S’pore depends on migrant workers. Why do we accept conditions we would never tolerate ourselves?

Everywhere you look in Singapore right now, something is being built.

Roads are dug up for new cabling works. Two new MRT lines and three extension lines are under construction. HDB alone has almost 130 ongoing housing projects. Meanwhile, the mammoth Changi Airport Terminal 5 is under way, the 21.5km North-South Corridor is taking shape and the 20-year, four-phase Tuas Port continues its massive expansion into the 2040s.

Singapore is in the middle of an extraordinary building surge – an infrastructure “supercycle” that the Building and Construction Authority expects will keep construction demand elevated at between $47 billion and $53 billion this year.

Singapore has rarely attempted to build so much, so quickly and on so many fronts at once.

Its reliance on migrant workers to make all of this happen – quickly and affordably – is also unprecedented. The country has nearly half a million migrant workers in the construction, marine shipyard and process industries, the majority of them in construction. The number of construction workers has increased by almost 40 per cent in the past five years as Singapore races to complete major infrastructure projects delayed by the pandemic.

At 1.22 million, the number of Work Permit holders – from construction, cleaning, manufacturing to domestic helpers – is now at a record high. That is half the size of Singapore’s citizen and permanent resident labour force.

A workforce of that scale is no longer peripheral to Singapore society. And yet, we still manage migrant labour as though it were temporary, despite it having become indispensable to our economy and success. 

That debate resurfaced last week during Singapore’s latest United Nations human rights review in Geneva.

Countries reviewing Singapore urged it to strengthen protections for migrant workers. In a joint submission to the UN’s Universal Periodic Review process, which takes place once every five years, Singapore’s two stalwart migrant worker advocacy groups – the Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics (HOME) and Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2) – argued that despite reforms after Covid-19, many of the deeper structural problems within Singapore’s labour system have persisted.

The report highlighted familiar concerns: recruitment debt, excessive overtime, barriers to changing employers, inadequate protections for injured workers, unsafe transport and the immense power employers still wield over workers’ housing, immigration status and livelihoods.

None of these criticisms are new. Singapore has debated migrant worker welfare for decades.

Covid reckoning

Covid-19 forced us to confront the issue more directly, when dormitory outbreaks exposed overcrowded living conditions and the deep social separation between migrant workers and the rest of the population. 

At the time, there was widespread talk about reducing dependence on cheap labour, redesigning the economy and accelerating productivity improvements.

Instead, the opposite has largely happened.

We doubled down on the same labour model, shortening recruitment timelines and widening source countries to meet acute labour demand.

Singapore clearly cannot build what it wants to build without migrant workers. The question is no longer whether the country depends on them, but what obligations follow from that dependence.

We have repeatedly treated migrant-worker flashpoints as isolated operational problems rather than symptoms of a deeper structural relationship with low-wage labour. After the 2013 Little India riot came tighter alcohol restrictions. After Covid-19 came upgraded dormitories. But the broader question – what place migrant workers are meant to occupy within Singapore society – remains unresolved.

The reality Singapore has avoided confronting is this: If the country is going to become even more reliant on migrant labour, can it continue treating migrant workers as a permanently transient class existing at the edges of society, even as their numbers grow?

This is not simply a moral question but also an economic one.

Singapore’s economic success has long rested partly on a managed labour model that keeps costs low through a heavy reliance on migrant workers. Cheap labour has helped keep housing affordable and infrastructure projects moving quickly.

The foreign worker levy was introduced in 1982 as a mechanism to control the inflow of migrant labour, protect local wages and encourage productivity. Over time, however, it has also become a major revenue stream for the state.

The Government collected more than $6 billion in such levies in 2024. This year, the figure is projected to hit $7 billion, according to HOME. It will rise further when levies increase again from 2028.

It is a startling figure that complicates the way Singapore frames the migrant worker debate.

Whenever the topic surfaces, the discussion often quickly narrows to whether ordinary Singaporeans are willing to pay more for housing, cleaning services and construction.

But this presents what might be a false binary – as though the only options are either maintaining the status quo or forcing households and businesses to absorb the full cost of reform.

Much less attention is paid to the fact that the state already collects billions annually from the labour system itself that have gone to fund public expenditures including our CDC vouchers and assistance for low-income families.

The levy – typically between $250 and $950 per month in commercial sectors – is paid by employers, not workers. But economically, it inevitably shapes wages because companies factor it into the total cost of hiring each worker. Salaries are suppressed as employers argue they are already paying levies, accommodation and medical insurance.

The result is a system where the worker becomes something to optimise for maximum output.

If a company pays a fixed monthly levy regardless of whether a cleaner works eight hours or 14, there is an obvious incentive to squeeze as much productivity and labour out of each worker as possible.

In their UN submission, HOME and TWC2 cited one case in 2024 involving a construction worker clocking 168 overtime hours in a single month – more than double the legal cap. Yet only one employer in the construction industry has been convicted in the past three years for breaching overtime rules.

In the name of productivity

Singapore likes to describe the levy as a productivity tool. In practice, parts of the system can sometimes incentivise the opposite: extracting more labour from fewer workers instead of redesigning work fundamentally.

There are undoubtedly exploitative employers. But there are also structural incentives that push companies towards cost minimisation at almost every stage.

Contractors compete aggressively on price. Developers, town councils and public agencies seek lower-cost bids. Consumers expect affordable housing, cheap services and rapid delivery. Everyone squeezes the layer beneath them.

At the very bottom sits the migrant worker.

And yet there is another possibility Singapore rarely discusses: Cheap labour may itself have become part of the productivity problem.

Economists have long warned that easy access to cheap labour can suppress innovation and mechanisation by making labour-intensive practices artificially affordable. In sectors like cleaning and construction, productivity growth may have slowed precisely because the economy has become too accustomed to solving manpower shortages through imported labour rather than fundamentally redesigning workflows.

Double standards

The irony is that Singapore has, in many areas, some of the world’s strongest labour protections and workplace expectations – but largely for citizens and higher-skilled workers.

Professionals expect annual leave, medical benefits, workplace safety protections, HR grievance systems and increasingly, mental wellness support. Younger Singaporeans entering the workforce openly discuss burnout, boundaries and toxic work culture. Flexible work arrangements are now mainstream enough that companies advertise them as recruitment perks.

But migrant workers operate under an entirely different labour reality.

Many remain heavily tied to their employers because changing jobs can be difficult without employer consent. Their housing is tied to their employment. Their right to remain in Singapore is tied to their employment. If conflicts arise, many fear repatriation before disputes are properly resolved.

This imbalance shapes behaviour long before abuse even occurs.

Workers who owe large recruitment debts are unlikely to challenge unpaid overtime or poor conditions. Workers supporting families back home are unlikely to report employers if doing so jeopardises their income. Workers whose immigration status depends on their employer are unlikely to speak freely.

A recent study by the Institute of Mental Health and the National University of Singapore found symptoms of anxiety and depression among migrant workers and migrant domestic workers were strongly linked to long working hours, lack of rest days and fears of job loss. Many avoided seeking help because they worried employers might send them home if they disclosed emotional distress.

One uncomfortable truth about Singapore is that we have developed an emotional distance from the people whose labour sustains much of the country’s physical infrastructure.

We admire expatriates in finance, law and technology. We talk enthusiastically about attracting global talent and being a world-class cosmopolitan city. We pay lip service to diversity, but are often far more comfortable with some kinds of foreigners than others.

Low-wage migrant workers are often treated less as fellow members of society than as a transient workforce to be socially managed and kept at arm’s length.

We want them to clean our estates and build our condominiums, but we do not necessarily want them congregating near our homes, sharing our public spaces or becoming too visible in daily life.

This hierarchy is most obvious in how we shunt many of them to dormitories on the fringes of the island in places like Tuas and Loyang, creating punishing daily commutes that make little sense from an operational standpoint but make perfect sense from a segregation standpoint.

For all our obsession with efficiency, Singapore has designed a labour system that spends hours moving workers back and forth across the island partly because many Singaporeans are uncomfortable living too closely alongside them.

Perhaps a more mature conversation would involve integrating smaller-scale worker housing closer to worksites and residential areas. That would almost certainly provoke resistance, as it did in Serangoon Gardens in 2008. Yet it could also reduce commuting fatigue, improve productivity and slowly chip away at the invisible social barriers Singapore has constructed around low-wage labour.

Another possible area for reform is greater labour mobility within the migrant worker system itself.

Singapore does not need a completely open labour system, but reducing workers’ dependence on a single employer – through easier transfers between companies, temporary bridging arrangements during disputes or stronger anti-retaliation protections – could lessen some of the precarity workers currently face.

Systems generally function better when workers are not trapped with bad employers and companies are forced to compete harder to retain labour.

But the lowest hanging fruit is reforming the recruitment system itself. It is probably the most politically achievable and economically manageable adjustment available, and one that would signal Singapore’s seriousness about reducing exploitation.

Workers should not have to mortgage family land or borrow years of income simply to secure jobs here. Stronger regulation of recruitment agents and greater employer responsibility for hiring costs would be a meaningful start.

The trade-offs

Any restructuring will involve trade-offs: better welfare costs money; safer transport is more expensive than ferrying workers on open lorries; shorter working hours may require more manpower.

But again, it would be too simplistic to frame the issue purely as a binary between humane treatment and economic competitiveness.

Other advanced economies rely far more heavily on mechanisation and operational redesign in areas like cleaning, waste management and construction. Singapore has talked about such shifts for decades. Yet the availability of low-cost labour has often reduced the urgency to fundamentally rethink how work is organised.

The harder question, perhaps, is how far Singaporeans themselves are prepared to go.

Are Singaporeans truly ready to accept equal treatment between local and migrant workers in terms of wages, working hours and protections?

Probably not fully – at least not yet.

Singapore’s affordability, speed and efficiency have long depended partly on labour conditions many citizens would never tolerate for themselves.

This is not unique to Singapore. Gulf cities, Hong Kong and even parts of Europe and North America rely heavily on low-wage migrant labour to sustain infrastructure, logistics and domestic work.

But Singapore holds itself to a particularly high standard. It prides itself not merely on being wealthy, but fair, rational and exceptionally well governed.

That self-image matters because it shapes the kind of society Singapore believes itself to be.

The goal does not have to be immediate parity in every area. But surely it should include some baseline principles: safer transport, stronger wage protections, genuine access to healthcare, reasonable rest, better grievance mechanisms and less dependence on employer goodwill for basic dignity.

Some reforms will almost certainly cost more. You may have to wait longer for your Build-to-Order flat. Your service and conservancy fees may go up.

But perhaps that is also what maturity looks like for a wealthy society: recognising that efficiency is not the only measure of success, and that the true test of a First World nation is not merely how fast it builds, but how it treats the people building it.