My first engagement was an interview with Ms Christine Exco, one of the volunteers in Transient Workers Count Too(TWC2). TWC2 is an organisation that supports migrant workers in Singapore and promotes equal treatment to them. I did a phone interview with Christine, in which I asked her questions based on my prior research.
One of my biggest takeaways from this interview was that although there are laws to protect the migrant workers from trouble, the laws don’t serve them well enough because of the fundamental migrant worker system, and the fact that they are in a weaker and more vulnerable position compared to Singaporeans. For example, one of the systems that protect migrant workers is the Work Injury Compensation Act. With this, workers can make injury claims and get compensation from their employers. However, the reality of this is more complicated. Since workers are in a weaker position, they find it very difficult to prove the injury itself. For instance, they cannot get access to the CCTV cameras where it happened, nor can they call their colleagues to testify in court. Therefore, they are injury cases which have been denied happening at the workplace, although the truth may have been somewhat different. In some countries, there are safety supervisors who are not connected to the company and also can testify. However, Singapore does not have a whole union that provides supervisors, meaning that the company itself provides them. This makes safety supervisors ineffective than they should be. Also, they are laws that prohibit employers exploitation for the workers. However, according to Christine, there are some enforcement issues to do with this, meaning that the government is not as thorough as they should be with these laws. Thirdly, although almost all of the workers are bound to a sponsorship system, meaning that they cannot change their employers during their stay in Singapore, there are some rare cases where they are allowed to find a new employer within two weeks. However, this is extremely difficult for the workers, since 1. They are foreigners, and they often do not have many personal connections they can use 2. Even when they did find a new employer, they have to pay a lot of money to get employed although most are already in trouble. Like this, there are still many problems to do with the system of migrant workers.
I also asked a question, ‘To what extent do you think the awareness raised has helped the actual issue?” The answer to this question was that although there has been a growing awareness of the migrant workers’ issue these past years, whether this connects to the actual betterment of these issues is still a question. This issue is a very complicated one, often more than people imagine.