaur 2004;Piper 2008;Silvey 2006;Garcés-Mascareñas 2009;Ford 2006). For example, Aihwa…”