In response to the World Health
Organization (WHO) celebrating Singapore's COVID19 response, I had noted in an
earlier post that international
organizations play important roles in foregrounding the vitality of democracy
to the prevention and management of public health crises.
Citing Singapore as an exemplar of COVID-19 response, WHO
Director General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom, linked to the speech of the Prime
Minister of Singapore, Mr. Lee Hsien Loong as an exemplar of pandemic
response.
Attack
on communicative equality and neoliberalism
In
my earlier blog, I had drawn on the key theoretical tenets of the
culture-centered approach (CCA) to argue that the absence of communicative
equality in the "Singapore Model" threatens the health and wellbeing
of communities, and particularly of communities that exist at the margins of
Singapore's extreme neoliberal economy. The "Singapore Model" is
the ultimate seduction for neoliberal marketers who recognize the power of
techniques of disciplining in catalysing the expansion of transnational capital
and to the control of dissent against it.
Paradoxically,
the very work of propping up the "Singapore Model" and the profitable
market opportunities that are attached to its circulation are deeply
intertwined with repressive techniques of attacks on communicative resources
and infrastructures at the margins. These attacks on communicative
infrastructures at the margins and the ongoing erasure of voices from the
margins works alongside the aggressive knowledge economy (think tanks,
transnational consulting corporations, market-promoting journalists and highly
paid elites) and private communication economy (public relations corporations,
advertising agencies, and 360 degrees strategic communication corporations)
that circulate, reproduce, and profit from the "Singapore Model."
I had argued that (a) the absence of democracy, (b) the absence of public transparency, (c) the absence of accountability, (d) systematic attacks on human rights activists (CARE's collaborator and activist-in-residence Jolovan Wham was incarcerated at the time of writing that piece), (e) control held by the authoritarian model of governance, and (f) the violation of fundamental human rights in Singapore contribute to a climate that is in the long run threatening to human health and wellbeing.
The violence and techniques of disciplining written into the "Singapore Model" reflect a fundamental communicative inversion that constitutes neoliberal governmentality. Techniques of violence and suppression of democratic voice are integral to the global expansion of the neoliberal project, communicatively inverted as the pursuit of freedom. Paradoxically, the freedom of the market is often achieved through the violent suppression of dissent and democratic possibilities. After all, the very inauguration of the neoliberal moment on the global stage involved a well-orchestrated violent attack on a democratically elected people's socialist government in Chile, the large-scale incarceration of activists and communities at the margins, and the murder of artists, academics, and activists organized by a propped-up dictatorship funded and supported by the neocolonial interests of the U.S., with substantive involvement of academics at the University of Chicago who both profited from the model and designed its global reach.
COVID19 and low-wage male
migrant workers in Singapore
Although
Singapore initially controlled the spread of COVID19, being celebrated with a "gold
star" for "flattening the curve," with the appearance of keeping
COVID19 in check even until early March, by mid-March, the number of confirmed cases of COVID19 started
increasing.
The structural configurations constituting the design of dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers, with bunk beds and close to twenty workers in a room, prevent the workers from practicing the one-meter social distancing guideline issued by the state in the prevention of COVID-19. With policy dictates about catered food, activists and advocates have raised questions about the quality of food being made available to the workers at the dormitories. In the ongoing ethnographic work with low-wage migrant workers in Singapore carried out by the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), the role of food inescurity in shaping health outcomes is situated alongside migrant worker articulations of (a) poor housing conditions; (b) shortage of toilets and shower facilities in dormitories; (c) shortage of toilets and clean drinking water at work sites; (d) unpaid worker hours during transportation (often taking between 1 and 3 hours in a day); and (e) lack of communicative infrastructures for voice. Throughout our fieldwork, (e) the absence of communicative infrastructure for worker voice emerged as consistent theme. Crystallizing the key conceptual thread of the CCA (Dutta, 2008), communicative inequality produced, reified, and reflected structural inequality.
The exponentially rising numbers in the clusters in the migrant worker dormitories have drawn renewed attention to their crowded living conditions in these dormitories. Earlier advocacy by migrant workers as well as by civil society in Singapore had periodically highlighted the challenges with the living conditions in the dormitories.
Amidst this erasure of communicative infrastructures for worker voices, the work carried out by CARE in co-creating infrastructures for voice among low-wage migrant worker communities led to the "Respect our food rights" campaign in 2015 that highlighted the poor quality of food, food insecurity, and challenges to health experienced by low-wage migrant workers in Singapore. Our advisory groups of low-wage migrant workers foregrounded how their experienced of food insecurity were central to how they came to understand health. They then highlighted a range of solutions including monitoring catering services, developing ratings programs for catering services, partnering with social enterprises, and most significantly, building dormitory infrastructures that facilitate migrant workers to prepare their food. They designed a 360-degrees advocacy campaign to accompany the white paper on the question of food insecurity, placing messages about poor food quality on digital media, buses, and trains. Our advisory groups of migrant workers foresaw many of the problems with their living conditions and food that are rendered visible amidst COVID-19.
Public relations messaging
The high incidence of COVID-19 in migrant worker dormitories disrupt the 24X7 propaganda circulated by the Singapore state and the teams of media personnel, pundits, and spin-masters on its payroll. The state machinery therefore has been quick to churn out the narrative of kindness.
Responding to the high incidence rates in the migrant worker dormitories in Singapore, the Prime Minister stated explicitly that the Singapore state will be taking care of the workers and ensuring their health and wellbeing. In a part of his message to the families of migrant workers, he offered re-assurance, noting that Singapore is grateful and will take care of the workers.
The Minister of Manpower took to social media messaging, speaking directly to the low-wage migrant workers, offering support and assurance. Various ministers have projected the narrative of the appreciative worker, grateful for the steps that the State has taken.
Worker fears in speaking out
Juxtaposed
in the backdrop of this outpouring of kindness is the chilling climate voiced
by many of the low-wage migrant workers I have been interviewing over the last
several days. The workers express the sense of fear they experience, and the
ways in which this fear has been heightened in this last week.
In addition to the fear of being infected with COVID-19, especially with some of their roommates still going out to work, the workers discuss the persistent fear of being under surveillance. They suggest that the fear has been heightened with the increasing presence of police and auxiliary forces. They also share that they are afraid to speak out as speaking out might have serious consequences.
The fears in speaking out are accompanied by the limits placed on media and civil society in reaching out to the workers. In a number of statements, Singapore's civil society has issued calls for greater media freedom and access in the coverage of the pandemic, with greater opportunities for participation of low-wage migrant workers in decision-making processes. Deep inequalities are sustained by the twin tools of (a) communcative erasure and (b) communicative erasure (Dutta, 2008). The erasure of the voices of those at the margins is integral to Singapore's reputational economy, to the upholding and circulation of the "Singapore Model." In everyday rituals of state management, these inequalities are naturalized through communicative inversions that uphold the narrative of meritocracy.
Lessons
from the "Singapore Model"
That
low-wage migrant workers express fear of consequences for speaking up in a
nutshell captures the limits of the "Singapore Model."
The question the WHO Director General did not grapple with when addressing global responses to COVID-19 is the integral role of democracies to human health and wellbeing. Any form of health system, and certainly a system that addresses an epidemic that works precisely on the sites of inequality, ought to be fundamentally anchored in democracy. Democracy ensures that the sites at the margins that are likely to be most affected by a pandemic have voices, have avenues of expressing these voices, and can lay claims on health structures to ensure that the health needs of those at the margins are met. Although Singapore effectively managed the first round of COVID-19, its extreme neoliberal model of pandemic management that naturalizes inequalities failed to grapple with the inequalities that are built into Singapore's political economy.
These same inequalities, usually hidden with strict controls and techniques of disciplining, along with a strong PR machinery at work, emerged as the fault lines along which COVID-19 is now impacting low-wage migrant workers, manifested as outbreaks in migrant worker dormitories. The conditions of poor housing for low-wage migrant workers highlighted earlier form the frontier zones of COVID-19 infection, unchecked by the strategies of neoliberal crisis management.
Singapore's model of neoliberalism that sustains inequalities is based on the erasure of democratic spaces, translating into a system of health response that certainly succeeds in producing spin, but does little in developing transparent solutions that are accountable to those at the margins. The systemic erasure of voices from the margins that would otherwise draw attention to the unsustainable inequalities translates into the absence of "inequality," "marginalization," "poverty," "food insecurity," and "squalor" from public discourse in Singapore. Conduct a literature search of these terms in the context of Singapore and you witness the ways in which the ideology of authoritarian neoliberalism has erased the registers for seriously engaging with the "effects" of neoliberalism. The communicative work of projecting sustainable smart governance actively erases these voices from the margins to cultivate the images of smartness and sustainability. An entire area termed "Singapore Studies" is invented to train students in this pedagogy of communicative inversions.
The culture-centered approach suggests that communciative equality forms the basis of building just health systems. The take-away lesson for WHO and other global institutions from this experience is the fundamental role of cultivating communicative equality in preventing and responding to health crises. Had the workers had spaces for voicing their everyday challenges to health and seeking solutions to these challenges (most of these challenges are infrastructural as consistently highlighted by our advisory groups at CARE), the pandemic outbreak in migrant dormitories would have been averted. Communicative equality as the basis of organizing democracies lies at the heart of building strong communities that respond to pandemics and other health challenges through the presence of the voices of margins in discursive spaces, through the development of community-anchored solutions, and through their dialogic engagement with the scientific evidence.
References
Dutta,
M. J. (2008). Communicating health: A culture-centered approach. Polity Press.