POPULATION, SPACE AND PLACE

Popul. Space Place 15, 147–159 (2009)

Published online in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/psp.545

Foreigners in Our Homes: Linking

Migration and Family Policies
in Singapore
Youyenn Teo1,* and Nicola Piper2
1
Division of Sociology, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
2
Centre for Migration Policy Research, School of the Environment and Society, Swansea University, Swansea
SA2 8PP, UK

ABSTRACT (Manager of maid agency Transworld Link

Management, The Strait Times, 11 January
In Singapore, despite high levels of state 2006: 4)
intervention in managing the influx of foreign
In Singapore, care work is increasingly fulfilled
labour, work conditions of foreign domestic
by a fairly large number of women from neigh-
workers (FDWs) are largely left to the
bouring countries who come to Singapore as
discretion of individual employers. We argue
‘foreign domestic workers’ (FDWs). These women
that to better understand the government’s
live in individual households, employed by indi-
reticence, as well as certain reluctance on the
vidual families, and their working conditions –
part of employers for reform on this particular
including wages and rest days – are largely left
issue, we need to go beyond the analysis of
to the discretion of individual employers, even
migration policies. Policies towards FDWs
though their collective presence is carefully
must be situated in the context of other social
orchestrated through state policies. Unsurpris-
policies targeted at the citizens of Singapore.
ingly, the relative absence of regulation over indi-
We show that the reform of migrant workers’
vidual employers has led to conditions of injustice
working and living conditions and the limits
and sometimes outright abuse. In recent years,
to the reform depend on what these reforms
activist voices have risen to criticise the
mean in the context of the state’s approach to
Singapore government’s reticence over the issue
welfare, and particularly its idealised vision of
of protection for foreign domestic workers in
‘the Singapore family’ within this framework.
their capacity as workers. The international
Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
non-governmental organisation (NGO) Human
Rights Watch has been vocal in critiquing the
Received 4 November 2007; revised 9 July 2008; accepted 15 July conditions that FDWs face in their daily lives,
2008 and has appealed to the Singapore government
to alter these (Human Rights Watch, 2005). Local
Keywords: Asia; Singapore; migration policy;
NGOs such as Transient Workers Count Too
family policy; social policy; foreign domestic
(TWC2) have also both raised public awareness
workers
and lobbied the government to create better con-
ditions for the numerous FDWs working in the
city-state by, for example, compiling data into the
INTRODUCTION
form of reports (see e.g. Gee and Ho, 2006).
These pressures have paved the way for impor-

I
‘ n Singapore, it is very difficult not to have
tant gradual changes in the way FDWs are treated
a maid. We either engage a maid to
as a category. Yet, for the most part, the Singapore
look after our children or aged parents.’
government has been reluctant to institute
significant legislative changes especially as they
* Correspondence to: Youyenn Teo, Division of Sociology,
Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Avenue, pertain to these migrants as workers, and the
Singapore 639798, Singapore. E-mail: yyteo@ntu.edu.sg few changes that have come about continue
Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
148
to emphasise the voluntary compliance of
employers (Piper, 2006).
This is puzzling on one level: the Singapore
state, after all, is highly concerned about its inter-
national image and sensitive to charges that it
is acting in ways unbecoming of a First World
country, and activists have leveraged precisely
on this in order to appeal to the conscience of
both the Singapore government and Singapore
citizens. Moreover, the demands of activists for
legal guarantees of minimum wages and rest
days seem unlikely to change the appeal of, and
demand for, foreign domestic workers, and hence
are unlikely to have significant negative eco-
nomic impacts. How, then, might we explain
why changes have come about so slowly and
why policies towards this group of women
workers continue to afford them only limited
protection?
We argue in this paper that to better under-
stand the government’s reticence, as well as a
certain reluctance on the part of employers for
reform, we need to look to sites beyond migra-
tion policies, and contextualise the discussion
in a broader social policy framework. Policies
toward FDWs must be situated in the context of
other social policies targeted at the citizens of
Singapore. In this paper, we show that the reform
of migrant workers’ working and living condi-
tions and the limits to the reform depend on what
these reforms mean in the context of the state’s
approach to welfare, and particularly its idealised
vision of ‘the Singapore family’ within this frame-
work. Specifically, changes that challenge the
myth of the self-caring family are unlikely to be
taken up, as this undermines its efforts in that
realm and would, moreover, have far-reaching
consequences for the balance of responsibility
between state and family. Hence, any demands
for reform really need to address larger issues of
how the state and foreign workers are situated
within the domain of the ideal family, and not
just narrow demands for workers’ rights.
A parallel issue here is that the rights discourse
is a very difficult one to articulate in Singapore
for a number of reasons. Most important among
these is that citizens do not enjoy the full panoply
of human rights as stipulated by ILO standards
and UN conventions. In the field of work,
although there is an Employment Act that has
stipulations for maximum working hours and
rest days, numerous exceptions exist – both in
Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
T. Y. Yenn and N. Piper
terms of the type of workers covered and the
particular protections – that basically render it
non-universal. It is thus unsurprisingly difficult
to garner support from society and push the state
to extend rights to foreign workers which citizens
do not themselves have. Labour standards for
migrant workers need, therefore, to be contextu-
alised within the framework of labour standards
for citizens. We mention this here to reinforce our
general point about the importance of analysing
the particularities of migrants by appreciating
state policies in general, not just those specifically
designed with reference to migrants. A more
detailed discussion of this, however, goes beyond
the scope of this paper.
SETTING THE CONTEXT
With the demise or underdevelopment of welfare
states, and demographic trends towards lower
fertility and rapidly ageing populations, the
issues of elder care and childcare have become
major socio-political concerns in many developed
countries. The persistence of uneven develop-
ment and wealth on a global scale further means
that these issues are finding resolutions in
outsourcing or privatisation; the importing of
migrant care labour is an integral part of solutions
in many parts of the world.1
Two somewhat distinct strands of scholarship
relevant to our discussion of the Singapore case
have addressed the many issues arising from
these trends: firstly, work on the migration and
development nexus deriving from a ‘south-to-
south’, or rather intra-regional, migration context
has illuminated the economic conditions and the
particular roles of the state in shaping labour
supply; secondly, research on foreign domestic
workers has given much attention to the often
quite exploitative and difficult conditions
endemic to this type of work.
The first body of work largely focuses on the
macro-processes that shape general migration
patterns and point to the politico-economic con-
ditions from the perspective of the ‘developmen-
talist’ desires of particular states. This strand of
scholarship places the issue of migrant labour
squarely in a regional framework and thereby
highlights the importance of understanding the
‘import’ of migrant workers in its macro-
economic context. Some studies on the Singapore
case (Lee, 1979; Hui, 1997; Yap, 1999) have
Popul. Space Place 15, 147–159 (2009)
DOI: 10.1002/psp
Migration and Family Policies in Singapore
discussed migration policies of the ‘developmen-
talist state’2 by confining their analysis to the
state’s active role in influencing the flow of people
for mainly economic and demographic consider-
ations. A direct link between the developmental-
ist state and care or domestic work has been
established in the important work by Chin (1998).
Taking a more holistic approach to her analysis
of the case of Malaysia, Chin alluded to the
interaction of political economy with everyday
practices, and the concrete ways in which the
Malaysian state’s developmentalist goals are ren-
dered palpable in the bodies of its middle-class
citizens, and how middle-class-ness is produced
by the relationships between Malaysian women
as employers and their foreign domestic
workers.
The second body of work more narrowly
focuses on domestic worker migration. The spe-
cific contribution of this set of scholarship lies
primarily in the documentation of the many
forms that abuse and exploitation of the migrant
may take, rather than linking the state’s migra-
tion policy to other areas of policy-making
(for Hong Kong, see Wee and Sim, 2005; for
Singapore, see Yeoh et al., 1999, 2004). Much of
this work discusses the tenuous position of female
domestic workers in relation to labour laws and
rights, highlighting issues such as working con-
ditions, poor remuneration, and close surveil-
lance by both the state and employers. Studies
which have used a rights or protection frame-
work centre upon the absence of fair or just poli-
cies (Huang and Yeoh, 1996; Yeoh et al., 2004;
Kobayashi, 2005). By contrast, in this paper we
shift the lens to the presence of policies which
shape a specific social setting of which FDWs are
a vital part, and that is the institution of the
family.
While each of the two main bodies of work is
rightly concerned with its own questions and
illuminates different aspects of the process, it is
problematic that the two literatures remain rather
distinct. The distinction suggests a persistent
tendency to address ‘economic’ questions and
‘social’ issues separately, even as more scholars
have begun to acknowledge that the distinctions
are more analytical than empirical.
Linking FDW migration policies to broader
social policies aimed at (in our case, Singaporean)
families allows us to address another shortcom-
ing in existing works on FDWs in the Asian
Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
149
context: the lack of (critical) engagement with
the emerging literature on ‘global care chains’
(Hochschild, 2000). Although without doubt an
interesting concept building upon earlier work
done on the international trade in domestic
workers (Heyzer et al., 1994; Parren, as, 2000: Lutz,
2002), Yeates (2004) observed in her discussion of
its analytical and empirical shortcomings that
this concept is based upon a narrow application
to just one group of migrant care workers – the
live-in domestic worker. For our purposes here,
we would add the observation that most studies
on FDWs in Asia, especially in the Singapore
context, lack a detailed analysis of the wide range
of services provided by FDWs – childcare, elderly
care – and how the persistence of cultural norms
in Asia (Lan, 2002) as elsewhere (Macdonald,
1998) that care for the elderly and children is
provided ‘in-house’, as opposed to institutional
care provided by the state, fits into a discussion
of the linkages between migration and social
policy.3
This paper picks up on the spirit of that work
insofar as it attempts to account for the limits and
possibilities of reform, aiming at the improve-
ment of the position of the FDW by looking at the
broader context of state-society relations that
inform migration policies. We argue in this paper
that states such as Singapore are interested in
more than the pure ‘economics’, and that analy-
ses of migration always have to be situated
in their broader approach towards society as a
whole.
MIGRANTS IN SINGAPORE
In August 2006, during the National Day Rally
Speech,4 Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong
elaborated on Singapore’s heavy and continual
dependence on immigration, and emphasised
the importance of attracting more foreigners into
the country for work and, in some cases, for long-
term settlement (Lee, 2006). This was a radical
departure from the previous two such speeches
he had given as Prime Minister, where the issue
of decreased fertility and its negative implica-
tions for the country’s future – economic as well
as social – were prominent themes, and where
Lee elaborated the state’s desires for and efforts
at encouraging marriage and fertility (Lee, 2004,
2005). In contrast, by 2006 Lee only briefly
touched on the issue of fertility among
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150
Singaporeans and instead made the case for
immigration as the most immediate and practical
solution to the low birth rate, and crucial for the
continued economic prosperity and growth of
the country. While pro-natalism remains an
important aspect of the Singapore state’s policies,
the speech signalled a shift towards more aggres-
sive pursuit of immigration.
Immigration – both temporary and long-term
– has of course been a feature of Singapore’s
economic development platform for some time.
Apart from the large flow of people across the
Causeway (the bridge between Singapore and
Peninsular Malaysia), the state has since the late
1970s allowed employers to hire workers from
so-called non-traditional sources such as the
Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka,
Bangladesh and India. Singapore’s non-resident
(i.e. not citizen nor permanent resident) popula-
tion increased from 131,820 in 1980, to 331,264 in
1990, to 754,524 in 2000 (Department of Statistics,
2000), to about 1 million in 2007 (Singapore
Department of Statistics, 2007). The proportion of
non-residents has also increased significantly
over the past two decades, making up roughly
5% of the total population in 1980, 10% in 1990,
19% in 2000, and 22% in 2007. In 2006, non-resi-
dents made up roughly 30% of the formal work
force (Ministry of Manpower, 2007).
Although immigration is clearly not new, the
Prime Minister’s public suggestion of immigra-
tion as a long-term solution to falling birth rates
– rather than just as a means of fulfilling cyclical
labour shortage – was somewhat novel. In the
weeks following Lee’s speech, much ink was
spilled in the national media on debating the
issues of immigration and its impact on Singa-
pore and Singaporeans. Oddly, out of 69 articles
on the topic collated from the local English-
medium newspaper, The Straits Times, over a six-
week period, only three discussed the fact that
Singapore takes in at least two radically different
groups of migrant workers, and that migration
means starkly different things for these two
groups.5
In Singapore, ‘foreigners’ are understood
through two distinct lenses. At the higher end of
the income and education spectrum, the country
grants Employment Passes to foreign profession-
als who earn at least S$2500 (about US$1800) per
month6 (Ministry of Manpower, 2006d). These
are the people Singaporeans know widely as
Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
T. Y. Yenn and N. Piper
‘foreign talent’ and who have been the focus of
attention in discussions of Lee’s speech. In 2006,
there were about 65,000 people in this category
(Ong 2006).7 On the other hand, at the lower end
of the income/profession spectrum, work permits
are granted to employers of ‘unskilled or semi-
skilled’ workers, whom Singaporeans refer to as
‘foreign workers’. Many of the male workers in
this category are employed in the construction
industry (about 135,000 in 2006), while many of
the female workers are ‘foreign domestic workers’
and number about 160,000 (Ong, 2006). In 2006,
about 580,000 people were ‘work permit’ holders,
roughly nine times the number of those holding
‘Employment Passes’.8
Given these relative numbers, that a debate
around migration could be so focused on one
group and so silent on the other is noteworthy.
Yet, for someone living in Singapore, this sort of
juxtaposition – where one group is held up as
highly desirable and of which there is lots to say,
and the rendering of the other group as largely a
fact to be tolerated and best left out of dinner
conversation – is continually reproduced as a
taken-for-granted reality of everyday life. While
‘foreign talent’ live and work among middle-
class Singaporeans, socialise in places of enter-
tainment that also serve local clientele – sometimes
as single people but also quite often as families –
‘foreign workers’ have a more furtive presence.
Their work rarely brings them into direct contact
with more than a handful of locals (and these
are generally people who supervise them). Male
workers are ghettoised in hostels that are near
neighbourhoods but not actually in them (Hui,
1997), while female domestic workers are
cordoned in individual households and have
limited mobility outside of these units. Their
leisure activities are limited in time, space and
social range: on their days off, in particular areas
of Singapore, and only with particular people –
Little India for Bangladeshi workers, Lucky Plaza
for Filipina domestic workers, Golden Mile
Complex for Thai workers, all places which many
Singaporeans have learnt to avoid precisely
because they are there. According to Kobayashi’s
(2005) research on employers’ attitudes toward
domestic workers (based on postings to the
website called ‘Maidlibrary’), many employers
of maids are annoyed by their employees
establishing the ‘wrong’ kind of social contacts,
especially boyfriends, at these sites.
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Migration and Family Policies in Singapore
Like others who have looked at how the low
status of migrant workers is reproduced through
state policy (Chin, 1998; Yeoh et al., 2004; Bell and
Piper, 2005; Oishi, 2005; Rahman, 2006), we show
here that the particularities of their experiences
do not spring inevitably from their foreign-ness,
nor even the type of work they do or the income
they make. Instead, the regulations governing
their status as foreign workers (re)produce and
give particular content to their liminal positions
in Singapore society. Contrasting the two groups
of migrants, we highlight two mechanisms that
contribute to continually producing the position
of foreign workers as simultaneously visible and
invisible, necessary yet undesirable: (a) control
with limited protection as workers; (b) social
quarantine via suppression of family formation.
(a) Control with Limited Protection
as Workers
Numerous rules and regulations govern the
entry, stay and exit of foreigners seeking to work
in Singapore. As mentioned, so-called foreign
talent apply for Employment Passes to work and
live in Singapore, while employers of foreign
workers apply for work permits that allow them
to employ workers from overseas, subject to
conditions such as quotas that are designed to
protect Singaporeans’ jobs to some degree.9 As an
employer of the latter, application for permits
entails having to pay a security deposit of S$5000
for each worker, and maintaining the employee’s
daily needs of housing and general ‘welfare’.
Upon the expiration or cancellation of a Work
Permit, employers are responsible for ‘repatria-
tion’, i.e. paying the costs of travel back to the
worker’s home country. This is enforced on
employers by the threat of charge on the security
deposit in cases of failure to arrange and pay
for this departure from Singapore. The security
deposit is also forfeited should workers go
missing.
This has significant implications for the
meaning of a person’s labour, and the relation-
ships between employer and employee. For
foreign talent, rules are being further liberalised
to allow workers to hold their passes without
being tied to a particular employer, and this
means that they are somewhat free agents in the
job market. Although unemployment would be
unpleasant and create bureaucratic headaches, it
Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
151
does not immediately put a person in a position
of daily peril. For foreign workers, on the other
hand, the absolute reliance on the employer is
solidified through their lack of job mobility as
well as the near impossibility of living a life in
Singapore outside the control of employers. The
vague definition of what welfare entails further
weakens employees’ positions vis-à-vis their
bosses, and requirements like the mandatory
security deposit act as potential punishment for
employers, compelling them to keep workers
under tight surveillance. As workers, then, work
permit holders have limited control over the sale
of their labour power and their daily lives once
they are in Singapore.
This is particularly true for the category of
women who come into Singapore as FDWs.
Unlike their male counterparts of work permit
holders,10 this group of women, who are hired
primarily from the Philippines and Indonesia to
be live-in domestic workers, are specifically
excluded from coverage of the Employment Act
– which stipulates minimum rest time and wages
for (low-wage) Singaporean workers. As men-
tioned in an earlier footnote, the protections
offered by the Employment Act are in some ways
quite minimal, since there are many categories of
workers who are not covered, and also because
there are many exceptional conditions that in fact
allow employers ultimate control over work time
and wages. The exclusion of FDWs is still signifi-
cant, however, because what accompanies their
exclusion are a set of specific discourses that
frames their position in Singapore and also results
in their not being defined socio-legally as ‘proper’
workers. As the Ministry of Manpower put it,
they are excluded from the Employment Act
because of their particular type of work, situating
them within the private sphere of individual
households:
‘it is not practical to regulate specific aspects of
domestic work i.e. hours of work, work on a
rest day and on public holidays. It would also
be difficult to enforce the terms of the Employ-
ment Act for domestic workers as: they work
in a home environment; and the habits of
households vary. For example, it would be
hard to compute overtime payments as
domestic workers’ work/free time are difficult
to define and regulate in the same way as
employees working in offices or factories.’
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152
This logic implied by the quote – that domestic
work is by its nature uneven and unpredictable
– is extended to justify the fact that there is no
standard rule on rest days for all domestic
workers. The issue of size of individual house-
holds (i.e. number of family members) ‘served’
by domestic workers is not regulated either, and
this is a source of much hardship among some
domestic workers. Many of the women who end
up in a shelter set up for foreign workers com-
plain of overwork based on having to ‘serve’
a big extended family (informal interview with
director of the shelter by Piper, Singapore, April
2005).
Instead of holding employers to account for
certain conditions for the domestic worker as
worker, the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) gives
great leeway for employers to set their own terms
depending on individual needs of the family. Yet,
this does not mean that there are no controls. In
an example that is particularly telling of what the
state is able to implement should it choose to, the
MOM’s own control of employers in so far as
payment is concerned is highly systematised: the
monthly levy which all employers of foreign
domestic workers need to pay to the state – this
is either S$200 or S$295, depending on whether
one qualifies for concessions11 – cannot be avoided
because employers are required to set up ‘GIRO’
accounts so that monthly payments are deducted
from their bank accounts and paid to the state. If
the employer does not have sufficient funds in
her/his account, the state can impose fines and
other punitive measures.
In sum, the way the state regulates work permit
holders – in contrast to Employment Pass holders
– pits employers and workers in positions of
some conflict, and moreover renders the worker
with little leverage vis-à-vis her/his employer.
By leaving the conditions of work largely up to
employers, by limiting job as well as everyday
mobility, and very importantly, by putting in
place material disincentives that remind the
employer that they are paying a price to hire
foreign workers, the state produces the highly
unequal relationship between workers and their
employers and generates the view (and structural
fact) that these are necessary and yet somehow
undesirable workers. In limiting their mobility –
both in the abstract sense of the job market and
in the concrete, everyday sense of where they can
sleep, eat, shower – the state also produces the
Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
T. Y. Yenn and N. Piper
conditions that make this large group of people
both highly visible in Singaporeans’ daily lives
and yet somehow invisible. This invisibility goes
beyond their absence in certain physical spaces:
indeed, foreign workers are invisible in so far as
they have very limited range in their social lives
as long as they are in Singapore. We refer to this
as a form of ‘social quarantine’.
(b) Social Quarantine Via Suppression of
Family Formation
A second set of mechanisms that reproduces
work permit holders’ status as liminal is the trun-
cation of their social lives in a process we call
‘social quarantine’. By this, we mean not only
that they are kept separate from Singaporeans in
their everyday lives but that they are barred from
certain forms of social life which is part of their
social and legal construction as ‘temporary’ con-
tract workers. The acts that Singaporeans and
Employment Pass holders can largely take for
granted, and which continually renew them as
members of a society, are actively withheld from
this group of workers: to invest long-term in
a particular place by, for example, purchasing
housing; to participate in the long-term growth
of a society by, for example, paying taxes; and
finally, and perhaps most significantly, to have a
long-term stake in a place through family forma-
tion and the life-course changes that often come
along with this. It is perhaps worth pointing out
that we are not making a normative claim regard-
ing the inherent good of familial life. Instead, we
are pointing out that for many people, being
members of families and aspiring to family reuni-
fication or family formation are important and
basic aspects of being part of a larger society,
and being effectively barred from these activities
and aspirations means being prevented from
being full members of a given society.
Unlike Employment Pass holders and
Singaporeans, persons on work permits are basi-
cally denied the possibility of familial life while
they are living in Singapore. Furthermore, while
Employment Pass holders may apply for perma-
nent residence and citizenship, work permit
holders may not. This means that while the entire
category of workers is a long-term reality in
Singapore, certain types of workers are not. More
importantly, while Employment Pass holders
may bring in family members through the
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Migration and Family Policies in Singapore
Dependent’s Pass (DP) or Long-Term Social Visit
Pass (LTSVP) programmes – and this includes
spouses, children, parents and parents-in-law –
work permit holders have no such option. In con-
trast to Employment Pass holders who may
marry Singaporeans, work permit holders have
to apply for special permission to do so, and this
is decided on a case-by-case basis.12 This regula-
tion applies both while they are work permit
holders and after they have ceased to be in this
category, implying that the state wants to mini-
mise cases of workers cancelling their work
permits before marrying a Singaporean. It also
applies both to marriages that take place within
Singapore and those outside of it, closing off yet
another potential loophole.
The rules applying to work permit holders
are particularly stringent when it comes to the
women who enter Singapore as FDWs, as other
scholars have pointed out (Yeoh et al., 2004).
Here, their very bodies are the objects of surveil-
lance. Every six months, this group of workers
must undergo medical examinations to test for
HIV and pregnancy, the rationale being that
‘FDWs work in a residential environment and
may have contact with children’ and to ‘screen
against FDWs who might give birth in Singapore,
as this would contravene the Work Permit regu-
lations’ (Ministry of Manpower, 2006a). The
phrase ‘social quarantine’ is particularly apt in
this case as we can see that notions of contamina-
tion and over-stepping of abstract boundaries
are at stake; the sense of contamination is strong
precisely because domestic workers cannot be
fully segregated in space. In sum, the workers
are contained in a small social space – living
within the household and yet not full members
of any family on an everyday basis; near intimate
relations and yet explicitly prevented from acts
such as sex; involved in care work and yet con-
tinually marked as an ‘other’ that might infect
children.
In contrast to Employment Pass holders, then,
work permit holders experience, in some ways,
an erasure of their social lives – past, present, and
future: while in Singapore, their (past and present)
identities as brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers,
husbands, wives, lovers, daughters, sons, is
largely invisible except insofar as they are imag-
ined to be contributing to their families through
remittances; their (present) everyday lives are
devoid of options for familial relationships; their
Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
153
(future) aspirations towards family formation
must lie beyond their lives in Singapore.
The implications of this social quarantine are
particularly significant and stark when under-
stood in the context of the state’s valorisation of
families when it comes to its own citizens and
potential citizens.13 We turn now to a discussion
of this in order to make the argument that we can
better understand why policies toward migrants
look the way they do when we juxtapose family
and migration policies. One might argue that
some of these regulations around foreign workers
are in place because of certain conflicts of interest
between low-skilled Singaporean labour and
foreign labour, and that these measures are put
in place to avert class struggle by ensuring certain
privileges for working-class Singaporeans. On
some level this is perhaps true: the policies ensure
that foreign workers are rarely in direct competi-
tion with locals for jobs or other resources. We
argue, however, that the issues cut deeper: what
is at stake are not only conflicting interests around
limited resources, but also issues of contradictory
elements embedded in the need for certain types
of labour and the quest for a certain type of
family.
SINGAPORE-STYLE SOCIAL WELFARE AND
THE IDEAL OF THE SELF-RELIANT FAMILY
The Singapore state’s interventions into the
family are quite well-known. Its campaigns to get
unmarried people matched up and married and
its offers of cash bonuses for babies born have
received widespread attention both within and
beyond its shores (see e.g. Edidin, 2004). In the
past few years, the main issues around the family
that have been at the centre of public attention
include those associated with an ageing popula-
tion, the rising age of marriage, lower fertility,
and higher divorce rates. Of these, the ageing
population structure – an outcome of greatly
declining fertility of the resident population – has
become a matter of national concern. The total
fertility rate has fallen steadily from 3.07 in 1970,
to 1.82 in 1980, to 1.60 in 2000. In 2005, the total
fertility rate in Singapore was at 1.25, well below
the ‘replacement’ level of 2.1 (Department of Sta-
tistics, 2006). The age dependency ratio of the
population of children below 15 to adults between
15 and 64 has decreased gradually over the last
decades – from 68.1 children per hundred adults
Popul. Space Place 15, 147–159 (2009)
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154
in 1970, to 28.0 children per hundred adults in
2004. On the other hand, the dependency ratio of
those 65 years and older to those between 15 and
64 has increased, with 5.9 people above 65 years
for every hundred between 15 and 64 years in
1970, to 11.1 in 2004 (Department of Statistics,
2005).
The specific policies and rhetoric aimed at
addressing these trends are interesting and
complex. One particular element that we want to
highlight for the purposes of this paper is that the
Singapore government consistently insists on the
importance of a self-reliant family. For the state,
any aid that it renders to the family – whether in
the form of tax credits or subsidies – should not
be perceived as welfare entitlements (Chua, 1995).
Political leaders repeatedly assert that Singapore
is not a welfare state and that people should not
expect public handouts. Hence, even though
public spending on education, health, infrastruc-
ture – in particular, public housing – is visibly
significant, access to them is built upon market
logics. In other words, social goods are provided
on the basis of demand and supply chains, and
economic incentives and disincentives are put in
place so that people make decisions based on
measures of opportunity costs. Significantly,
people are compelled to make these decisions as
family units.
Two examples are particularly relevant here.
Firstly, with a few exceptions, public housing has
to be purchased and owned, and co-ownership
is possible primarily for people who are legally
defined as a family – two people married to each
other, parent and adult child, or divorced/
widowed parent with minor child. Additional
members of the family – such as children and
siblings – may be included in co-ownership, but
only after these basic pairings are established.
People pool financial resources as a family
to buy housing, and accumulate capital from
the investment as a family. Given that most
Singaporeans own and live in public housing,
and that housing represents the main asset of
most Singaporeans, this obviously means that
people’s long- and short-term economic interests
are automatically tied up with those of their
spouses/parents/children, and that their respon-
sibilities towards their families are significantly
anchored in economic contributions (i.e. via
continual employment in order to maintain
mortgage payments).
Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
T. Y. Yenn and N. Piper
Secondly, the family is further compelled to
pull together as a unit in care for the elderly,
young, and otherwise dependent. This example
is perhaps even more illuminating for the pur-
poses of this paper. The public rhetoric has the
state insisting that the best care is provided within
the household, and ideally by female members of
the family. Thus, women are valorised as devoted
mothers and care-givers (at the same time that
they are encouraged to continue working). This
rhetoric is accompanied by policies that make
certain choices more ‘sensible’ than others;
specifically, particularly for the middle-income
family, hiring domestic workers is much more
cost-effective than paying for care services outside
the household. Of course, for a particular option
to become ‘sensible’ requires more than evalua-
tions of cost. Chin (1998) pointed out, for example,
that middle-class employers in Malaysia come to
prefer live-in workers and shun crèches because
they see the latter as working-class solutions that
are inadequate for fulfilling their children’s
needs.
As mentioned earlier, lower rates of levy exist
for people who have either children or the elderly
living in the household, and only people who are
married qualify for these lower rates. Instead of
public spending on institutions of care, then,
the state effectively subsidises care that is
ostensibly provided by the family unit within
the household.
These two examples illustrate how the state’s
social policies – including provision of what
we might call welfare goods – emphasises
the primacy of the family. And what is note-
worthy is not only the rhetoric around Asian
values through newspaper reports, television
series and other public campaigns that people
know so well, but also the policies that bind
family members’ interests to each other,
which make it natural that certain decisions
are made by people as members of the
familial unit. It is through the combination
of strong public rhetoric and these structural
mechanisms that shape practices by which the
ideal of a self-reliant family is produced and
reproduced.
This ideal of the self-reliant family that stands
at the core of the state’s social policies is impor-
tant for understanding its approach toward
migrant workers. We now turn to how this context
allows us to understand the state’s reticence
Popul. Space Place 15, 147–159 (2009)
DOI: 10.1002/psp
Migration and Family Policies in Singapore
toward migration policy reforms as an effort at
maintaining this ideal.
FAMILY AND MIGRATION POLICIES IN
DIALECTICAL RELATION
The context of the Singapore state’s orientation
toward the family sheds much light on its poli-
cies toward foreign domestic workers. One way
to illustrate this is to look at recent reforms and
their limits. We argue here that the limits to
reforms are shaped by the greater importance the
state places on maintaining the idealised self-
reliant family.
As mentioned earlier, in October 2006 the
Ministry of Manpower introduced a number of
new measures aimed at improving relationships
between employers and the FDWs they hire.
From 1 November 2006 the following measures
have been in effect: firstly, FDWs may request
that their salaries be paid directly into their
Singapore bank accounts, and this option has to
be offered to them as a precondition to the grant-
ing of work permits to employers; secondly, the
MOM randomly selects first-time FDWs for inter-
views in the first months of their employment,
ostensibly to make sure that they have adjusted
to their new work environments; thirdly, the
Ministry makes limited employment histories of
workers – including the number of employers
they have had and the beginning and termina-
tion dates of each employment period – available
to prospective employers; fourthly, the MOM,
from December 2006, started to send guidebooks
to employers in order to ‘help employers better
understand their roles and responsibilities to
manage their FDWs’; finally, the Ministry pro-
vides ‘useful information to FDWs on their rights
and responsibilities’ via six-monthly newsletters
(Ministry of Manpower, 2006c).
In addition to these measures, two accredita-
tion agencies – the Association Of Employment
Agencies (Singapore) and CaseTrust (the accredi-
tation arm of the Consumer Association of
Singapore) – introduced two standard contracts,
one regulating relationships between employers
and employment agencies, and another re-
gulating relationships between employers and
FDWs (Association of Employment Agencies
(Singapore) and CaseTrust, 2006). Beginning 15
September 2006, employment agencies – the
main channel through which FDWs find
employment, and through which employers find
Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
155
workers – have had to offer the two standard
contracts to both employers and workers, in
order to be accredited. Significantly, the Standard
Employment Contract Between Domestic Worker
and Employer lays out in detail certain condi-
tions for employment, including wages and when
they will be paid each month; the type of accom-
modation the workers will have; the minimum
number of paid-for meals she is to receive each
day; the hours of rest and number of rest days
she is entitled to, and the monetary compensa-
tion she should receive if she does not take
them.
All of this is not to say, of course, that problems
have been resolved. In a series of articles in
the local English newspaper, The Straits Times,
reporter Arlina Arshad points to the numerous
abuses that FDWs often have to put up with in
the process of gaining employment in Singapore
– from ‘handlers’ who do not provide them with
adequate accommodation prior to job placement,
to employers who justify not granting them rest
days because of lack of trust, to agents who trans-
fer all sorts of costs to the women (Arshad,
2006a,b,c,d,e,f).
Yet, these are significant changes that are worth
highlighting for at least three reasons: firstly,
while FDWs are still not protected legislatively
under the auspices of the Employment Act, we
see that there are measures put in place that are
likely to improve their conditions of work and
which give them some leverage vis-à-vis employ-
ers in cases of disputes. Although not guaranteed
rest days nor minimum wages as a category of
workers, individual migrants do now have
contracts that stipulate what they as individuals
should receive. Symbolically, the changes are also
important in so far as they send a message to the
employing public that the women who form a
very intimate part of the Singaporean middle-
class family have certain rights as workers.
Secondly, it is important to recognise changes
because they signify the impact that NGOs have
had on the issue of FDWs. Although the NGOs
themselves remain dissatisfied with the rate and
form of change (Human Rights News, 2006), it
does appear to us that the pressures exerted have
had some effect. In a case where the state often
does not acknowledge the impact NGOs have on
policy-making,14 and hence where it is difficult
for NGOs to learn the lessons of how best
to organise and advocate, it is particularly
Popul. Space Place 15, 147–159 (2009)
DOI: 10.1002/psp
156
important to recognise that there is change over
time and that some of this has probably come
about because of pressure from organised advo-
cates. Thirdly, and finally, it is when we recognise
these changes that we can look more closely at
the reach and limits of such pressure.
This final point allows us to see that while
there are signs that the state wants to give protec-
tion to workers, they constantly prioritise partic-
ular types of interests of employers. On one level,
there are issues of keeping wages (including
levy) relatively low, so that Singaporean people
– particularly women – will continue to find
‘choosing’ foreign domestic workers more viable
and/or desirable than cutting back on or quitting
their own jobs. Even more importantly, it main-
tains the option as more attractive than solutions
that lie outside the household. Beyond the issue
of wages, however, we see that the changes
emphasise voluntary compliance and flexibility
for individual employers so that it remains up to
individual families how they want to structure
work and rest time for their employees, and how
they wish to incorporate them into their house-
holds. Finally, the social quarantine of FDWs is
left utterly untouched. By maintaining the worker
as someone constantly in the intimate realm of
the family and yet never herself either a full
member of the household nor a full member of
society, the ideal and myth of a self-reliant
family can persist.
In this way, although the self-reliant family is
absolutely dependent upon employed help, the
flexibility and responsibility involved in manag-
ing this help, and the continued articulation of
the worker as a social other, allows the myth of
self-reliance to be maintained.
CONCLUSION
Looking at migration policies in Singapore
through the lens of family policies, the paper
shows that the limits to reform which have frus-
trated those concerned with the treatment of
FDWs ‘make sense’ when placed in the broader
context of concerns about the family as an institu-
tion. The state’s willingness for reform seems
limited by its vision of the appropriate and rela-
tive roles of the state and family in the context of
demographic changes.
Juxtaposed against existing scholarship on
migration policies, the findings from this paper
Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
T. Y. Yenn and N. Piper
highlight the importance of situating macro-
economic analyses in the broader social context,
and the value of moving beyond describing poor
conditions to trying to understand how they
have come to be and the limits and possibilities
of reform.
The implications of this are two-fold: it sug-
gests that for scholars interested in migration
policies, critical analyses of the state’s positions
must take seriously the many and sometimes
conflicting goals and interests embedded within
policies. Aside from the more obvious issues that
can lead to overt social conflict – for example, job
competition – state policies are likely to be shaped
by a range of other social forces that may have
no apparent connection to migration.
This in turn has implications for efforts towards
change. One of the assumptions commonly held
by people who are critical of the conditions faced
by FDWs is that Singaporean employers are
uncaring and cruel, and that this is somehow
linked to the state’s reticence. This view over-
looks the structural circumstances that shape
people’s decisions for care-giving and the cir-
cumstances surrounding the hiring of the domes-
tic worker, and too quickly pits the interests of
employer and employee against each other. This
unwittingly reproduces the oppositional rela-
tionship set up by precisely the state policies that
are the object of criticism. A closer focus on how
injustices are produced by systemic conditions
opens up the conversation for seeing how the
policies in fact place burdens, albeit different
ones, on employer and employee alike. This in
turn has the potential for inviting ideas about
reform that do not set up zero-sum games
between employers and employees, and may
also encourage more employers to stand in
their favour.
NOTES
(1) There is a rapidly expanding body of work on
foreign care or domestic workers approached
from a variety of perspectives. For our purposes,
the most relevant studies are those on ‘global
care chains’: Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2003),
Hochschild (2000), Yeates (2004).
(2) The coining of this notion is usually attributed to
Johnson (1982) and broadly refers to policies
pursued for export-led industrialisation based
on heavy dependency upon foreign investment.
Popul. Space Place 15, 147–159 (2009)
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Migration and Family Policies in Singapore
Scholarship analysing the role of the state in facil-
itating industrialisation is vast. See, for example,
Amsden (1989), Evans (1995), Wade (1990), Woo-
Cumings (1999).
(3) This notwithstanding, it has to be noted here that
there is some evidence that this norm is beginning
to break down as more institutions for the elderly
are opened in East Asia as well as Singapore. At
the same time, this norm has experienced a
‘revival’ in Europe as the result of the crumbling
of the welfare state. Recent reports in the media
in the UK, for instance, have shown how wide-
spread and costly the practice of intra-family care
of the elderly can be (see http://news.bbc.co.
uk/1/hi/health/7001160.stm, accessed 17 March
2008).
(4) The National Day Rally Speech is delivered by the
Prime Minister before a live audience and telecast
on all public television channels every year, typi-
cally shortly after Singapore’s National Day (9
August). It is a platform for the government to
reveal significant new policies and programmes.
(5) Of these, one talked about this bifurcation as
problematic and urged consideration of low-end
workers as potential long-term migrants; see Ong
(2006). Two other articles discussed how to reduce
Singapore’s dependence on unskilled workers in
the long-term; see Chia (2006a,b).
(6) Employment Pass holders are further divided
into three categories according to their monthly
salaries and professions: P1 (>S$7000); P2 (S$3500–
7000); Q1 (S$2500–3500).
(7) This excludes the roughly 25,000 people who are
on the ‘S Pass’ – mid-level skilled workers, with
technical diploma qualifications, who earn at
least S$1800 per month (Ong, 2006).
(8) There is a third smaller group of workers (25,000
in 2006) who hold the ‘S’ Pass. These are a cate-
gory of Employment Passes given to mid-level
skilled workers, usually with technical diplomas,
for employment in retail, healthcare, and certain
technical jobs: see Ong (2006). While in 2006, the
total number of Employment Pass holders (i.e. P,
Q and S Pass holders) stood at 90,000, by 2007,
according to Li (2007) of The Straits Times, the
number had increased to 110,000. We use the 2006
figures in the text, because there is uncertainty
around the specific breakdown of P and Q Pass
holders versus S Pass holders. Similarly, Li con-
tends that the number of work permit holders
stood at 646,000 by 2007; we use the 2006 figures
above for better comparison with Employment
Pass holders.
(9) Details of rules, regulations and procedures are
drawn from the website of the Singapore Ministry
of Manpower (MOM): http://www.mom.gov.sg
Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
157
(10) Only women are allowed to be Foreign Domestic
Workers. See Chin (1998) for an interesting
discussion of the historical shift from male to
female servants. She argues that the naturalisa-
tion of women as the only possible option for
domestic work happened over time and was rein-
forced by Malaysian state policy.
(11) Employers are eligible for lower rates of levy if
they have a child or grandchild who is a Singa-
pore citizen and below 12 years old; or if they or
their co-residing spouse are 65 years or older, and
at least one person is a Singapore citizen and the
other a permanent resident; or if they are
Singapore citizens who are co-residing with a
parent, parent-in-law, grandparent or grandpar-
ent-in-law who is at least a permanent resident
and 65 years or older. Effectively, the state subsi-
dises families who care for dependents within the
household. We will elaborate on this later in the
paper. For details of concessions, see Ministry of
Manpower (2006b).
(12) We do not have data on whether or how many
such cases are actually processed and approved,
and what the conditions are for approval. For all
intents and purposes, it is likely that foreign
workers are simply given the impression that
they are not allowed to marry locals.
(13) One of the authors of this paper, Teo, argues in
her dissertation that the Singapore state puts ‘the
family’ – with corresponding particular and
limited notions of ‘values’ and ‘traditions’ – at the
centre of its developmentalist goals. The successes
and failures at producing particular ideals around
the family are crucial for understanding the reach
and limits of state legitimacy. The next section
draws primarily from this dissertation work: see
Teo (2005).
(14) Note, for example, that in the MOM’s Press
Release announcing its new measures in October
2006, it begins with the claim that it is responding
to ‘feedback from FDW employers, foreign
domestic workers (FDWs), employment agencies
(EAs) and the general public’ and there is no
mention of NGOs.
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