A Narrative of Low-wage Migrants in Singapore.

• Author: Cheow, Xin Yi
• Position: A Thousand and One Days: Stories of Hardship from South Asian Migrant Workers in Singapore - Book review

A Review of A Thousand and One Days: Stories of Hardship from South Asian Migrant Workers in Singapore

Edited by Sallie Yea, A.IC.M. Mohsin, and Debbie Fordyce (Singapore: Banglar Kantha Publications, 2014), 72 pages.

As a migrant worker in Singapore, Saddam remembers 20 December 2010 as the day when a workplace accident washed all his dreams away. The Bangladeshi national, who was working in construction at the time, fell from a wall into a drain, fracturing two bones below the left knee. Shortly after the incident, he fled his dormitory to escape the clutches of "a team of gangsters" hired by his employer to send him back to Bangladesh after the employer had refused to buy state-mandated insurance for Saddam's accident or pay him medical leave wages. (1)

Still nursing his injury and already in debt from paying recruitment fees to migrate, Saddam was close to sleeping on the streets before he received the kindness of a civil society activist, who put him up in her home to recover and resolve his injury claims in Singapore. (2) He received only a third of his work injury compensation due to a lack of insurance, but received the remainder in installments after returning to Bangladesh. (3)

Saddam's story, recounted like a diary entry in a first-person perspective, has one of the better endings in A Thousand and One Days: Stories of Hardship from South Asian Migrant Workers in Singapore, a collection of eight challenging migration experiences in the Southeast Asian city-state.

As its title suggests, A Thousand and One Days paints a sobering picture of the downsides of labor migration in the age of economic globalization. The stories presented are also a reflection of the inadequacies of the government policy apparatus in Singapore to deal with the unique challenges faced by low-skilled migrant workers within the country.

Seven of the featured migrants work in the construction industry and one was trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation. They often attribute their hardships to personal bad luck, but the editors argue that the poor outcomes, exploitative laboring, and protracted cases of work injury claims and salary disputes are more a product of Singapore's flawed labor migration system. (4)

In the book's introduction, editors Sallie Yea and Debbie Fordyce--both civil society activists at the forefront of migrant advocacy efforts in Singapore--described Singapore as a deeply neoliberal state, which has achieved rapid development through...