Reaching Out to a Community of Migrant Workers

Hello! We are a group of NUS students seeking to create spaces for dialogue with migrant workers and to hopefully, inspire and mobilise others to take action to empower the community.

To kick start our project, we first approached several NGOs focused on providing aid to migrant workers. Two of these organisations showed interest in working with us: HealthServe and the Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics (HOME).

Volunteer Orientation @HealthServe

HealthServe seeks to "meet the needs of the migrant workers through the provision of medical care, counseling, case work, social assistance, and other support services." The orientation session proved to be useful as Willy Lau, HealthServe's volunteer manager, provided a brief overview of the challenges faced by their target population: low paid vulnerable migrant workers (who are largely male). Some of these challenges include:

• low wages;

• high agent fees paid in home country;

• language and cultural barriers;

• long working hours;

• high risks of injury as they engage in dangerous work;

• medical insurance may not cover outpatient treatments;

• asymmetrical power structures: employers' can easily cancel a worker's work pass, resulting in repatriation.

However, after the orientation session, the team felt that the organisation's current priority was the recruitment of volunteers for the clinic, especially that of medical professionals, and as such, they seemed less keen on working on short term projects such as ours.

Meeting with HOME

HOME is "dedicated to empowering and supporting migrant workers who find themselves victims of human rights violations and suffer abuse and exploitation." Their target population are foreign domestic workers and other migrant workers. Representatives of the organisation, Jacqueline and Stephaine, shared key issues that make these two target groups vulnerable:

Male Migrant Workers

• Work Site Injury

• Wage-related issues: non-payment of salaries, wage theft (overtime, public holiday pays and kick Backs (workers have to pay money to renew their work permits)

Foreign Domestic Workers

(more vulnerable as they are not covered by the Employment Act in Singapore)

• Verbal & Psychological Abuse

• Food Deprivation (including Malnourishment)

• Physical & Sexual Abuse

• Illegal Deployment (e.g. working for more than one family, working for businesses)`

HOME expressed interest in working with us to embark on our advocacy project. To ensure that the project is mutually beneficial, the team agreed to produce a video for future outreach events.

Our Project

Following our meeting with HOME, the team has decided to target migrant workers, segmented into domestic workers and male migrant workers. While we understand that this may seem like a broad population to target, we see commonalities in the challenges faced, and have chosen to target both groups.

What we'll be working on next:

• Following Jacqueline's and Stephaine's suggestions, the team will be conducting secondary research to have a better understanding about the challenges faced by the migrant workers community.

• Developing a proposal to be sent to HOME including filming dates, subjects for interviews, interview questions and potential ideas for the video.