Balancing responsibilities: A primer on human rights

The termination of Amy Cheong, an officer of the NTUC for a blatantly racist comment on
Facebook is ill-advised. The NTUC must reconsider its decision.
On Sunday last, Ms Cheong, a senior officer of the state-sponsored National Trades
Union Congress, commented unfavourably on the noise issuing from a Malay wedding held
in a HDB void deck. In making her point, she uttered some very unforgiving statements
about our Malay community and imputed various failures to it.
She clearly acted wrongly and insulted many in the Malay community. Judging by the
majority of posts online, she also offended many non-Malay Singaporeans.
Racist comments are always unacceptable and should never be tolerated. When I
lived abroad, it never ceased to both hurt and amaze me that people could utter racist
statements. Often I heard the statement, “F**k off back to where you came from,” and it
always caused me to reflect that most people in the United Kingdom are not originally from
the UK since the indigenous people died out centuries ago.
To say that Ms Cheong made a mistake; acted impetuously; that we are all entitled to
our opinions so long as they don’t colour our dealings with one another, are all true, but
when confronted with behaviour such as was displayed by Ms Cheong, our sense of fairplay,
courtesy, immediately kick-in and we feel we are justified in punishing the guilty one.
No doubt, harmony among the ethnic groups in Singapore is a crucial quality and
should be fought for every step of the way. Our history has made this goal even more
important.
But to sack Ms Cheong is, in the words of that old saying, ‘to take a sledgehammer to
crack a walnut’. And equally important, the episode shows up the failure of policy in two
crucial areas.
The government has consistently told the nation that racial harmony is a desirable
objective, indeed a central factor in nation-building. And instinctively we know this to be so.
Furthermore, over the decades, over almost two centuries of modern Singapore, unaided by
the government, we, the people, did indeed develop a sense of multiracial and multicultural
pluralism.
Proudly, we know that we are a cohesive, pluralistic people. We share one another’s
holidays, we eat one another’s food, we inter-marry, and we speak at least two of our four
major languages.
But, note, that we did these things unaided by government diktat. The government’s
multiracial policies have, at best, attempted to put a gloss on our differences, appear to
decisively deal with disunity, and force us into what sociologist, Nirmala Purushotam,
described as an ‘ascriptive’ racialism, whereby one must fit into the C-M-I-O mould.
 Recall that for years, government policy ignored the two most colourful ethnic groups
who were among the most successful and committed of our people, the Eurasians and the
Peranakan, until they took matters into their own hands and began to carve out a space for
themselves. But, sadly, not before many Eurasians had migrated abroad from a country
which seemed to have little space for them and not before many Peranakan forced
themselves into being Chinese. We were the poorer for it.
Recall also that Dr Purushotam herself was a casualty of state-sponsored ascriptive
multiculturalism when she became the subject of discipline at a local university upon a
complaint that she exposed young students to the ‘dangers’ of Little India.
Underlying the government’s approach to the multiculturalism policy there lay – and
continues to lie – a deeply racist foundation to public policy.
The racist approach was characterised best, and most emphatically, by the first Prime
Minister himself, who was known for his uncompromisingly racist views, often using his
National Day Rally speech and other public utterances to characterise the ethnic groups
according to a self-defined framework of utility. The Malays were lazy, he said, and
untrustworthy. The Indians were fractitious. The Chinese, he told us, were the only group
which possessed the traits desirable for progress in Singapore.
Only after India began to develop in earnest did he appear to amend his views on that
ethnic group. One is entitled to wonder if the immigration policy, that favours immigration
from China and, to a lesser extent, India as opposed to the Nusantara, that is, the Malay
Archipelago, is an expression of this. After all, the proportion of people of Chinese descent
has been growing while those of Malay descent declining, even though Malay fertility
replacement is higher.
So long as the relevant government departments, namely Immigration and Manpower,
decline to publish details of their immigration policies as well as the absolute numbers of
immigrants and workers from the various countries, not to mention Permanent Residence
criteria, the government lays itself open to an accusation of racism in population policy that it
cannot defend.
Policy in respect of self-help groups has also been structured in ethnic terms. Mendaki,
Sinda and CDAC were instituted on the assumption that people are more likely to help
members of their own group than others.
Military recruitment and National Service has, and continues to insult the Malay
community by frequently refusing to enlist or promote Malay servicemen on the grounds that
they are a security threat should we ever enter into conflict with other Malay or Muslim
nations.
Signboards and voicemail messages on government and quasi-government
department answerphones very usually employ only English and Chinese.
 The SAP system in schools favoured one as opposed to the other ethnic groups.
The government is not above playing the communalist card for its own ends. The GRC
system was characterised as being to encourage minority representation in Parliament. In
2000, the Open Singapore Centre published a research paper entitled, Elections in
Singapore: Are They Free and Fair, which I wrote. (It is now out of print.) That research
found that minority representation was not declining.
In late 2011, I shared a forum platform with PAP MP, Alex Yam, of Chua Chu Kang
GRC. I alleged that the GRC system had nothing to do with minority representation but was
designed to entrench the PAP’s stranglehold on Parliament and make it harder for the
alternative parties to effectively participate. To applause from an informed, professional
audience, Mr Yam kept silent.
In the last two years, the former Prime Minister has continued to utter deeply racist
statements against the Malay community, to the concerted and deafening silence of Malay
ministers and Members of Parliament.
So, if, after 53 years, some of our people are still displaying the ugliest traits of
communalism, then we must question whether the initiatives aimed at achieving both multi-
racial harmony as well as courtesy have worked in the face of a racist approach to
policymaking that has characterised the PAP since after it assumed power. I say, ‘after it
assumed power’ because the former Prime Minister sought to position himself as a
multiracial pan-Malaysian until his party consolidated its power after the 1967 General
Elections.
Therefore, in effect, as citizens we can legitimately ask, have the ugliest examples of
racism exhibited by our citizens been aided and abetted by a government that it itself, at its
worst, also a proponent of ugly racism.
We do not here take issue with the nature of Ms Cheong’s views, so thoroughly
unpleasant though they were. We must be fair to ourselves and accept and admit that at the
best of times we all entertain negative views about out-groups: it is a human phenomenon.
But if a senior officer at the heart of a government-linked institution, whose secretary is
a cabinet minister, considers it acceptable to make those views public on a worldwide
platform such as Facebook, then we are entitled to question both if such views are
commomplace at the NTUC and if she felt comfortable expressing those views precisely
because they are commonplace since, as I have suggested above, racist approaches to
policymaking are, themselves, commonplace.
A second failure of policy relates to Ms Cheong’s rights as an employee. The NTUC
announced that it was conducting an inquiry into the affair and would publish a report.
However, before its findings were made public, Ms Cheong was terminated.
 I will say at this point that there was nothing to investigate: Ms Cheong’s statements
were deeply offensive and unbecoming of a public officer. But an employee has a right to a
fair hearing, a right to have her behaviour examined and mitigating circumstances taken into
consideration.
Do we, for example, know whether Ms Cheong was under intolerable pressure in her
personal life? Is she on medication for an emotional condition? Had she just come from a
distressing experience? Did the noise extend to past eleven o’clock pm?
The point is that people make mistakes. They do or say things they should not have
done. They exhibit poor behaviour in the workplace. They don’t match up to the expectations
of their boss.
Our knowledge of human development, of human endeavour, of human limitations call
us to take a rational approach to human mistakes.
In many jurisdictions, particularly those with well-defined rights for workers, labour
legislation mandates a certain level of investigation and retraining for workers who have not
reached the mark expected of them.
In Singapore, the Employment Act does not contain any such provisions. Workers can
be fired at the behest of their employer with little right of reply except a statutory appeal to
the minister. The migrant labour NGOs tell us that this route rarely succeeds.
Workers are entitled to some level of protection. They are entitled to the
acknowledgment that they are fallible, that they sometimes need retraining, that their values
need reorienting. They must be given the chance to improve and employers’ have a duty to
nurture their employees. It goes to the heart of our productivity.
The gap in our legislation means that our workers have little recourse in the face of
arbitrary termination. And it would be a source of irony, were it not so tragic, that the
abridgement of Ms Cheong’s rights as an employee have been carried out by the very
institution set up to safeguard labour rights and to set the marker for good employment
practices.
As we have observed in those countries which consistently top the productivity league
tables, productivity and creativity go hand in hand with a sense of belonging and the
availability of protections that take account of workers’ failings. Ms Cheong should not have
been used as a political football to demonstrate the government’s apparent hard line against
racism.
The response to Ms Cheong’s offensive bevaviour is, unfortunately, a typical example
of the government’s approach to issues surrounding race. We have prosecuted our
multiracial policy by giving it a gloss which bears the semblance of effective harmony without
in fact actually remedying the problem. Respect and equal treatment should be at the heart
of any policy designed to unite people. Until the PAP’s approach to the ethnic groups shifts
from the underpinnings installed by the former Prime Minister, we cannot build a community
that is effectively multiracial and multireligious and nor will we build a workforce that is
secure and to whom retraining and improvement are standard.
The government is in a bind. It is unsure what to do with the episode Ms Cheong has
deservedly created. By sacking her it has highlighted the failures of government policy as
they relate to our people both as employees and as members of ethnic groups. It could have
shown leadership by viewing the issue as an opportunity to revisit our policy, to improve. It
is, after all, in the midst of a National Conversation, is it not?
Instead it has chosen to respond by pretending no problem exists, that the issue is
confined to isolate dindividuals, and then reiterating its time-worn statements of racial
equality, which have been frequently abused for its own purposes.
The Prime Minister is wrong: NTUC did not do the right thing by terminating Amy
Cheong. There is still time to take heed of the sentiments of Amy’s fellow citizens and fellow
workers. Will the NTUC do so?