Note how dense the map is. Almost every building and road in Singapore is the site of, or is surrounded by sites of, a migrant worker’s death. As we try our best to represent these lives, we must acknowledge:

No human being is ‘unknown’

Many workers on the map did not have their names reported and we could not find publicly available information on their identities. To make sure they were still represented, we listed them as ‘unknown’. But these workers are not nameless. Rather, their names have been erased. They had names, just as they had stories, families, and dreams. Similarly, some exact  coordinates where a worker died were not clear. We call on the Ministry of Manpower to release this information in the interest of public accountability. We deserve to know what is going on, why this keeps happening, and what we’re actually choosing as citizens. 

Every worker is more than their cause of death

It is difficult to put together an archive–despite its necessity–without falling into the trap of rendering its subjects nothing more than data. We want to underscore that these workers are more than their causes of death. This project seeks not to bind people to their manner of exit from the world—but rather to interrogate the systems that allow this sort of violence to persist. 

The data and visualisations are tools we use to illustrate violence, but they cannot begin to convey the fullness of each migrant worker’s life. Every individual’s life has meaning; they were loved and are still being mourned. This cannot be contained in headlines, or even in aspects of our project, that reduce workers to their final moments. 

Trauma extends beyond each person

While the map plots individuals, every one of these workers represents a network of vulnerability that is much larger than themselves. Each worker is connected to many others in their companies and workplaces who suffer from the same violence, precarity, and disregard. 

Straits Times, 27 September 2013, "Worker dies after fall from 20th storey"

New Paper, 3 September 2014, "Gate falls, crushing foreign worker to death"

So much of the reporting fixates on statistics, obscuring the extent of trauma caused by each migrant worker’s death. What happens to the families whose sole breadwinners have been taken from them in an instant? What happens to the children who grow up without fathers and mothers? What happens to colleagues and friends who have witnessed these horrific events yet have to return to work day after day?

Click on the ‘settings’ tool on the bottom right to toggle between data visualisations. You can group, shade, and compare data points across sex, nationality, and age. For example, to sort the data by individual nationality and view all deaths across age groups, input these conditions: Group By: Nationality; Shade By: Sex; Compare: Age.

Barring the listings tagged as ‘unknown’, deaths are heavily concentrated amongst Indian and Bangladeshi men in their 20s and 30s. This is the demographic of workers that are employed at most worksites across the island—men who, in recent months, have been subject to greater timeline pressures of impending projects that were delayed by the pandemic. This includes HDB's Built-To-Order¹ projects, which is just another one of the industry’s cruel ironies—especially when we consider that many of these men are also husbands and fathers with young families back home—because some lives and families are put at risk in order to actualise the beginning of others.