For most of Singapore society, the transport system has been continuously transformed for them to enjoy safe and comfortable access to different parts of the country—an ever-expanding Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) network, the compulsory implementation of seats-belts in school buses, and even USB charging ports have been added to the country's latest fleet of public buses. However, for the majority of male migrant workers in Singapore, they remain transported on the cargo decks of goods vehicles (i.e. trucks and lorries) without proper seats, adequate shelter, and any form of safety restraint. Despite the injuries and fatalities resulting from this precarious form of transportation, it continues to be normalised and justified for migrant workers. 

Below is a timeline of this discriminatory transport practice. It is sortable by major lorry accidents, legislative measures, pushback, and public action—all of which have taken place since the year 2000, including a landmark legislative amendment in 1987. The remainder of this section analyses the ways in which a systemic disregard for migrant lives is expressed through the State’s continued refusal to abolish the use of goods vehicles to transport migrant workers. 

As seen in the timeline, any concern for the transport safety of migrant workers only gains traction in public discourse after a series of tragic accidents. Yet, even then, the public’s concern is drowned out by a State-led apathy towards migrant deaths. When we listen to the minister’s responses to these accidents, we hear more about market constraints than human dignity; we learn that the "acute pain" of an industry necessarily trumps the anguish and trauma following a worker’s death². While the transportation of passengers on goods vehicles is banned under the Road Traffic Act, exceptions are made for those either “in the employment of the owner or hirer of the vehicle and is proceeding on his master’s business”³ [emphasis ours] or in need of emergency medical services—what is permitted as an emergency mode of transport is ironically normalised as an everyday experience for migrant workers.

As Christoper Tan, Senior Transport Correspondent at The Straits Times, explains, “[t]he conditional ruling is seen as a business-friendly move, so that companies can acquire or rent just one vehicle to ferry both workers and work equipment.”⁴ A significant proportion of male migrant workers are thus legally exempted from basic transport safety because the use of goods vehicles to transport them “help[s] companies control business costs and be operationally flexible.”⁵ In valorizing the profit motive at the expense of migrant lives, the State’s persistent justification for using lorries to transport workers is a practice of dehumanisation.

Over the years, various transport ministers have asserted that regulations are in place to make goods vehicles safe for the transport of workers, while at the same time justifying the cost benefits of this practice. These measures typically focus on improving the safety structure of the cargo deck, such as installing canopies and higher side-railings:

A “Safer” Cargo Deck

But as explained by Dr. Amy Khor, then Senior Minister of State for Transport, “commercially available lorries are not designed for seat belts to be installed in the rear deck and the floorboards in the rear deck might not be sufficiently strong to keep the seatbelts anchored in the event of an accident.”⁷ [emphasis ours] The incompatibility between seat-belts and the cargo deck should demonstrate that goods vehicles are fundamentally unsuitable for the transportation of human passengers. However, government and industrial authorities have sought to work around the structural limitations of lorries with the piecemeal installation of canopies and side-railings. The superficiality of these measures is underscored when one considers that canopies and side-railings do not reduce the physical impact experienced by workers during a collision, let alone prevent them from being thrown against each other. At best, canopies shelter workers from the rain and railings are something to hang on to. But as it stands, it does little to protect workers from the precarity of the status quo.

Despite the claim that these measures were borne out of the Workgroup’s “thorough” and “careful” review⁸, the manner in which workers are harmed by lorry-related accidents has not changed. Our timeline shows that the accidents which took place from 2012⁹ onwards still include workers being flung out of the vehicle or crushed by the impact upon collision. As Dr. Stephanie Chok argues, “[m]odifying spaces not meant for transporting humans is not innovation to be welcomed—it is an attempt to be ‘cost-effective’.”¹⁰ Compared to actual safety devices like seat-belts and airbags, canopies and side-railings are merely perfunctory measures that disguise the cargo deck as a safer passenger space. 

Beyond feeble attempts at improving the design of goods vehicles, government authorities have also made the “errant” driver a key target of their enforcement measures—reviewing driving qualifications and speed limits, educating drivers about road safety, and imposing stiffer punishments for driver-liable offences. 

Take for instance the penalty framework which was implemented in 2009 following the Workgroup’s review:

The “Errant” & “Reckless” Driver

This framework and state rhetoric penalise lorry drivers — usually contract drivers or migrant workers themselves — for the manner in which workers are transported, even though decisions about how to transport workers are typically made by worksite supervisors and employers. This punitive mode of regulation displaces the responsibility for transport-related deaths and injuries onto the conscience of a driver who has little control over their labour circumstances. 

Ripon Chowdhury, a Bangladeshi poet and shipyard quality controller, explains that many lorry drivers are overworked and expected to adhere to unreasonable transport schedules¹¹. Having to make multiple trips within a limited span of time, these drivers are forced to drive quickly and manage risky manoeuvres lest they be punished for being late. Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics (HOME) has likewise mentioned that since the resumption of construction, marine, and process work in 2021, drivers have reported that they are driving for an average of 13 to 16 hours everyday¹². The chronic fatigue that results from these extreme working hours predisposes drivers to low concentration levels and carelessness when driving. Thus, the so-called “errant driver” is, in reality, oftentimes an overworked and disempowered worker, whose entanglement with exploitative labour conditions heightens the risk of road accidents. Unless the safety campaigns initiated by the State can hold managerial positions accountable for hectic transport schedules and extreme productivity targets, workers and drivers will continue to be subjected to hazardous transport schedules. 

Following two lorry accidents in June 2010, which caused 3 fatalities and 54 injuries, debates around the transport practice were reignited once again with many members of Parliament and civil society arguing for bolder safety regulations. Teo Ser Luck, then Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Minister of Transport, responded to these renewed concerns with the proposal that one “should allow the measures to improve workers' safety on lorries to take effect and study their effectiveness before concluding that they are insufficient and going for a ban."¹³ Workers continue to be dehumanised, injured, and killed under the same cruel transport system that took the lives of Li Xian Long, Li Jia Jun, and Qiu Min Jun - who all died in the same accident. It was only in 2021 when the government conceded that, “[f]rom a road safety perspective, it will be ideal for lorries not to carry any passengers in their rear decks.”¹⁴ That being said, this concession has yet to translate into the abolishment of the practice because of the “practical” and “operational” inconvenience it poses to businesses. 

The government’s overall response to the lorry-related deaths of migrant workers has thus been both dissonant and disconcerting. Even as it is acknowledged that a single death or a single injury is “still one too many”¹⁵, we are told that any further protection of these migrant lives will hinder the completion of “various building projects, from BTOs to MRTs to nursing homes and hospitals.”¹⁶ The State frames the loss of migrant lives within a scarcity mindset to suggest that the precarious conditions of migrant labour, while unfortunate, have to be tolerated for the country’s urban development. This implies that in an environment of scarcity, society has to enclose resources and prioritise certain groups of people over others—a line of reasoning that immediately undermines any imperative for redistribution and care. While recent arguments for the lorry transport practice have cited the COVID-19 pandemic as a reason to prioritise operational flexibility and economic efficiency, a look into earlier Parliamentary discussions will reveal that this has been a long-running claim to restrict migrant workers’ access to safe transport conditions.

The government’s tendency to privilege economic efficiency over migrant lives is not unique to the lorry transport practice; it can be traced back to the socio-economic relations that circumscribe Singapore’s migrant labour regime. Dr. Brenda Yeoh points out that migrant workers are brought into Singapore as a flexible labour force, whose transience is enforced through a “use-and-discard”¹⁷ policy framework that minimises the socio-political costs of hiring them in Singapore while maximising the extraction of their labour. Consequently, the government maintains a migrant labour force that is “low-cost, hyper-productive, docile, and disposable”¹⁸. Within a capitalist society like Singapore, efforts to preserve migrant life are scaled according to the economic productivity generated by their labour, as reflected by policies that have “little concern for the welfare of [migrant] individuals unless it proves economically expedient to do so.”¹⁹ Purported solutions to lorry-related accidents that seek to achieve “balance”²⁰ amongst stakeholders will then likely rule against the protection of migrant workers; any “balance” that is sought in a capitalist system will inevitably seek to suppress costs—the same cost that is needed to ensure workers’ safety. Migrant lives should never hang in the balance.

Despite the difficulties cited around regulating the lorry transport practice, unsafe transport conditions have been abolished before: following a school bus accident that caused the death of a primary school boy in 2008, a total of $35 million was set aside by the government to support the compulsory implementation of seat-belts in school buses²¹. As such, it is possible for the government to facilitate a transformation of industry-wide practices, but resources have to be redistributed towards ensuring that small and medium businesses can transition away from cheap and unsafe labour practices. And it would be unfair to simply appeal to a narrative of resource scarcity to oppose such redistributive measures without accounting for the billions of dollars collected by the State yearly from foreign-worker levies²². What would it take for us to redistribute resources, such as those accumulated under the levy system, towards the preservation of migrant life? To abolish the cruel conditions that migrant workers are transported in, one must reckon with the systemic conditions that have underpinned the persistence of this practice, rather than only fixate on upgrading the cargo deck and punishing the “errant” driver. Safety is an infrastructure of care that can only be realised with overhauls and transformations of labour conditions.

Human beings are not cargo.

Beyond a Road Safety Perspective

¹Teh Joo Lin, “Ferrying Workers Safely”, The Straits Times, 20 May 2009. 

² Amy Khor Lean Suan, 10 May 2021, https://sprs.parl.gov.sg/search/sprs3topic?reportid=oral-answer-2453. 

³Road Traffic Act (Chapter 276), Revised Edition, 2004, Part IV, Section 126(a). 

⁴Christopher Tan, “Transporting workers on trucks and lorries has huge hidden costs which can be avoided”, The Straits Times, 31 May 2021.

⁵Teo Ser Luck, 18 August 2009, https://sprs.parl.gov.sg/search/topic?reportid=005_20090818_S0006_T0010; a similar claim was made in 2006, with accident statistics for 2000 to 2004: https://sprs.parl.gov.sg/search/topic?reportid=035_20060116_S0008_T0008. 

⁶MD Sharif Uddin, Stranger to My World (Landmark Books, 2021), 43. MD Sharif Uddin is a Bangladeshi author and safety supervisor.

⁷Amy Khor Lean Suan, 10 May 2021, https://sprs.parl.gov.sg/search/sprs3topic?reportid=oral-answer-

⁸Ibid. And see timeline entry “Aug 2009: The introduction of stricter safety standards.” 

⁹The Workgroup’s recommended safety regulations were all implemented by the end of 2011, see timeline entries from “Aug 2009” to “Aug 2011”. 

¹⁰Stephanie Chok, “They’re not cargo”, TODAY, 21 August 2009. 

¹¹This was detailed by Ripon Chowdhury during an open meeting organised by SG Climate Rally on 1 May 2021. The transcript for this meeting can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UUeNQU2Pna2EfRPjt0MD0B-w5PIezI49FBYIeqTuPQo/edit 

¹²HOME, 1 May 2021, https://www.home.org.sg/statements/2021/5/1/labour-day-2021-workers-safety-should-be-better-protected?fbclid=IwAR1zs6uD8-DZ7J5aMthu4cZfNcJ8dQzEbZZNR8HkoArxx3lisNMnGX0UtBM 

¹³Kor Kian Beng, "Tighter driving rules for foreign workers", Straits Times, 20 July 2010.

¹⁴Amy Khor Lean Suan, 10 May 2021, https://sprs.parl.gov.sg/search/sprs3topic?reportid=oral-answer-2453. 

¹⁵Ibid.

¹⁶Ibid.

¹⁷Brenda S.A. Yeoh, “Bifurcated Labour: The Unequal Incorporation of Transmigrants in Singapore”, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 97, no.1 (2006): 32.

¹⁸Grace Baey and Brenda S.A. Yeoh, “Migration and Precarious Work: Negotiating Debt, Employment, and Livelihood Strategies Amongst Bangladeshi Migrant Men Working in Singapore’s Construction Industry”, (Brighton: Migrating out of Poverty, 2015), Working Paper 26, 12.

¹⁹Liow’s analysis of the Work Pass system used to manage the migration and labour of migrant workers highlights the capitalist rationality of Singapore’s migrant labour regime. See Eugene Liow, “The Neo-Liberal Developmental State: Singapore as Case-Study”, Critical Sociology 38, no.1 (2011): 13. 

²⁰See Amy Khor’s and Teo Ser Luck’s Parliamentary responses on 10 May 2021 and 18 August 2009 respectively. 

²¹Sumita D/O Sreedharan, “All school buses fitted with seat belts following rule change”, TODAY, 27 July 2013, https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/all-school-buses-fitted-seat-belts-following-rule-change.

²²On 12 November 2012, it was revealed in Parliament that the total amount of foreign worker levies collected in FY2010 and FY2011 were $2.5 billion and $1.9 billion respectively—amounts which are expected to have increased over the years with Singapore’s  growing migrant labour force. As Tan Chuan-Jin, then Acting Minister for Manpower, explains, “the foreign worker levies are not ringfenced for any specific purposes” and can be used for Government expenditures in general. One example given of such an expenditure is the Workfare Income Supplement (WIS), a scheme that “supplements the income and CPF savings of older low-wage workers while encouraging work.” See https://sprs.parl.gov.sg/search/sprs3topic?reportid=written-answer-1098.