key: cord-027047-xlz576hm
authors: Koh, Vanessa; Lim, Al; Tan, Jill J.
title: The Singaporean State and Community Care in the Time of Corona
date: 2020-06-04
journal: City Soc (Wash)
DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12297
sha: 
doc_id: 27047
cord_uid: xlz576hm

nan

In the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, various health experts praised Singapore's response to the virus. On February 18, 2020, the Straits Times-Singapore's national newspaper-reported that four epidemiologists at Harvard University had praised Singapore as "a gold standard of nearperfect detection." Less than a month later, Minister for Foreign Affairs Vivian Balakrishnan noted in an interview that this pandemic is "an acid test of every single country's quality of healthcare, standard of governance, and social capital… If any one of these tripods is weak, it will be exposed quite unmercifully." He would later be proven correct, but not in the way he likely intended. By early April, Singapore saw a huge surge in COVID-19 cases, as many migrant workers who have built the city-state's infrastructure tested positive. The Prime Minister subsequently announced the imposition of a "circuit-breaker" (simply put, a lockdown), and the media narrative quickly turned to an examination of the dense and poor living conditions foreign workers have endured as Singapore transformed from a model of effective governance to a cautionary tale.

Technocrats often boast that Singapore not only has a competent state that can deliver solutions in times of crisis, but also a socially compliant population that responds to state policies. This trust in government was especially visible during the earlier months of the pandemic (Quah 2020) . One of us has been conducting (now interrupted) fieldwork in Singapore since early February, and witnessed various statements that reinforced the notion that a competent government would surely provide a way out of a public health crisis. For example, one Singaporean acquaintance suggested that there was no need to worry too much about the virus because the government had learned important lessons from SARS 17 years ago. "They have policies in place to ensure we're prepared for an outbreak like this. We are checking temperatures as people enter buildings and doing vigorous contract tracing. There is a WhatsApp group to convey factual information to the public to combat fake news so they will know not to panic. It's paternalistic but do you trust people to be prudent or stupid? I tend to go with the latter." A WhatsApp message sent by the government to the public advising against panic buying.

Image Credit: Vanessa Koh

The framework of political governance in Singapore is largely a technocratic one that operates on the belief that foreign-educated elites will deploy knowledge, logical reasoning, and technical expertise to govern in ways that transcend ideology and partisanship. Under such a configuration, the implicit social contract is a negotiated settlement in which people cede substantial amounts of authority to the technocratic governing elite in exchange for persistent delivery on technical (and economic) solutions to a series of challenges. Despite bouts of panic buying of groceries every time the Prime Minister announced that he would address the nation-in anxious anticipation that the government might decide to lock the country down-there was a prevailing sense of security in the state for two months, as shopping malls and public transit remained crowded and everyone clung onto the hope of some semblance of normalcy.

As news first broke about the struggles in Italy, Singaporeans largely remained confident.

It was easy to explain the Italian healthcare system as being overwhelmed due to their perceived slowness in implementing strict social distancing measures, or to see the system as weakened by punishing austerity measures over the years. By contrast, Singaporeans took relative comfort in having a robust healthcare system and a proactive government. Certainly, these points are not to be dismissed wholesale. We are not suggesting that there is no validity to certain technocratic policies. Contact tracing, for example, has and likely will continue to be useful as the state slowly reopens. Every person in Singapore is entitled to free testing and citizens and long-term residents will not have to pay out of pocket for treatment. However, we caution against an unshakable faith in a system that promulgates a narrow and elitist definition of care that excludes vulnerable subsets of the city-state's population.

At the time of writing (May 18, 2020), there are over 28,000 confirmed cases of in Singapore, and these are differentiated by citizenship or employment status. Foreign work permit holders in dormitories account for 26,132 (92%) of the 28,343 cases. "Community cases"

(a term most commonly associated with Singaporean citizens and permanent residents; excluding imported cases) comprise 1,631 cases, which is less than 6% of the national total. The disparity of these numbers-92% of cases from foreign dormitory residents and 6% of cases from the community-and separate reportage illustrate that there are two realities in Singapore: one for those who live in dormitories and another for the rest of the Singaporean population. The everyday realities also correspond to this bifurcation. Singaporeans that returned from overseas were housed in 5-star hotels for their 14-day quarantine period, whereas many work permit holders were forced to stay indoors in crowded dormitories, where often, 10 to 20 men 1 have to occupy one single room. demanded an apology." This reply has been over-sensationalized, but it is evidence of the state's lack of reflexivity and sensitivity during a moment of intense public scrutiny and stress. It would baffle anyone to think that a migrant worker, at risk of being deported, could confront an MP to demand an apology. The workers already face immense debt on top of psychological tolls from being away from family and worrying if the virus will prevent them from sending money home to their families. These worries have driven workers to attempt to speak the language of the state in order to get redress for wages they may not have yet received or ex gratia payments that are often magnitudes smaller than what they are entitled to. They are far too anxious and intelligent to demand an apology.

However, situating Minister Teo's comments within the context of the rest of the speech is essential. Her response reads:

Ms. Anthea Ong asked about an apology. We interact very closely with the workers themselves, on a very regular basis at the dormitories, and even outside the dormitories whenever I'll ask teams, you know, follow up on their requests and feedback. I think what they're focused on is how we can help them to handle this present situation, not fall sick, and if they fall sick, help take care of them, how to look after their wages being paid, how to ensure that they can send money home (emphasis added).

The latter three factors are, in fact, the needs that the migrants have learned to articulate. They are also important according to numerous NGOs that have worked with them in the past years, such as Healthserve, TWC2, HOME, Migrant Workers Centre, and Singapore Migrant Friends. These economic factors capture why they have come to Singapore in the first place. On Labor Day, NMP

Ong also posted a message on Facebook that addressed the workers directly. She writes: "The world sees you now, you are no longer invisible -we must and will do right by you." The use of the word "now" suggests that this is a recent change that emerged as a consequence of scrutiny due to the coronavirus.

Yet even as ministers are acknowledging the state's responsibility towards the workers, there remains a hesitance in reflecting on the structural conditions that led to the outbreak at the dormitories. When pressed about the living conditions at the dormitories in a recent interview with CNBC, the Minister for National Development and co-chair of the coronavirus task force Lawrence Wong cited the provision of recreational facilities and convenient access to amenities as proof of improved conditions over the years. He suggested that the crux of the problem is that "these dormitories are designed for communal living, where the workers eat together, they live together, and they cook together." He went on to say that despite the best efforts at putting in place precautions and safeguards, such as reminding the dormitory operators that "these non-essential communal activities have to be ceased at the start of the outbreak, the lesson we've learned from this experience is that with this unprecedented pandemic, the safeguards were not sufficient and the design of dormitories have to change." By insisting that the way forward is to redesign these places of residence, the state is reducing what is indeed a sociopolitical problem-the second-class treatment that migrant workers endure-to a solely technocratic one that can be solved by a mere architectural makeover. Communal activities such as eating and cooking together are not extraordinary even during a global pandemic; those of us who do not live in dormitories engage in these activities with the people who are a part of our respective households. Persisting with an anti-politics machine (Ferguson 1990 ) that views caregiving only as a technocratic project and disregards the social injustices of a political system will only hinder efforts to flatten the curve and prepare for future pandemics.

It is useful to distinguish how the state is administering care from how individuals and NGOs are doing so. We refer to the distinction Felicity Aulino makes between care-as-maintenance and care-as-concern in her recent work on the anthropology of care. Aulino observes that contemporary usage of the English word "care" may contribute to the tendency to assume a correspondence between particular internal states, such as feeling affection or being concerned ("care about"), and the acts of best providing for another ("to care for") (Aulino 2016: 99) . Aulino cautions against such conflation, which may place an inordinate value on emotional concern in acts of providing for others while obscuring other important facets of care. Instead, in her ethnographic work on caregiving practices, Aulino focuses on the physical and pragmatic work of maintenance. In the case of care practices in the time of Covid-19, we examine where state and community approaches fall between the poles of care-as-concern and care-as-maintenance. In isolation, each form of care is often insufficient, but a robust vision of care draws from both concern and maintenance.

Care-as-maintenance, which is largely understood as the concern of the state, hinges on and plays out in the administering of technocratic care. For instance, in the area of expanding healthcare, technocratic solutions to the upsurge in numbers of people with Covid-19 who need treatment have included conversions of large community facilities into treatment facilities, like when Singapore Expo was converted into a hospital. Administering care-as-maintenance also notably encompasses the state's ability to delegate maintenance to non-state actors, such as private subcontractors who employ and oversee the dormitories of short-term migrant laborers. Critiques of care-as-maintenance indict the state's subhumanization of migrant laborers who are often treated as if they need to be "maintained" in order to continue fulfilling their roles.

Care-as-concern, meanwhile, is evident in the language of care used by NGOs and the upswell of community action and civic activism around addressing the plight of migrant laborers.

Support Coalition advocated for seeing the "human aspects" over only "seeing [migrant support] as a humanitarian relief operation" or an intellectual discussion focused solely on policy. In the same conversation, Michael Cheah, the Executive Director of Healthserve, noted that more care must be paid to workers' breaking points: the stresses of work and life, and loneliness as they navigate distance away from families for whom they must provide.

The language of care of NGOs and community advocates does not always stress emotional care over practical mediation. Notably, calls for empathy have been channeled through allaying the immediate physical needs and logistical anxieties of those unable to advocate for themselves.

This closes the gap between calls for care-as-concern and competent care-for-maintenance and includes requests for an increase of NGO oversight to provide better care. Other responses by aid organizations, however, have foregrounded personal narratives and private messages between migrant workers and volunteers as testimony in order to emphasize the humanity and plight of migrant workers. Such centering of individuals' lives and testimonies is ostensibly a sign of pushback against the sense that Singapore's response to Covid-19 neglects to take into account migrant workers' welfare in terms of both policy and statistics. Yet the language and means of such outreach measures potentially fall prey to instrumentalizing individual's lives and stories, even if it is in service of raising awareness and drawing attention towards perceived needs and gaps. Care-as-concern, when directed at maximizing human pathos, must thus be cautioned against in this unmitigated form on grounds of relational ethics and efficacy.

Following Aulino, and contra some of the rhetoric of aid organizations, we take seriously care-as-maintenance as a valid approach to care in the time of Covid-19, and note that competence on the part of state actors and policy-makers has little to do with sentiment or "concern" per se in terms of daily problem-solving and an overall moral orientation. Rather than adding to existing critiques of the state's lack of care-as-concern, we focus instead on the structural issue of Singapore's policies around migrant labor in Singapore that now renders present techniques of care-as-maintenance as insufficient. Pure care-as-maintenance fails because it renders workers simply as a cost-benefit input-output equation.

Since the mid-1970s, Singapore has relied on a merry-go-round of migrant nationalitiesinitially, Thai and Malay, then Indonesian and Chinese, and now South Asian-to service its economy and dependence on cheap labor, while absconding from social responsibility.

Anthropologists and geographers have documented the asymmetrical power dynamic between state elites and migrant workers who realize the aspirations of the state (Constable 2007; Elsheshtawy 2008; Kitiarsa 2014; Yeoh 2006 ). Singapore's economic model has relied on factor accumulation to deliver its GDP growth at the expense of productivity increase, primarily through labor market policies reliant on large inputs of a cheap, transient pool of unskilled labor (Fong and

Lim 2015). The model has not changed, perhaps due to growth fetishism or preferring the most convenient route to growth, in spite of evidence of diminishing returns and socio-spatial constraints in Singapore (Pang and Lim 2015: 16, 25) .

Instead of focusing on improving the workers' skills and quality of life, the government is more interested in depressing their wages to ensure higher capital gains through the input-output framework. For instance, it is not difficult to deport a worker back to their home country and it is also easier to hire a worker from overseas than to hire one who is already in Singapore due to kickbacks. Sociologist Chua Beng Huat (2020) identifies this as an issue of the ruling party being wary of setting a precedent that would allow migrant workers to make a set of claims and thereby officially designate the state to be the primary caretakers of these workers. That the migrants are not citizens and are classed as "low-skilled" work permit holders place them under a series of legal and practical restrictions, even extending to their reproductive capacities (Constable 2019) . There is also a tunneling effect in their everyday lives, where they experience a limited daily time-space based on a state-mandated policy to limit their mix/interaction between the migrant and host population (Collins 2011: 329) . Even before the outbreak, migrant workers were not allowed to use the same toilet as Singaporeans. Read together, the "othering" of the migrants, their designation as "inputs" into an economic model to propel Singapore to international acclaim, and

Singapore's trend of utilizing different nationalities of cheap labor point to an urgent need to treat workers with dignity.

Where public critique has focused on insufficient care-as-concern of the state, we might also look at systemic reasons as to why its techniques of care-as-maintenance are falling short. The enforced disposability of "unskilled" migrant foreign workers from the Singaporean state's purview and their inability to gain citizenship based on the work permits they hold is magnified and complicated by a global pandemic when it comes to the matter of yet-fulfilled labor contracts.

With employers and agents still owed work and processing fees by migrants who are now quarantined due to being perceived risks to the Singaporean public instead of working, and migrants who are unable to return home because of contracts and the need to send remittances back, the recourse of repatriation after the term of employment is no longer the built-in easy option for the state. On the one hand, risk, contagion, and common precarity have complicated the disposability of migrant laborers in terms of their repatriation; on the other, by hothousing migrants in conditions which all but guarantee contraction of Covid-19, their disposability in Singaporean society has never been more obvious.

While community advocates and aid organizations stress care-as-concern as necessary affective responses, we must also question why care-as-maintenance has failed this segment of Singapore's population. To recognize and care for people as fully human entails not only the recognition of their narratives but the structures under which their basic maintenance of life is and has been troubled. In the aforementioned roundtable with various NGO leaders, some also shared that the media's overemphasis on cramped dormitories is secondary to long-standing issues such the lack of timely payments by employers. Of-the-moment responses in the time of Covid-19 may, therefore, fail to highlight areas of provision most needed for migrants in Singapore, beyond perceived insufficiencies in both care-as-concern and care-as-maintenance frameworks. Practices of care must also be considered alongside its temporalities -how long will care-as-concern last, considering modes of attention based on 24-hour news cycles and the episodic nature of processing a pandemic?

We suggest that the issue at hand is not that the state does not care, but that it relies on an outmoded form of care. Care-as-concern as an affective and communal response to the crisis has been rightly advocated for across the board. Care-as-maintenance can also be a serious crisis response, but its apparent insufficiencies must be read within a larger context of structural inequalities that dispossess short-term migrant laborers in Singapore, rather than simply a lack of accompanying care-as-concern.

In sum, the Singaporean experience with Covid-19 illustrates how we need to rethink what an ethics of community care constitutes. That the state draws a distinction between migrant worker cases and local "community" spread points to the ways in which "community" is limited to citizens, long-term residents, and skilled migrants ("expats") who inhabit the homes that "lowerskilled" migrant workers have built. Care is not just about the application of technocratic policy, but it also entails a concerted effort to reverse historical trends of othering "lower-skilled" nationalities and treating them as inputs into an economic growth model. We echo former NMP Sadisavan's (2020) statement that the government's stellar academic and professional credentials cannot replace the need to consult its citizens because of the complexity of contemporary issues.

This is especially vital in light of global sentiments of xenophobia that have emerged during the pandemic. In Singapore, issues of brownface and the recent Facebook post by Member of Parliament Yaacob Ibrahim, which expressed his happiness about how the virus had cleared out a space where foreign workers congregate, suggest that what many label as the "silent majority" might have entrenched racist views that have, up until this point, been simply left unsaid. What we can learn from the handling of Singapore's Covid-19 situation is that inclusion entails not just access to information, but also recognition within legislative information in terms of statistics, recommendations, and narratives by the state and its media. Beyond human interest pieces on the plight of migrants in Singapore, what must be remembered of this moment is how existing policies have endangered the vulnerable in Singapore for there to be a semblance of movement towards the possibility of inclusive care.

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