By Chun Han Wong
This story of a strike by Chinese bus drivers in Singapore offers a close-up look at a major issue facing the Southeast Asian city-state today: The growing number of migrant workers who underpin Singapore’s economy and the social tensions that their presence can generate.
What happened over two days in late November 2012 rattled the foundations of Singapore’s economic success – its business-friendly governance and industrial harmony – and prompted a robust response from the government.
The strike, a rarity in Singapore, resonated across Asia, where other countries are grappling with a growing dependence on foreign labor, too. And it provided a window into ordinary lives seldom-seen: the migrants who fan out from China in search of a fatter paycheck abroad.
How to balance the need for new workers from overseas with the preservation of established ways, presents a major dilemma that policymakers and citizens will wrestle with for years to come.
Chapter One: Contours of Conflict
SINGAPORE—In the cool hours before dawn one Monday in November, this metropolis was at its calmest, its sleek skyscrapers and tree-lined thoroughfares drained of their daytime bustle.
Most of Singapore’s 5.3 million residents were still asleep. But there were signs of life at a cluster of austere housing blocks in the city-state’s northern suburbs, in a district called Woodlands. It was 3 a.m.
In cramped dormitories, Chinese bus drivers donned maroon shirts and black pants – the uniforms of employees of SMRT Corp., a state-owned public-transport operator.
Then the drivers gathered in clusters near the dormitory gates. Shuttle buses waited to ferry them to bus terminals dotting the island, part of the dreary pre-dawn drill that ensures Singapore’s commuters arrive punctually at work every day.
As the buses idled, the drivers chatted in their native Mandarin. But that morning, the talk was different from their usual early-morning banter.
AFP/Getty Images
He Junling said he came across an online advertisement that was part of the SMRT hiring drive in early 2011. He is pictured here on Feb. 25.
He Junling, a 32-year-old mainland Chinese driver, and others walked through the group, spreading the message that the drivers should refuse to work that day and the next, according to Mr. He and others.
Slimly built with short cropped black hair, Mr. He has a calm, unassuming demeanor. But after one-and-a-half years at SMRT, his sense of grievance had reached boiling point.
The day before, in an essay addressed to his Chinese co-workers published on an online forum, he had laid out his case for why the drivers should not go to work. Compared with drivers from Singapore and neighboring Malaysia, drivers from the Chinese mainland felt they were being discriminated against by the transport company.
“We’re all human, yet SMRT management treats us so differently,” Mr. He wrote, using an alias that was known to his Chinese colleagues. “Clearly, they think there’s so many mainland Chinese available that they could hire hundreds at a go and fire anyone who steps out of line.”
That morning, as he worked the crowd, Mr. He reinforced his message with an appeal to the drivers’ patriotism and sense of injustice, tapping what the drivers say is a reservoir of frustration accumulated over several years over issues such as pay and living conditions.
A total of 171 Chinese drivers – the majority of them from the Woodlands-district dormitory – complied with his plan. It called for drivers to take medical leave en masse to miss work, according to SMRT public statements and prosecutors’ documents later filed in court in a related case. The shuttle buses departed empty.
Soon company supervisors showed up to try to persuade the men to work. They refused to budge and demanded to see the chief executive, according to the drivers.
Officials at SMRT, which serves 25% of Singapore’s bus ridership, declined to comment on the essay written by Mr. He. They would later acknowledge certain shortcomings and take steps to address them. But they say the company didn’t discriminate against its mainland Chinese drivers and called the workers’ actions inappropriate.
The Chinese drivers’ act of defiance would have been insignificant almost anywhere else. But in Singapore, a labor protest is a high-stakes game.
For this tightly controlled city-state, famous for its ban even on the sale of chewing gum, the drivers’ actions threatened one of its most cherished assets: A long record of maintaining unflinching public order and efficiency.
Over the past 50 years, that reputation has been a magnet for companies and investors across the globe, turning Singapore into one of the world’s richest places – a manicured island of skyscrapers, eight-lane highways, luxury cars and fancy restaurants.
The bus drivers, too, had plenty on the line. Each had spent a small fortune and traveled thousands of miles for a chance to make a better living. Many were the sole breadwinners in their families. In Singapore, they became unlikely activists, but not ineffective ones.
The dramatic events they set in motion would cause upheaval at one of Singapore’s most prominent companies, leading it to review and revise its practices, and prompt intense public scrutiny of the country’s way of dealing with employment disputes.
The strike would also spur some changes that may make life better for the migrants who come in the future. Yet, for some of the drivers who refused to board the buses that November morning, those changes would come at a high price.
Singapore hadn’t seen anything like it in years.
***
The grievances felt by Mr. He and other Chinese bus drivers in Singapore are part of a broader drama unfolding in Southeast Asia’s financial capital.
Like many other rich nations, Singapore has come to count on imported labor from China, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere to fuel its economic growth. Many of those imported workers do jobs that increasingly-affluent Singaporeans aren’t tempted by: Bus drivers, construction workers, hospitality staff, among others.
Foreign workers numbered 1.27 million as of December 2012, about one third of the labor force, up from 652,700, or about 28% of the total workforce, in 2002. This immigration surge boosted Singapore’s population by nearly 32% since 2000 and helped its economy grow at an average annual rate of about 6% in the past decade, but also contributed to rising living costs and stagnating low-end wages.
Singapore’s Gini coefficient—a measure of income inequality in which zero indicates that all income is shared equally and one represents complete concentration of income—rose to 0.478 last year from 0.442 in 2000, making it the second-most unequal economy in the developed world, behind Hong Kong.
“We face difficult choices: We need foreign workers to serve our economy and Singaporeans’ needs, and immigrants to make up for our shortfall of babies,” Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in a televised speech on Aug. 8, the eve of Singapore’s National Day. “But we also worry about crowding and congestion, and maintaining our Singaporean identity.”
Foreign workers join a working environment where public dissent is muted and labor protest is virtually unheard of. Since it came to power in 1959, the People’s Action Party has enforced strict controls on public assembly, curbed union powers and rewritten labor laws to favor employers. Unions at the time were decimated; those that survived were mostly subsumed under the National Trades Union Congress, a confederation that is often led by a cabinet minister.
Under Singapore law, a union can only strike after obtaining consent from a majority of members through a secret ballot. Foreign workers on fixed-term contracts aren’t permitted to become full union members.
A strike can be deemed illegal, according to the law, if its participants pursue causes beyond a specific trade dispute, and if the action “is designed or calculated to coerce the Government either directly or by inflicting hardship on the community.”
Workers performing “essential services”– including health care, firefighting and public transport – must give 14 days’ notice before going on strike. Employees of public utilities including water and electricity services have no right to strike at all.
The result is what the PAP government calls “constructive and dynamic” industrial relations managed under a “tripartism” model linking workers, employers and the state, according to the website of Singapore’s Manpower Ministry, which regulates labor issues and workplace conditions.
Singapore’s last legal strike occurred in 1986 when workers at U.S. oilfield-equipment company Hydril picketed their factory for two days to protest the dismissal of several union leaders. Government officials had approved the strike in advance.
Authorities have since shown little patience for industrial action. In 2002 and 2003, when disputes between Singapore Airlines and its pilots’ union threatened to boil over, top government leaders—including Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding prime minister—weighed in with threats of punitive action, so as to head off full-fledged industrial action.
“We are telling them, both management and unions, ‘you play this game, there are going to be broken heads,’” Mr. Lee, then Senior Minister in Singapore’s cabinet, said in a December 2003 speech during one of the disputes.
“If we sit back and do nothing and allow this to escalate and test the wills, then it is going to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in one, two, three months of nastiness,” Mr. Lee said then. “We are not going to have that.”
***
Reuters
A police van departed the dorms in Woodlands district on Nov. 26, 2012.
Even though Singapore is tiny compared to China – a population of just over five million versus 1.3 billion – the island state is enticing to thousands of Chinese workers. It is safe and orderly. Wages for basic jobs are higher. And it comes with a degree of familiarity: The majority of Singaporeans are ethnic Chinese, whose ancestors started arriving in large numbers in the 1830s.
SMRT has been hiring bus drivers from China since late 2007 to help staff its fleet of more than 1,050 buses. Foreigners accounted for about 44% of SMRT’s 2,000 bus drivers as of the end of last year. Half of those – about 450 – were from China, according to SMRT. The other half were from Malaysia. Typically, the company uses recruitment agencies to find and transport workers from China to Singapore.
Mr. He, the driver who wrote the essay calling for drivers not to work, was recruited this way. He said he came across an online advertisement that was part of the SMRT hiring drive in early 2011. He was living in his backwater hometown of Qinyang, a city of 400,000 in China’s central Henan province.
Bloomberg
Singapore’s skyline
He said he paid 25,000 yuan (US$4,080) to recruitment agents in China and passed a battery of driving tests before SMRT hired him. The job meant separation from his family for at least two years. But he figured the promised payoff would make up for it.
According to Mr. He, recruitment agents promised prospective drivers monthly wages of about 2,000 Singapore dollars (US$1,560) after overtime, or up to 10,000 yuan. That was more than double his salary as a truck and bus driver in China.
The terms of employment would become a central factor in the drivers’ dispute. Mr. He and others said that their recruiters had made inflated promises about their wages and working conditions in Singapore.
SMRT declined to comment specifically on Mr. He’s account, but told The Wall Street Journal it has reported the alleged misrepresentation by China-based agents to Singaporean and Chinese authorities for further investigation. Efforts to determine the identity of the agents and contact them were unsuccessful.
“I wanted to provide more for my family, especially for my child,” now five years old, Mr. He said in a telephone interview. “It was also a chance for me to gain fresh experiences, seeing and learning new things.”
But Singapore also would hold some unpleasant surprises.
Continue to Chapter Two: Mainland Chinese drivers in Singapore face alienation, even from local ethnic Chinese, and fear that any protest will lead to harsh reprisals.
[The Wall Street Journal compiled this account from dozens of interviews, including drivers, defense lawyers and labor activists, as well as archived Internet conversations between drivers, public statements by government and company officials, and court documents. It will run as a serialized story on Southeast Asia Real Time and asia.wsj.com every day this week.]
The Strike That Rattled Singapore: A WSJ Investigation
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét