COVID-19, Authoritarian Neoliberalism, and Precarious Migrant Work in Singapore: Structural Violence and Communicative Inequality

Abstract

Drawing upon an ongoing ethnography with low-wage migrant workers in Singapore, this article builds on the theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach (CCA) to explore the experiences of the workers amid COVID-19 outbreaks in dormitories housing them. The CCA foregrounds the interplays of communicative and material inequalities, suggesting that the erasure of infrastructures of voices among the margins reproduces and circulates unhealthy structures that threaten the health and well-being of the working classes. The voices of the low-wage migrant workers who participated in this study document the challenges with poor housing, poor sanitation, and food insecurity that are compounded with the absence of information and voice infrastructures. Amid the everyday threats to health and well-being that are generated by neoliberal reforms across the globe, the hyper-precarious conditions of migrant work rendered visible by the trajectories of COVID-19 call for structurally transformative futures that are anchored in the voices of workers at the margins of neoliberal economies.

Singapore’s Extreme Neoliberalism and the COVID Outbreak: Culturally Centering Voices of Low-Wage Migrant Workers

“…Global responses to COVID-19 (C19; coronavirus disease 2019) render visible the vast inequalities in organizing human health and well-being by five decades of relentless neoliberalism ( Dutta, 2016 ). Migrants have borne the largest burdens of C19 infections as well as adverse health outcomes resulting from C19-related policies ( Dutta, 2020a , 2020b , 2020c ). The unequal burden of C19-related mortality and morbidity borne by migrant workers shows the deep fault lines of neoliberalism ( Dutta, 2020a , Tan, 2020 ).…”

“…Migrants have borne the largest burdens of C19 infections as well as adverse health outcomes resulting from C19-related policies ( Dutta, 2020a , 2020b , 2020c ). The unequal burden of C19-related mortality and morbidity borne by migrant workers shows the deep fault lines of neoliberalism ( Dutta, 2020a , Tan, 2020 ). C19-response frameworks by neoliberal states have further exacerbated these inequalities by strategically ignoring the structural challenges of income, housing, food, and health care negotiated by those at the margins of neoliberal economies.…”

“…In Singapore, the C19 outbreak in dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers exposes the unhygienic and health threatening conditions in these dormitories ( Dutta, 2020a , 2020b , 2020c ). In sharp contrast to the Singapore model of effective pandemic management pushed as a model by the World Health Organization in the early part of the C19 trajectory, the dormitory outbreak reflects the ineffectiveness and failure in Singapore’s public health infrastructure.…”

“…How can a public health infrastructure that is projected by global organizations such as the World Health Organization as a model for pandemic response be riddled with a fundamental failure in anticipating and addressing the health needs of its migrant worker population that forms the backbone of the economy? This failure in addressing migrant health is a direct result of Singapore’s exploitative structure of labor management anchored in its authoritarian neoliberalism ( Bruff & Tansel, 2019 ; Dutta, 2020a , 2020b , 2020c ; Juego, 2018 ; Tansel, 2017 ). As a model for designing and implementing “authoritarian neoliberalism” ( Tansel, 2017 , p. 4), Singapore has perfected the techniques of labor repression while selling itself as a “labor destination.” Its “smart city” imaginary that works actively to project a futuristic imaginary of securing sustainable urbanization through digital technologies and participatory tools (see, e.g., Kong, 2018 ; Kong & Woods, 2018 ) is deeply imbricated in the exploitation of low-wage migrant workers whose exploited labor builds the necessary infrastructure of this imaginary.…”

“…The absence of communicative infrastructures is played out in the systematic erasure of migrant worker voices from the state’s C19 response. Drawing on Dutta’s (2020a) conceptualization of “extreme neoliberalism” (p. 2) as the ideology of the free market implemented by an authoritarian state through technologies of violence, I will argue that state repression and the erasure of discursive registers for worker voice and collectivization shape the context of the C19 outbreak in dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers in Singapore.…”