Read on Twitter
Thread/ As we begin to demand better dorm conditions and other structural changes to the migrant worker regime in Singapore, perhaps we should also open the door to articulating demands for transitional justice arising from years of modern slavery and COVID-19 :
1/ Since the state is responsible for not taking action for dorm conditions, how about a payment to all MWs for the harm done to the mental health arising from the need for an extreme lockdown order in poor living conditions.
2/ For those who have contracted COVID-19, how about an additional payment, with an amount sufficient to cover any long-term conditions that might arise. If insurance companies are handing out free COVID-19 coverage, why can't MWs get something like that too.
3/ Calculate how much wages have been depressed and return that differential that has been captured as profit or collected in foreign worker levy, and in addition sanction employers to return stolen wages.
4/ Such schemes are usually funded by acollective pool. In our case, it should be State and employers. There's much complexity to working out a scheme like that - for a start it challenges the line between individual and collective responsibility by the State/employers/us.
5/ Reparations are usually not only financial, they come in other forms, e.g. (sincere) apologies+commitments, open assemblies etc. In most cases of transitional justice people don't want money, no amount of it is enough. They want to end their marginalisation & commodification.
6/ It's important therefore to think about the inclusion of MWs into this process. But the challenge is of course the obstacles they face to speaking up and participating. And I think an need to address their immediate precarity in one form or another,....
7/...crucial precisely because of how our MW population is MADE transient by the State. I'm concerned that more MWs (esp. those whose faced particularly egregious abuses) will leave or be made to leave, and that it becomes more difficult to do justice across national boundaries.
8/ Current legal processes, criminal or civil, are insufficient to address injustice faced for above reasons. They pose their own obstacles to access, especially for migrants. They are slow and opaque. And when the state is criminal, appealing to its own system seems foolish.
9/ Hence I do think we need to make that start in making demands for reparations. Reparations alone might not change long-term outcomes in cases of institutionalised human rights abuse, but such demands for justice can draw the link between an abusive past and a just future.
10/ Having an actual scheme allow us to move past insincere apologies by the State, empty promises to do better. And get commitments to reform. Open discussions about reparations can be a lens to interrogate our society's participation in and the orthodoxy of this economic model.
11/ To actually critically tell the story of injustices that have been done. It might open the conversation to a more justice-centered society, and make us take responsibility for the harm done to other minoritised and marginalised communities.
12/ In the US, Ta-Nehisi Coates opened the door to that conversation about reparations with an watershed essay, building on the work of others before. It led to a congressional hearing on reparations, which you can read about here: https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/6/20/18692949/congress-reparations-slavery-discrimination-hr-40-coates-glover
13/ Well I'm not an optimist. But no reason not to try, even if watered down. It must be that thinking along such lines will become crucial to remaking our society and our world post COVID-19. If we fail to imagine, then we set ourselves up to perpetuate the injustice we live in.
Keen to hear what everyone thinks.
