With restaurants and shopping malls bustling, life is slowly returning to normal for people in Singapore — except for the more than 300,000 migrant workers who make up much of the city-state’s low-wage workforce.
Since April, these workers have been confined to their residences with limited exceptions for work.
After an extensive testing and quarantine campaign, the government last month cleared the dormitories where most of the workers live of COVID-19, letting residents leave for several “essential errands,” such as court appearances and medical appointments.
Photo: Bloomberg
The Singaporean government last month said that it was working toward relaxing more regulations for migrant workers.
Those plans are now under threat, with new COVID-19 clusters emerging in the dormitories, where workers from China, India, Indonesia and elsewhere share bunks and tight living spaces.
“Some days I feel very upset and can’t take it,” said Mohd Al Imran, a Bangladeshi working for a local engineering firm.
After months of confinement, he got COVID-19 anyway. He was sent to a care facility and said that it was “very free” by comparison.
“At the dorm you can’t go out from your room,” he wrote in a text message. “They treat it like a prison.”
Singapore says that it is taking appropriate measures, considering that migrant workers have accounted for nearly 95 percent of the city-state’s COVID-19 cases, but the resurgence, so soon after the dormitories were declared free of COVID-19, is raising questions about whether Singapore’s conditions for its low-wage work force undermine the efforts to stamp the coronvirus out.
“If you’ve got relatively socioeconomically deprived people in crowded housing, you’ll get COVID-19 transmission at a higher rate,” said Peter Collignon, an infectious diseases physician and professor at the Australian National University Medical School.
It is not inappropriate to treat higher-risk groups differently, but “it’s unreasonable to put restrictions on people when there are things you can fix up,” he said.
While experts say it is reasonable to cordon off specific areas to quash an outbreak, they also say the conditions in the dormitories are ripe for transmission. The ventilation is not always good and bathrooms are shared by a dozen or more people.
Singaporean government standards specify a minimum of 4.65m2 of personal space — equivalent to one-third of a parking spot — conditions that “will always pose a risk of outbreaks,” said Raina Macintyre, a professor of global biosecurity at the University of New South Wales in Australia.
In the best of times, Singapore’s migrant workers live with more restrictions than citizens and white-collar expatriates — with clusters rising again in the dormitories, the prolonged lockdown-like conditions have brought new psychological stress, along with renewed debate about the city-state’s deep reliance on this part of the workforce.
In local media and on social media, reports of self-harm and suicide attempts among migrant workers have circulated.
While the Singaporean Ministry of Manpower said that these tend to be isolated incidents that reflect existing, underlying mental illness or trouble back home, social service groups said that they have been swamped with calls for help from workers.
The situation “has definitely deteriorated in the last two months,” said Alex Au, vice president of the migrant workers aid group Transient Workers Count Too. “The tone of the conversations have changed a lot. There’s a lot of: ‘I don’t care if you don’t even get me my salary, just get me out of here. I want to go home.’”
With overtime, a migrant worker can earn S$600 to S$1,000 (US$438 to US$730) per month, far less than the monthly cost of a typical three-room apartment. The dormitories still eat up a chunk: For about S$350, a worker can get a bunk bed in a room shared with 12 to 16 others.
The amenities vary. There are typically some kind of health services, such as a clinic or sick bay, as well as recreation spaces, mini-marts, and indoor and outdoor seating areas.
As of June, the Singaporean government had moved more than 32,000 workers into temporary accommodation in response to the pandemic. Longer term, it plans to build 11 new dormitories which would limit occupancy to 10 single beds per room.
Close quarters are ideal for the spread of a highly contagious virus such as COVID-19. After officials instituted broad, nationwide restrictions in April, cases exploded in the dormitories, eventually peaking at more than 1,000 per day.
By May, with lockdown measures still in place, Singapore had one of the biggest outbreaks in the region. The government responded with an aggressive testing strategy and, as case counts began to fall, began the process of reopening in the middle of June.
However, dormitory residents remain in virtual lockdown, with exceptions for those who had jobs to go to — some, but not all, of the city-state’s construction projects were allowed to start up again.
The dormitory exits are monitored and before workers can go to work or run one of the sanctioned errands, their employer must notify the manpower ministry. This is a trade-off many residents are willing to make. Many are owed wages and the health costs can be worse back home.
Ah Hlaing, a Burmese worker at a care center for the elderly, has been riding out her quarantine in a Holiday Inn since May.
“I do morning exercise, eat breakfast, watch the news, movies,” she said. “I’m on Facebook, eat lunch, have a bath, dinner, pray and sleep.”
Fewer people have jobs to go to these days, cutting off the biggest allowable reason to leave the dormitories. Many construction projects are on hold until employers can meet safe distancing and testing criteria.
So migrant workers are largely confined to their compounds.
“I don’t know until when I will be quarantined and I don’t have any income,” said Bob Bu, a 33-year-old Chinese who worked as a restaurant manager until he lost his job in a salary dispute with his employer. “I was under great mental pressure and couldn’t sleep for a while, because of the uncomfortable environment of the dormitory.”
At construction company Kori Holdings, 10 of the 200 migrant workers have told chief executive Hooi Yu Koh that they would like to go home.
“I could understand the concern of the workers in isolation, with family members worrying about their safety, being confined to the dormitories,” he said. “They just want to return home to their family, as well as to ensure that the family knows they are safe.”
“This is not the ideal situation, but let’s look at the facts,” said Leong Hoe Nam (梁浩南), an infectious diseases physician at Mount Elizabeth Hospital. “There’s little to no transmission in the [broader] community. If you need the economy to move, would you release the community people or the dormitory workers? The safety of others overrides the interest of an individual.”
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