These forms of communicative violence are situated amidst structural violence that is magnified by the trajectories of COVID-19, and that forms the hegemonic organizing of “unfree labor” in Singapore (see Yea and Chok, 2018).
Communicative inequality, inequality in distribution of information and voice infrastructures, is intricately tied to the material inequalities experienced by low-wage migrant workers (Dutta, 2008).
The violence of extreme neoliberalism is worked into the various forms of disciplining that work actively to silence the voices of workers (Springer, 2012, 2015). The various forms of disciplining the workers experience, from being surveilled to being terminated for speaking up work together to perpetuate a fundamental form of violence ingrained in fear.
The structural violence of poor housing, poor sanitation, and poor food that forms the everyday context of health of low-wage migrant workers is exacerbated by the pandemic, magnifying the effects on worker health and well-being. Well-being that are routinized into the routine management of low-wage migrant workers in Singapore are exacerbated by the pandemic.
This article, anchored in the CCA attends to the ongoing erasure of low-wage migrant workers in Singapore, amidst the active work of depoliticizing the exploitation of low-wage migrant workers and propping up the individualizing ideology of altruism. The erasure of the voices of low-wage migrant workers is a vital tool in legitimizing.
The very technologies of authoritarian control that work on one hand in legitimizing efficient pandemic management while upholding the neoliberal ideology of “open borders” also have historically rendered invisible the structural violence within which low-wage migrant workers negotiate their lives through disciplining and control.
Control: We provide you the power to control your account performance. The specific context of extreme neoliberalism in Singapore and its failures further renders visible the failure of the behavior change paradigm of health communication that systematically erases structures while simultaneously putting forth recommendations for individual behavior change such as staying home, maintaining physical distance, washing hands, and wearing masks.
The zeitgeist of the neoliberal behavior change framework, working to promote individualized responses that simultaneously erase questions of structural transformation, is confronted with its failures in Singapore and elsewhere across the globe.
Inherent in the state's official narrative that articulates the impossibility of anticipating the outbreak is its systematic efforts of individualizing behavior and unseeing low-wage migrant workers in discursive spaces10.
These structural features of work and livelihood constitute the crowded living conditions that shape the spread of COVID-19 among low-wage migrant workers in Singapore. My work pass will be taken away.”
The erasure of spaces for voicing their everyday challenges to health. The “interplay of neoliberal labor markets and highly restrictive immigration regimes” (Lewis et al., 2015) that depict hyper-precarity of low-wage migrant work in Singapore is rooted in communicative violence, the strategic erasure of communicative infrastructures for migrant worker voices. The erasure of voice, the absence of information infrastructures, and the absence of infrastructures for voice constitute the context of hyper-precarity of migrant work. This makes me worry.”
Not having access to information about the steps being taken by the dormitory. ” Not having access to information about the steps being taken by the dormitory. Story in Telegram Explorer provides information for business pages to the user.
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The authoritarian impulse of extreme neoliberalism seeds and circulates the rhetoric of the “anti-national” to suppress dissenting voices, thus legitimizing techniques of disciplining as necessary responses of good governance (Bruff and Tansel, 2019). Extreme neoliberalism sustains the free market ideology as an organizing framework even as its narrative has been thoroughly disrupted by the everyday empirical accounts of those struggling with its violent effects at the margins.
Communicative violence is a salient organizing feature of extreme neoliberalism. The essay wraps up by theorizing the work of co-creating communicative equality by building democratic infrastructures for migrant voices, which emerge as vital resources in addressing the pandemic, and offer the registers for post-pandemic transformations of politics, economics, and social organizing.
The pandemic outbreak in low-wage migrant worker dormitories makes visible these poor conditions of health, work, and well-being (Dutta, 2020a,b). What this article demonstrates is that the everyday threats to health.
Paradoxically then, even as structural resources for health and well-being have been largely absent, various technologies of surveillance and containment have been put into place targeting the low-wage migrant worker. Paradoxically, the challenges to the health and well-being of low-wage migrant workers in Singapore exists alongside the claims to technocratic efficient management of the pandemic through tools of contact tracing and quarantining celebrated by global organizations such as the WHO and the World Economic Forum (WEF)9.