Our foreign workforce makes up a staggering

one-fifth

of Singapore’s total population, making this an issue that we cannot choose to ignore.

According to statistics from the Ministry of Manpower, there were 1,386,000 reported foreign workers in Singapore as of December 2018. This includes 253,800 who held a work permit to be a foreign domestic worker (FDWs) and 280,500 who held a work permit for construction work.

In other words, Singapore’s economy is built on the (literal) backs of foreign labour. In search of a better life for themselves and their families, they raise our children, clean our streets, build our homes, and feed our families.

Yet we continue to treat our migrant workforce as objects or property because many of us don’t care to understand their lived realities, or consider them equal human beings. We reduce them to stereotypes or caricatures to sort them into categories in our minds, especially those we believe should ‘serve’ us, and end up stripping them of any sense of humanity.

The antidote to objectification is empathy. This starts with mindset change, according to Member of Parliament Louis Ng, who was one of the panellists.

Contrary to what cynics believe, a change in mindset isn’t superficial or inconsequential. It’s a realistic and necessary guiding principle for improving the lives of our migrant workforce, and should work concurrently with policy and legislation.

For example, Louis puts up posters of cleaners in his estate that highlight their life stories, including their family and children back in their home country. They too are fathers, sons, brothers, uncles; they too worry about providing for their family; they too deserve respect.

In the grand scheme of things, this might be a small action, but each poster humanises the featured cleaner, returning to them a voice that’s robbed every time someone belittles them.

On an individual level, none of us should be absolved of playing our part even if we don’t personally interact with foreign workers. For starters, Ghislaine Nadaud, a panellist who works as a sustainability expert in a bank, reminds us that we all have bank accounts, and therefore should hold our banks accountable to what they do with our money. We can start by enquiring if and how our banks finance companies and industries with environmental risks, and reading our bank’s environment and social governance reports.

At work, those of us who regularly procure vendors should do our due diligence to ensure we don’t inadvertently enable companies with unethical work practices. Good employment practices right down to the supply chain should be our most important criteria in assessing whether companies deserve the job.