A Stranger in Fiction?

Talking with the director of Not Working Today

by So Young Chang

Abu Ahasan is a Bangladeshi construction worker in Singapore whose boss has withheld payment from his employees for several months. Unwilling to tolerate this situation any further, Abu gathers testimonies from his co-workers and jots them down in his notebook. One morning, he fakes being sick and instead of getting into the lorry, he gets into a city bus to pay a visit to the Ministry of Manpower. Written as such, the premise may seem rather straightforward. But as the opening scenes to Shijie Tan’s short film Not Working Today, the story of Abu’s day off holds a dramatic power that captivated an audience at a civil society event showcasing art about and by migrant workers. As people made their way out of the cinema, there was a collective buzz about the film, as well as about other segments such as a poetry reading from a migrant worker. “It might be a bit of preaching to the choir,” Shijie says in humble response to the reception it got at the event. But there is something special about the communal experience of watching a film in a darkened theatre, in how it can evoke our empathy for strangers and also offer social commentary about a system that is just “not working”.

Abu also happens to be the actor’s real name, and the story he acted out could easily have been his own. Shijie met him at Dibashram, which is a resting space in Little India for migrant workers run by the publisher of the only Bangladeshi newspaper in Singapore. While no longer in session, there used to be troupes of migrant workers who would perform plays once every few months. There you could feel the same conviction for how arts and entertainment could bring people together through shared emotions. Locals would come by to watch the plays and even without subtitles, everyone understood what they were about. In one particular play, Abu was playing the role of a jester and he had a special quality about him that caught Shijie’s eye. Not Working Today was filmed during Abu’s last three weeks in Singapore as he waited for his medical claims to be settled and two days after the end of filming, he returned to Bangladesh.

By the time he made the film, Shijie had spent six months volunteering with TWC2, a migrant worker support and advocacy organization in Singapore. Still in film school at the time, he was compelled to do something after reading an article about the treatment of migrant workers. While he felt strongly about reacting to injustice, he does not subscribe to the term ‘activist’ because it would be reductive in his role as a filmmaker. For one, there is no single cause that he feels committed to as an individual, and furthermore he does not think that one should make art to dictate ethics or moral statements.

“I’m inviting people to complete film. Typically how I think about it is you want to show them just enough for them to be interested, and give them the necessary tools to make their own decisions about the situations that they’ve just seen.”

The focus on provoking thought and sparking conversation is a core driver of what motivates him to make films. What the medium allows for is the space to engage with the human being on the screen, where you can be intensely interested in the well-being of someone else, and in that process, see yourself become a little kinder and a little more humanist.

This work of presenting human emotion and experience requires a lot of care, especially when dealing with subject matter that involves a social justice element. As a filmmaker, there is a fine line between feeling compelled to act and making use of the material. Ultimately, it comes down to having integrity and thoughtfulness from the moment you approach a topic and maintaining it throughout the storytelling. For example, if he had made a film that purely blamed society, it would have been a disservice to the migrant worker community.

“My job when I think of dramatic scenarios is to find the most appropriate, most dramatic, and most human thing to put on the screen. These three things don’t always settle on one thing, and they might be in separate directions sometimes. But when you do find something that pulls them all together, it’s quite special. So my job is to find those things and put it on the screen.”

Where power imbalances abound, the best one can hope for is to open up small pockets of exchange where people can start to listen to each other more. Unlike activists, the difficulty for artists, as Shijie says, is to express a message in a way that doesn’t involve him just telling you what he thinks.

As he wrapped up the film editing process and submitted a rough first cut to the faculty (after all, this was a school assignment), the Little India riots happened. The precise timeline was this: a week after submitting the finished product, he was called in to hear the evaluation, and the night before was when the events unfolded that changed society in ways both minute and profound. This sequence of events coloured the entire proceedings that followed and he was vindicated in the worst way possible that this was an urgent issue.

“Not Working Today, it’s fictionalized, but is it fiction?”

Three years after the film was made, the story of Abu still rings true. Where the line between fiction and documentary blurs, the artist positions himself, hoping to communicate something that will eventually make life better for some. For the filmmaker, “you don’t need to think up stories, just look around.”

Abu is not working today. 




FOOTNOTE:
Not Working Today won Best Singapore Short Film at the Silver Screen Awards at the 2014 Singapore International Film Festival. It was screened at HealthServe’s event, Builder, Father, Poet at the Projector on August 14, 2016.


So Young Chang has recently finished a 3 month internship with Migrating out of Poverty based at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore.

Poverty: who needs to change?

by Paul Clewett

I find that the done thing when encountering fellow Brits abroad is to start off über polite, gently introduce yourself, then rapidly descend into heated debate about all manner of pertinent contemporary issues. The Second World War, for instance, was standard fare when I studied in Germany.

And so fittingly, four days into my internship at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore, I ended up in a bar drinking overpriced San Miguel with an assortment of locals and expats, discussing Britain’s colonial legacy. I was (probably over-enthusiastically) suggesting that British expats in Singapore owe their privileged position vis-à-vis many other migrants in Singapore to more than talent and hard work, and perhaps quite a lot to a head start in the global labour market off the back of a significant period of aggressive imperialism.

This was fairly uncontentious in itself. It’s quite hard for people (who aren’t Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party - UKIP) to claim that the Bengali or Tamil construction worker down the road on low wages and in a workplace that offers little health and safety protection finds himself in that position because he didn’t try hard in school. But it gets much more complicated when we start talking about what this actually means for us as privileged individuals, and equally so for scholars and policymakers.

In March, there was a debate on Duncan Green’s ‘From Poverty to Power’ blog over this precise issue, although you’ll have to bear with me to see the connection. It kicks off with Paul Collier talking about his book ‘Exodus,’ which argues for restrictive migration policy in the North towards selected countries in the South where brain drain can be identified as harming development prospects, an approach that Justin Sandefur sums up as  “deport thy neighbour.”  Sandefur rails against the flimsy evidence base on which brain drain arguments are premised and highlights the paradox that comes with proposing a draconian migration governance regime in the name of realising development ‘freedoms’ in the South.

Despite the opposing views, this whole debate is a product of the development industry’s long-standing bias towards two things in particular: the nation state and the poor. The baseline assumption is that if you are from a poor country,  you automatically shoulder the responsibility of ‘developing’ that country. There will be those who find it quite acceptable that citizens do their duty. But let’s face it, citizenship in its formal sense doesn’t mean quite what a lot of governments would like it to mean. Nor should it: a significant number of people’s lives and therefore obligations, are spread across and in between countries. Their duties and allegiances might belong to business in one, church in another and family in both. The point is, simply coming ‘from’ a place is not enough to label someone duty-bound to ‘develop’ it. Just as the North, the home of development policy, retains its right to set its own priorities and its inhabitants pursue their own livelihood strategies, so must the South be allowed to do the same. The results of policy that is supportive of this livelihoods approach can be quite extraordinary too, see Grace Baey’s recent film Ceria, which documents Ristanti Ningrum’s story, for instance.

But this doesn’t mean that there is no responsibility towards the poor. Nor does it mean that diaspora has no place in development. It is simply that responsibility shouldn’t be set on the terms of the rich, conveniently emphasising the duty of co-nationals or co-ethnics to develop their ‘own’ at the expense of asking difficult questions of the livelihoods of the rich. If we believe in Amartya Sen’s conception of development as freedom, then just as tirelessly as we research and implement strategies to open up the choices of the poor, we should be investigating how the lives of the rich are limiting them in the first place. When we start our car, we should be thinking about the extent to which we’ve just undermined the viability of the local transport system (credit to Doreen Massey for that example).

Our lives across the world are hopelessly intertwined, and it is likely that the richer you are, the further your life is embedded in that complex web of processes and relations that spurs globalisation. The renewed excitement about migration and development is great because it brings this fact home - quite literally for the Indonesian female domestic workers (FDWs) in the wealthy households of Singapore, the focus of ARI’s current work. The Strait of Malacca no longer separates Indonesian rural life from the wealthy across the water. And so the poor and the rich are forced to negotiate power, difference and livelihoods, regardless of how much public debate on these kinds of issues is stifled and suppressed. I think this kind of insight is one of the great, if unforeseen, outcomes of the Migrating out of Poverty programme.

Paul Clewett was the 2014 Research and Communications Intern at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore. He was funded by the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium to conduct research and uptake work within the Southeast Asia regional programme between May-August 2014.

Women migrants working in construction: shaking the foundations of the way they are socially constructed

By Benjamin Zeitlyn

The Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium (RPC) is conducting research on internal and regional migration in Africa and Asia. As part of our qualitative research we focus upon three areas of employment that attract a lot of migrant workers in several different countries. These are domestic work, construction work and manufacturing. The assumption many of us made when we began to think about these categories is that men work in construction and women in domestic work.

A conspicuous aspect of many cities in rapidly urbanising and developing countries is a vibrant construction sector and the rapid emergence of new buildings. Millions of workers work on construction projects large and small in cities across the developing world. Often a very high proportion of these workers are internal and regional migrants.

Along with my colleagues Priya Deshingkar and Bridget Holtom, I reviewed the literature on internal and regional migration for construction work to survey the current state of the evidence and identify themes and gaps in the literature. The review will soon be published by the RPC, here I report some of the results of this review of the literature for International Women’s Day.

One of the first things that struck me was that among the studies we found about internal and regional migration for construction work in developing countries, very few explicitly look at gender relations and/or the role of women. Those that do exist tend to be based in India and Bangladesh. We speculate that this is because it is common to have women working in construction in South Asia, but not in other parts of the world, our research in African countries aims to see if this is true.

Research in India and Bangladesh on women working on construction sites reveals interesting gendered divisions of labour and inequalities in wages on construction sites as well as gendered patterns of remittance sending. Many migrant women working in construction in Bangladesh had migrated with their husbands or families, but a significant proportion migrated alone or headed their household. They were mostly young (25-35), poor and from rural areas. Women workers earned less than their male counterparts and if they were alone had to pay more for their accommodation (Ahsan, 1997). Higher status and skilled jobs (which offer the most potential for genuinely transformational earning) are dominated by men (Pattenden 2012).

Poor health for women migrants and their families working on construction sites are a major concern in the literature. Conditions on many construction sites in developing countries are incredibly dangerous and social protection is often minimal. Poor health can lead to increased indebtedness and so reduce the positive outcomes of migration. Interestingly, Jatrana and Sangwan, (2004) find that women construction workers in North India perceive their own health to be better after migration, although poor health was a constant aspect of their lives. For these women construction workers, being relieved of water and firewood collection duties and having a constant supply of food made them feel healthier. The costs of accessing high quality medical attention were still prohibitive for them; so improved access to healthcare was not the deciding factor. Jatrana and Sangwan attribute the improved perception of health to urban lifestyles and social network support that the migrants come into contact with in cities. 

Emerging findings from our research in Ethiopia support this interesting observation. While conditions for women migrant workers in the cities of Ethiopia are hard at best and border on modern day slavery at worst, the conditions, which many women and girls have migrated to leave behind, are even worse. As Naila Kabeer (2000) described in her book on the garments industry in Bangladesh, the options available for many poor women and girls other than the exploitative conditions of work in the garments industry are very grim indeed.

Research on female migrants tends to portray them as victims, to highlight their health problems and the exploitation they suffer, without paying much attention to the exploitative or abusive conditions that they have left behind and the contributions they make to their families’ and nations’ development. Migrant women working in the construction industries of developing countries shake the foundations of the way women migrants are socially constructed.

 

Benjamin Zeitlyn is the Theme Leader for Qualitative Research within the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium.

 

 

Migrants: victims or agents of change?

Priya Deshingkar

How can 66% of Indonesian migrant domestic workers saying that they were able to educate their children and 88% of Indian migrant construction workers’ children being in school be bad news?  This is exactly what is emerging from research conducted by the Migrating out of Poverty Research Consortium in South and Southeast Asia.  It shows how migrants’ own accounts of the motivations, costs and benefits of migration are often at variance with mainstream narratives of slavery and trafficking.  Interviews with migrants and their families tell a much more complex story of hardship and deprivation but also of achievements and tangible improvements in living standards that may not have been possible without migration.  

By all accounts such migration into the lowest jobs has continued unabated or even grown, with urbanisation, a growing middle class and the spread of recruitment agents.  Construction work for example, provides employment for poor and low-skilled migrants all over the world according to Building and Woodworkers International, the global federation of trade unions in the construction industry .  Similarly domestic workers are predominantly but not always female and poor and many are migrants from rural areas according to various studies commissioned by the ILO. 

Both of these occupations have been in the news recently; construction workers because of the slave-like conditions in which they have been employed in the Middle East and domestic work with cases of abuse and exploitation emerging from several countries.  Human rights organisations  and anti-slavery movements have done well to attract attention to these issues but there is a danger that the debate is becoming too polarised; more like a moral discourse with migrants being viewed as “victims” who need to be “rescued” from their employers.  Market intermediaries such as recruitment agents are also suspect because they have a great deal of power over poor and vulnerable workers and can control and exploit them in a number of ways – for example, by confiscating their passports or underpaying them.  The worst cases of exploitation and abuse have become so visible that recruitment agents are now no more than traffickers in the public eye, and migrants, especially if they are poor, young or female, helpless victims. 

The research in South Asia examined the impacts of rural-urban migration for construction work in Nepal, India and Bangladesh through interviews with 150 migrants in the capital cities, and a small number of rural families in source areas.  In India, 98% had saved and remitted part of their incomes even though they lived and worked in extremely inadequate and hazardous conditions. These remittances were critical for the receiving families in improving consumption, upgrading housing, investing in education and assets.  While most migrants felt their living conditions had deteriorated, they felt that migration had opened up more opportunities for employment and higher remuneration which they hoped would support them out of poverty. Interviews with source families in Bihar and West Bengal indicated that 88% of the children from migrant households were in school compared to 77% among non-migrants, more durable assets, better housing and higher levels of expenditure on consumption compared to non-migrants from a similar socio-economic background.

The research in Singapore, based on interviews with 201 Indonesian migrant women working as domestic workers, also highlights the need to understand the process from a broader perspective.  There, despite the precarious and unregulated nature of recruitment and employment processes, with employers and agents exercising a great deal of power over workers, 66 per cent of the migrants in the sample said that remittances had contributed to the education of their children and other uses that have the potential to reduce poverty and improve well-being in the longer term.  However the impacts of such migration on poverty would be significantly faster and greater if the industry could be better regulated.

The results so far indicate that migration presents a number of possibilities for the poor to exit poverty in the longer term through human development and asset building, especially when compared to options available locally. Where setbacks and losses are experienced, this is more to do with the hostile policy environment that leaves migrants with few sources of insurance against risk or the inability to access services that should rightfully be theirs.  There is a need to move beyond the incomplete and biased analysis that views the migration of the poor only through an exploitation lens to one that examines the counterfactual i.e. what they would have done in the absence of such employment.  

 

 

Dr Priya Deshingkar is Research Director of the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium.