Neoliberal Governmentality and Low-Wage Migrant Labour in India and Singapore

Abstract

Drawing on a digital ethnography and in-depth interviews conducted with low-wage migrant workers in hyper-precarious working conditions amidst ongoing neoliberal transformations in India and Singapore, this manuscript offers a comparative framework for examining the limits of pandemic communication. Interrogating the ideology of behaviourism that forms the dominant approach, the narratives point to the organizing role of structures as sites of labour exploitation. The exploitative labour conditions constitute the backdrop amidst which the migrant workers negotiate their health and well-being.

Keywords

Culture-centred approach outbreak inequality pandemic migration COVID-19

Panchu had travelled to Bangalore from Piyalsukhia, a remote village in the Jhargram district of West Bengal. In Bangalore, he lived on the outskirts of the city in a makeshift factory structure, along with other workers. On 24 March 2020, when the COVID-19 lockdown was announced in India, Panchu was told by his employer that the makeshift factory structure would be shut down. Worried about how he would get access to food and where he would stay, Panchu quickly collected his clothes and put them in a plastic bag and started walking. He walked with six other migrant workers who had migrated from the same village to the junction bus stop. The buses however were already full of other workers, spilling over from the sides, the back and the top, packed every inch into the bus. He did not know when the next fleet of buses would become available. So he started walking, from Bangalore toward his home in Piyalsukhia. The long walk, a total of 1,450 kilometres, felt safer to him than being stuck in Bangalore, homeless and without guarantee of food and care. Panchu knew that he would be safe only if he could get home. Surrounded by his family, he would at least have access to food and a decent shelter. He described how he walked over 10 days, waiting on the road to rest his feet and then walking again, how his parched throat craved a drop of water and blood started oozing out of his feet. At some junctures of the walk, he felt he would die from the tiredness.

Panchu was among the 50,000 or so internal migrant workers in precarious work across sites of India’s capitalist urban infrastructure who had been expelled into India’s roadways and highways amidst the first national-level COVID-19 lockdown. The unplanned nature of the lockdown, without adequate notice and the manner in which it was carried out within a top-down framework of authoritarian governance, placed low-wage migrant workers in interpenetrating vortices of health risks. These health risks ranged from direct exposure to the novel COVID-19 virus in crowded transports and shelters to accidents, dehydration, hunger, fatigue and depression brought about by the lockdown. Similarly, in Singapore, Rohel shares how he struggled with anxiety and uncertainty during the COVID-19 outbreak, initially living with 15 other workers in a room. He voiced how the lack of adequate infrastructure for migrant worker housing left him feel unprotected and exposed to COVID-19. After an initially effective response to COVID-19 based on contact tracing, outbreaks in dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers in Singapore emerged in the backdrop of the ongoing structural challenges to health and well-being experienced by the workers. The state’s celebratory rhetoric of authoritarian management based on market-driven principles of technocratic efficiency was disrupted through the trajectories of the outbreak, with the state articulating the narrative that the outbreak could not have been foreseen. That the surveillance-based tools of expertise-led pandemic management in Singapore could not foresee (according to the hegemonic state narrative) the pandemic reflects the limits of neoliberal governmentality, rooted in the circulation of efficiency.

India, under a technocratic authoritarian regime, and Singapore both reflect a mode of top-down expertise-led governmentality, constituted amidst the erasure of the voices of the precarious working classes (Dutta, 2017a, 2017b; Kaur, 2020; Kaur, Tan, & Dutta, 2016; Yea, 2017; Yea & Chok, 2018). In this essay, I argue that the precarity of migrant work that forms the substratum of the COVID-19 outbreak is shaped by the structures of exploitation folded into neoliberal capitalism, forming the context within which the health risks of COVID-19 are produced. The trajectories of COVID-19 and the unequal terrains of its impact throw out into the open the carefully tucked away inequalities that have been cultivated, nurtured and circulated by over two decades of neoliberal reforms. Drawing on the culture-centred approach (CCA), I co-construct worker voices at the precarious margins as the basis for health communication as health advocacy. The worker narratives depicted in this article attend to the limits of the ideology of neoliberalism underlying health communication interventions, focusing on individual behaviours and devoid of the structural contexts that constitute behaviours. Culture-centred articulations of solidarities with low-wage migrant workers turn toward collectivizing amidst precarity as the basis for addressing the challenges posed by COVID-19.

The Dominant Approach to COVID-19 Communication

The dominant approach to COVID-19 communication, embedded within the ideology of neoliberal capitalism, frames health solutions as behaviours situated in the realm of the individual, mediated through the market (Dutta, 2005). The individual is constructed as a consumer who secures health through his/her participation in the market, the onus of behaviour change placed on the individual. This deep individualism reflects both the West-centric (read largely US-centric) logic of individualism that constructs behaviour as an individual response, connected to individual beliefs and attitudes, as well as the hegemony of neoliberalism that systematically obfuscates the structural contexts of health. Dominant health communication theories and their applications are constituted within this overarching ideology of individualism, organised around the problematic of the strategic construction of effective messages that would produce the desired behaviours in the individual target audience (Dutta, 2005). The neoliberal turn to health communication further consolidates the capitalist control on health, turning health into a privatised commodity achieved through individual participation in effective behaviours. The industry of health communication solutions is intrinsically tied to the individualisation of health problems and the simultaneous erasure of the structural contexts that shape health. In the context of COVID-19, the hegemonic health communication approaches have foregrounded health messaging, turning attention to strategies for the development of effective messages to produce behaviour change (Crowley et al., 2020; Kowalski & Black, 2021). This behaviourally based approach constructs the individual as the site of negotiating health, separated from the overarching structures that constitute these behaviours and that shape the experiences of health. The emphasis of the dominant approach is on designing health messages based on audience characteristics, with the goal of rendering these messages effective.

Migrant Health

Migrant health is constituted amidst neoliberal processes of capitalist extraction (Dutta, 2017a, 2017b; Dutta & Jamil, 2013). The everyday exploitation of low-wage migrant workers in capitalist systems is legitimised through neoliberal narratives of upward mobility, and this forms the context within which migrant health is negotiated (Dutta, 2017a, 2017b, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c). The nature of migrant work is ‘dirty, dangerous and difficult’, without labour protections and protections of citizenship (Dutta, 2017a, 2017b; Yea, 2017; Yea & Chok, 2018). The precarity of migrant work, therefore, is deeply intertwined with the structural limits of citizenship. In Singapore for instance, migrant workers arrive on short-term work permits, and this leaves the power over migrant workers in the hands of employers. The struggles for migrant health are constituted amidst the lack of labour protections and the absence of pathways of mobility into citizenship. These hyper-precarious conditions that define migrant work are constituted amidst the interplay of capitalist forces of exploitation and authoritarian state structures (Baey & Yeoh, 2015; Bal, 2015; Dutta, 2017a, 2017b; Yea, 2017; Yea & Chok, 2018). The hyper-precarity of migrant work is marked by the lack of labour rights, with ‘limited social benefits and statutory entitlements, job insecurity, low wages, and high risks of ill health’ (Vosko 2006, p. 4). Underlying inequalities in distribution of power shape the contexts within which health is negotiated (Yea & Chok, 2018).

Health is constituted amidst the restrictive migration laws that promote temporariness and preclude pathways of mobility into citizenship. This temporariness of the working condition melds with complex and interconnected webs of brokerage, resulting in the tenuous conditions of low-wage migrant work without labour rights (Baey & Yeoh, 2015, 2018; Lindquist et al., 2012). Lewis et al. (2015) describe these conditions of low-wage migrant labour as ‘hyper precarious’, reflected in the ‘deportability, risk of bodily injury coupled with restricted access to healthcare, and transactional relationships’ (p. 593). The linkages of brokerage, reflected in the complex relationships among the recruitment, training and travel agencies, impose significant front-end investments on low-wage contract-based migrant workers, which are often secured by going into debt, selling the limited ancestral land or selling household possessions (Lian & Rahman, 2006). These debts manifest in forms of bondage that hold low-wage migrant workers to the job, in spite of the poor work conditions.

The condition of ‘unfreedom’ in low-wage migrant work in Singapore (Yea, 2017; Yea & Chok, 2018) is similar to the conditions of unprotected work evident in the construction and similar dirty industries in India. Low-wage migrant workers negotiate the vast power inequalities at worksites, in interplay with the structures of majoritarianism, caste oppression and stigma (Dutta & Kaur-Gill, 2018). The hyper-precarity of low-wage contract-based migrant work is further exacerbated by the individualisation of the risks on the worker, with the absence of systemic infrastructures for workers to address their labour-related needs, the absence of state-based infrastructures directly accessible to workers and the absence of clear policy oversight that holds the employers, dormitories and caterers accountable. Low-wage migrant workers lack access to healthcare, work in conditions that constitute fundamental threats to health and live under health-threatening conditions (Dutta, 2017a, 2017b).

The absence of human rights to health of precarious migrants is evident in the lack of access to health services as well as in the absence of culturally sensitive communicative resources addressing the health needs of migrant workers (Bernadas et al.; Fouskas, 2018). The theorizing of health of low-wage migrant workers in Singapore ought to be situated amidst its ‘smart city model’ marketed globally as a model of labour extraction through techniques of authoritarian disciplining that enable capitalist expansion (Dutta, 2020c; Juego, 2018; Springer, 2012, 2015; Tan, 2012; Tansel, 2017; Thompson, 2019). That the material architecture of smart city Singapore is built on the extracted labour of low-wage migrant workers is communicatively erased, using the tools of ‘trickle down’ narratives and rendering invisible the bodies of low-wage migrant workers from Singapore’s smart urbanisms (Dutta, 2020c).

CCA: Community Voices

The CCA conceptualises health inequalities in relationship to structures, the forms of organizing of societal resources and the corresponding rules and roles that perpetuate the patterns of distribution of material resources (Dutta, 2004a, 2004b; Dutta & de Souza, 2008; Dutta, Elers, & Jayan, 2020; Elers, Jayan, Elers, & Dutta, 2020). Challenging the overarching ideology of the dominant approach to health communication, culture-centred critiques attend to the limits of the individualizing ideology, closely unpacking the cultural values that shape the behaviourally based construction of communication. Challenging the notion that health messages can bring about equality in health outcomes, culture-centred critiques situate health amidst the constitutive structures (Dutta, 2005). The CCA suggests that these structures shape how individuals, households and communities come to understand health and participate in everyday actions in negotiating health (Basu & Dutta, 2011; Dutta, 2004a, 2004b, 2008).

Interpretations of what constitutes health shape the scripts, strategies and actions that individuals, households and communities create to secure health (Dutta, 2008). These interpretations are shaped by culture, the dynamic web of values held in a community and negotiated in relationships and community ties. Cultures are both intergenerational and transformative. Structures depict materiality, expressed in the forms of organizing of politics and economics that determine the distribution of resources in society. Contexts of everyday life at the margins are shaped by the interactions among culture and structure. Culturally embedded values legitimise and reproduce structures; simultaneously, structures shape cultural values and meanings. Agency is the individual and collective capacity to make sense of structures and to participate in actions in negotiating and transforming these structures (Giddens, 1984). In offering a communicative explanation of the inequities in health outcomes that are empirically evidenced at the margins, the CCA theorises that these inequities are produced through communicative inequalities, reflecting the inequalities in the distribution of communication resources in society (both information as well as voice resources) (Dutta, 2008).

To intervene into health inequities then, the CCA co-creates communicative infrastructures for the voices of the margins through practices of solidarity, with an advisory group from the margins identifying the research problem, constructing the research design, and participating in making sense of the data to guide intervention development (Dutta, 2008, 2018c; Dutta et al., 2019). These communicative infrastructures for the voices of the global margins create theoretical and practical registers for intervening into health inequities (Bates et al., 2019; Dutta, 2008, 2018c; Dutta et al., 2019). Theorizing as an expression of subaltern agency co-creates communicative registers for intervening into the unequal structures, building resources for negotiating structures, as well as co-creating advocacy/activist/movement interventions seeking structural transformations (Dutta et al., 2019). Drawing upon the CCA, I ask: How do low-wage migrant workers construct the communicative contexts of the COVID-19 interventions in India and Singapore?

Methods

I draw from two field sites where community–activist–academic teams have been working on co-creating research design, building advocacy interventions and mobilizing for social change, under the umbrella of ongoing interventions co-created by the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE). One of these sites is based in Singapore, an Asian hub of urban capitalist growth and the other site is based in Jhargram district, distributed across largely remote and rural spaces with predominantly indigenous and caste oppressed communities. Whereas Singapore is a destination hub for Asian migration, the villages across Jhargram, with predominantly indigenous and outcaste (dalit) communities, are the feeders of/to internal migration with/in Asia. At both sites, the COVID-19-specific research designed was embedded in a culture-centred intervention on migrant health, with the framework of research designed by an advisory group of low-wage migrant workers (Dutta, 2018a; Dutta et al., 2019). This specific manuscript draws on a digital ethnography combined with in-depth interviews. Since 2012, our team of academics, activists and community researchers have been co-creating an advisory group of low-wage migrant workers. This advisory group has identified the specific problems of health to be studied by drawing on their lived experiences, informed the research design, participated in gathering data, co-analysed the data and co-created a worker-led labour rights campaign ‘Respect our food rights’ (Dutta, 2017a, 2017b).

When the COVID-19 outbreaks emerged in the dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers, the existing advisory group of workers co-created a research design to investigate the outbreak, with the objective of mapping COVID-19-related health solutions. The advisory group designed the in-depth interview protocol, identified participants and created a list of the digital spaces (Facebook pages created by workers) to be examined. The in-depth interviews reported here were deemed to be low risk following university ethics procedures. I have taken the following steps to anonymise worker identity: (a) transcribed the interviews immediately, erasing the audio files immediately after transcription and (b) removed any identifiers from the narrative accounts. I kept detailed notes of interviews where participants felt uncomfortable being recorded.

This manuscript reports from 47 semi-structured interviews with low-wage migrant workers in Singapore conducted in April 2020, and 72 semi-structured interviews with low-wage migrant workers in India conducted between March 2020 and January 2021. The participants for the interviews were identified using snowball sampling, guided theoretically by the principle of co-creating the ‘margins of the margins’ (Dutta, 2018a). In Singapore, I conducted the interviews in Bengali, a mix of Bengali and English, or English, depending on the level of comfort and preference of the participant. The interviews in India were conducted by community researchers working on an existing intervention on migrant health. The interviews were conducted in Bengali, Hindi or a mix of both languages. Data analysis was carried out through line-by-line coding of the interviews, followed by the organizing of the codes into broader themes. The initial themes emergent from the analysis were shared with the advisory group of low-wage migrant workers in India and in Singapore, who made sense of the themes through their lived experiences amidst COVID-19. The advisory group comprising of low-wage migrant workers made sense of the themes, determining the key findings to be reported based on the consideration of the immediate challenges they have been experiencing amidst COVID-19.¹ The findings formed the basis of culture-centred advocacy interventions, resulting in media coverage, policy discourses and public conversations.

Findings

The findings from the in-depth interviews across India and Singapore articulate (a) the state’s COVID-19 response as callous cruelty, (b) repression of voice and (c) preventive behaviour as an impossibility. These themes collectively point to the structures that constitute low-wage migrant work both in Singapore and in India.

Callousness as Cruelty

The participant voices often point to the callousness of COVID-19 management, asking how governments could allow the gargantuan magnitude of cruelty that is scripted into the prevention strategies implemented in spaces of urban living. The narrative accounts voiced by precarious migrant workers disrupt the hegemonic construction of urban mobilities as monolithic solutions to the problems of poor health experienced at the margins. Moreover, they voice the callousness with which prevention responses were crafted, without accountability to precarious migrant workers. Both in India and Singapore, the participants make sense of the COVID-19 policy responses by describing them as cruel, connecting COVID-19 policy to the broader architecture of cruelty underlying urban planning and the exploitation of migrant workers.

Bodru notes, ‘When you see so many of us. There were just so many of us. We were all without shelter, without food, without water. If you wanted to get on a transport, the transport was overcrowded. When you look at that, you know that no one in this country cares about the worker’. That the worker falls outside of the hierarchy of care depicts the reorganisation of the state under the logic of capital. The lack of access to adequate food, water and shelter emerged across the interviews conducted in India. The lack of shelter placed the workers in spaces of exposure to the pandemic. In most instances, the workers voiced their long walk home, often on feet, because of the lack of access to food, water and shelter. Articulates Badal, ‘Many workers died because we just wanted to get home. At least at home, there will be food. In my case, there were 30 of us living in this place and the owner said we could not live there anymore. He did not pay us the pending salary, and we had very little money to buy food’. This experience of being expelled out of the spaces where they sheltered in was voiced by a large number of low-wage migrant workers in India. The act of expelling is tied to the overarching structure of labour exploitation, with large numbers of workers not being paid their wages. This was catalysed by the timing of the lockdown in India, carried out with haste, within the timeframe of a few hours. Monglu shares that he was at work when the supervisor announced that the worksite will be closed, and that the rooms in the factory where the workers stayed will be shut. The urgency created by the lockdown enabled the exploitation of workers, with employers refusing to pay the workers their pending wages as they hit the roads.

Janardan notes, ‘There was no consideration for the condition of the migrant worker. No one sees us. And this is how the lockdown was carried out. In a few hours, everything changed. I remember just starting to hear things from other workers about COVID-19. I had gone to work, and then the owner said, work will be closed, and the factory where we stay will be shut down’.’ The accelerated speed of the implementation introduced health challenges and exacerbated them. The invisibility of low-wage migrant workers in the everyday context of urban organizing of spaces is tied to their invisibility from the state’s regulatory response to the pandemic. Nokul shares that for most workers, this cruelty is a ‘part of life and work that workers come to accept’. This notion of workers accepting their plight is voiced by Holodhor, ‘We have to accept that the worker does not matter. Who will care for the worker?’

Similarly, Shaifuddin, who works with a sub-contractor in Singapore, notes that the state does not care about workers. Referring to the state’s response in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak in dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers, he notes, ‘How can they be so cruel [referring to the employer] and put so many workers in one room? This only happens because the MOM [Ministry of Manpower] allows it to happen like this. There are no checks into the conditions of the dormitory. The people that come to check have an understanding with the owner of the dormitory. So they check only from the gate and leave’. They articulate the ways in which the outbreak response was unplanned, making visible the gaps between the lived experiences of the workers and the state’s rhetoric of ‘smart’ pandemic response. The notion of effective planning circulated in state propaganda, when seen from the vantage point of low-wage migrant workers, is disrupted.

Repression of Voice

The callousness of the organizing structures of migrant labour is systematically erased through the erasure of the voices of low-wage migrant workers. Participants in India and Singapore foreground the everyday interactions, workplace processes and state policies that constitute this erasure. Shaheen, a low-wage migrant worker in Singapore, notes that ‘the worker cannot talk about these things here. We live in fear of being deported. The supervisor will threaten to deport. So we live in that fear’. The fear of being deported is articulated across interviews conducted in Singapore. This is what Bashir has to share, ‘Who will listen to the voice of the worker? You tell me, does the worker have any right to say anything? He will suffer the pain every day and go to bed in pain. The worker can’t speak’. In the context of the COVID-19 outbreak in dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers, participants noted that they felt scared to discuss openly the poor housing situation.

One of the participants Rothin shared with me his post on a Facebook group for low-wage migrant workers. He shared that even posting about the challenges with the living condition in the dormitory could get a worker into trouble. He noted,

There are the employers on Facebook and their people are monitoring what the workers are saying. A number of us have been threatened with deportation. When I shared about the poor condition of my living arrangement, some accounts started threatening me, asking for my details. I was very scared.

Participants note that workers often are scared to say anything about their poor living conditions. They point out the verbal abuse that is thrown at workers. The repressive climate is perpetuated by infrastructures of surveillance. Participants note that the surveillance has heightened, with strong police and security presence in the dormitories since the outbreak.

In my participant observations of interactions on worker-led Facebook pages, I noted the communicative constructions of tracking in instances when workers voiced their concerns about health and well-being. In response to Rothin’s post on a public Facebook group that emerged for addressing migrant worker needs amidst COVID-19, a number of Facebook users on the page asked for his details. He reads this is as the culture of surveillance that keeps track of low-wage migrant workers in Singapore. Indeed, various technologies of surveillance are deployed in Singapore to monitor, discipline and control low-wage migrant workers. The heavily policed streets of Little India where the workers spend their Sundays (the off day), the cameras on the streets and the floodlights placed across Little India depict this culture of surveillance. Jayanta shares that he has to be careful of what he says on Facebook because his supervisor had asked him questions about his Facebook activities. Even as a number of workers spoke up on digital platforms that emerged as spaces for articulating the needs of migrant workers in conversations with Singaporeans, they were often harassed for their articulations, accused of making up stories and questioned about the veracity of their accounts. This is voiced by Nakul, ‘Who will listen to what the worker has to say? These poor conditions in the dormitory, we have been raising the issue for many years. Has anyone cared to listen to the workers?’ That the poor housing, with many workers cramped into rooms lacking adequate ventilation, has been consistently voiced by the workers emerges across the accounts. That the worker voices are silenced forms the backdrop of the outbreak. The participants note that the conditions in the dormitories have not changed because worker voices have not been listened to. Nakul further notes that the outbreak would have been prevented had the dormitories been built with adequate space and ventilation for the workers. However, unless in emergencies such as the outbreak, the living conditions of the workers are not really the priority of the state.

Fakru discusses the fear produced by the surveillance. I had started a conversation with Fakru before he was moved to a makeshift arrangement for COVID-19 positive workers. He points to the surveillance in the makeshift arrangements that were made for the workers amidst the outbreak in the dormitories. There were security guards in the makeshift spaces, and Fakru notes that he felt scared to say anything. For almost a month, we did not communicate with each other as Fakru was very scared that he was being watched. Similarly, Majidul shared that the toilets in his dormitory were unhygienic. He put me on a video call to walk me through the toilet. For almost two weeks, I did not hear back from him. I worried that he had been seen making the video call. He later shared with me that he had gotten scared after the video call, as he felt there were some workers who had been asked to surveil.

The sense of not having a voice is shared by migrant workers in India. They note how their voices have been silenced. Pointing out that workers have nowhere to go to voice their grievances, suggests Bidyut, ‘Did the Modi government think of the migrant workers when the lockdown was declared? Did anyone ask the migrant workers? Did the government that claims so many things about progress even consider, what will happen to the migrant workers?’ The lack of voice is reiterated in a number of interviews. Shares Lalan, ‘Where can the worker go to express his needs? Whom will he talk to? Where will he go to voice his concerns?’ The participants share that the exploitative economy of India is made visible amidst COVID-19, with the exploitation of workers being perpetuated through the erasure of their voices. Points out Jeevan, ‘For many years, workers have no voice. Workers work in the construction areas. We do not get paid properly. There is no adequate housing. The worker can go hungry for many days. He can’t do anything because he does not have a voice.’ The hardships experienced by the workers amidst the lockdown are brought about by the erasure of workers’ voice.

Prevention as Impossibility

The participants voice the impossibility of practising the preventive regulations imposed by the state. Their articulations conceptualise COVID-19 prevention as an impossibility, embedded within the structural contexts that are intertwined with regulatory policies imposed by the state. At the precarious margins of neoliberal societies, the state-imposed preventive frameworks emerge as sites of exposure to COVID-19. This contradiction between the aggressive imposition of a top-down regulatory framework by an authoritarian state and the impossibility of practising the imposed preventive behaviours is reiterated throughout the interviews. The accounts narrate the ways in which the lack of voice of low-wage migrant workers in the COVID-19 policy response result in policy responses that exacerbate the likelihood of exposure to COVID-19. The paradox of COVID-19 prevention imposed within authoritarian structures lies precisely in the health risks that are intertwined with the preventive framework. In Singapore, low-wage migrant workers were restricted to the dormitory and were prevented from moving outside of the dormitory room. This resulted in large numbers of workers that were confined in the room.

Notes Bashir, ‘How can any worker be safe from COVID-19? When you have so many workers in one room. I can’t even get out of the room. So many of us are all in the same room.’ This is reiterated by Rasul, ‘When the circuit breaker was announced and we have not been allowed to leave the room. Every worker has to stay in the room. So now in the room, there are so many workers. Usually, most of us are out during the day. Now the room is much more crowded than usual.’ The state’s policy response that low-wage migrant workers stay in the room contributed to the crowded conditions in the rooms. On a similar note, shares Makbool, ‘There are 18 of us all in the same room. All brothers are staying in the room throughout the day. It is hard to breathe in here, and there is no space in the room. With so many of us in the room, how can a worker keep a distance?’

Moreover, the participants note the uncertainty around the response strategy being implemented in the dormitories. They share that even amidst the circuit breaker, as workers have been ordered to stay in the room, some workers in the room are going out to work. Saheb points out, ‘Some brothers in the room are going to work. They increase our chances of becoming infected. How can some workers still go out to work?’ The participants express anxiety around some of the workers having to go to work and then returning to a crowded room. Moreover, they point to the absence of communication around the response strategy and management. This is shared by Kaseem, ‘The dorm owner never told us why we were being moved. Sometimes, the workers are moved from one room to another. New workers are brought into the room. But there is no explanation of what is going on. This causes a lot of stress for me.’

In India, the implementation of the lockdown without any warning meant that for most workers, basic ingredients of health such as food and shelter disappeared within a few hours. The large number of workers who found themselves on the highways trying to get home found themselves in heavily crowded conditions. This is shared by Dilbar, ‘All of us were trying to get back home. But there was no transport available. When the private buses became available, there were too many of us at the bus stand. The buses were crowded with people. How could a worker not be infected you tell me.’ Another migrant worker, Babulal shares, ‘The buses were filled with workers. Inside and outside. There was no place to go’. The condition of the crowded buses was voiced by a number of participants. -Arul shared, ‘There is no way I can get home. Many brothers have started walking. I thought about that but then stayed back. This place where I am staying is crowded with so many of us. That is how the virus spreads’. The crowded living conditions for low-wage migrant workers made it impossible to practise preventive behaviours. Many of the make-shift arrangements for housing low-wage migrant workers were unhygienic and health- threatening. Workers referred to instances of deaths because of snakebite in the makeshift housing. Others pointed out that the makeshift housing lacked clean water and sanitation facilities. A number of participants noted the lack of supply of water and soap to wash hands. Shared Jakir, ‘How can I wash my hand regularly? There is no water to drink even’. Multiple participants noted the impossibility of health amidst the lockdown because of the very nature of the lockdown and its implementation. They pointed out that the walk home seriously threatened the health and well-being of many workers, with workers dying on the journey home. Also, when they reached home, they often brought the COVID-19 infection with them into their communities.

Discussion

Over three decades of aggressive neoliberal reforms pursued across the globe constitute the backdrop against which COVID-19-related inequalities play out (Dutta, 2016; Dutta, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c; Team & Manderson, 2020). Whereas the neoliberal reforms were initiated in India in the 1980s, accelerating through the 1990s, Singapore’s version of neoliberalism finds its roots in the 1970s, predating the neoliberal transformations across most of the globe. The neoliberal reforms introduced in both India and Singapore foreground the logic of the free market, attacking the welfare function of the state, attacking the resistive capacity of unions, criminalizing worker collectivisation and selling a version of Asian development that serves the interests of private capital. The narrative of Asian development and re-turn of the Asian century that occupies discursive spaces actively works to erase the extreme forms of labour exploitation that form the infrastructures of Asian development (Dutta, 2016, 2018b, 2019a, 2019b; see Kong 2018; Kong & Woods, 2018 for examples of the propaganda that props up the Asian smart city). Singapore’s reputation and ranking as the futuristic sustainable city, ranked as the most sustainable city in Asia, is built on the exploited labour of low-wage migrant labour from across Asia.

The pathway of neoliberal development pursued in India centres market fundamentalism tied to accelerated urbanisation. The ‘Singapore model’ of development with its narrative of leapfrogging growth offers a vital register for India’s growth-driven economy (Pow, 2014). As this manuscript demonstrates, the model of development pursued aggressively in India and Singapore works through the exploitation and repression of low-wage migrant workers. The ‘model of development’ punctuated by Singapore as the vision for India’s future erases the interplays of capitalist exploitation and authoritarian management (Dutta, 2018b, 2019a, 2019b; Dutta & Kaur-Gill, 2018). The Asian imaginary of development that flows through India and Singapore capitalises the extreme exploitation of low-wage migrant workers, without rights, and mediated by a middle class civil society embedded in a relationship of accommodation with the authoritarian state (Koh, Wee, Goh, & Yeoh, 2017; Lyons, 2005). This exploitation is thrown into the open by the COVID-19 crisis. The culture-centred articulations by the workers render visible the extreme threats to health and well-being that are perpetuated through the neoliberal organizing of labour exploitation.

Health communication in addressing the pandemic takes the form of advocacy and activism that is directed at transforming the unhealthy structures (Dutta, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c). The poor conditions of living that emerge as serious threats to health amidst the pandemic are constituted by the lack of labour rights and the attack of authoritarian neoliberalism on the collective organizing capacity of labour. In this backdrop, the work of communication in securing the health of low-wage migrant workers turns to collectivisation. Communication as organizing unions that demand the fundamental labour rights, decent wages and decent living conditions for workers lies at the heart of addressing the risks of the pandemic. The narrative accounts depict the ways in which the preventive policy framework imposed by a technocratic state organised in the principles of authoritarianism exacerbates the risks of COVID-19 exposure for workers. The erasure of worker voices, the absence of voice infrastructures for workers and the absence of consultation with workers translate into policies that place workers directly into the pathways of COVID-19 exposure. The vulnerability of workers to the risks of COVID-19 exposure is shaped by the ongoing exploitation of workers in Asian capitalism.

The digital ethnography and interviews guided by the conceptual framework of the CCA foreground the interplays of structure and agency. Structure shapes the context within which pandemic prevention policies are experienced by low-wage migrant workers in India and Singapore. Preventive health behaviours such as physical distancing are constituted by the overarching structures of work and living. For low-wage migrant workers, the poor conditions of housing shaped the contours of distancing behaviours. Physical distancing behaviours became impossible amidst the state-mandated lockdown policies both in India and in Singapore. Moreover, the state’s preventive policy response further exacerbated the impossibility of the behaviour. Amidst the struggles with practising everyday health behaviours, workers enact their individual and collective agency in looking after one another, and in creating spaces of mutuality.

This manuscript attends to the limits of authoritarian response in pandemic management. Narrative accounts celebrating the power of authoritarian responses to manage pandemics fail to attend to the failures written into the structures of authoritarian management. Those at the ‘margins of the margins’ of neoliberal economies bear the burdens of these failures. Without the presence of voice infrastructures for migrant workers negotiating hyper-precarity, state-directed COVID-19 prevention interventions create conditions that directly threaten their health. A culture-centered approach to pandemic communication envisions the work of health communication as building solidarity with low-wage migrant workers to bring about structural transformation.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Note

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