A surge of coronavirus cases in foreign-worker dormitories across Singapore and in the slums of India has drawn attention to the squalid housing conditions of migrant labourers and the vital role they play in cities, housing experts said on Tuesday. In Singapore, which had earlier been lauded for containing the deadly respiratory disease, more than three-fourths of total cases have been linked to crowded dormitories that house more than 300,000 foreign workers.
Migrant rights groups – who for years had raised the issue of inadequate worker housing – had warned that labourers were at high risk from the coronavirus, said Alex Au, vice president of the Singaporean nonprofit Transient Workers Count Too. Singapore’s 43 squalid foreign worker dormitories are a far cry from the city’s glitzy tourist attractions. The workers, who are mostly men, are from China, Bangladesh, Myanmar and India, and usually work in the construction and transport sectors. They live in rooms with 10-20 bunk beds each, and share bathrooms that are often unsanitary, Au said.
After clusters of infections were identified in dorms earlier this month, Minister of Manpower Josephine Teo said standards had to be improved. Under the law, operators of the dorms had to maintain standards for cleanliness, sanitation and hygiene, and officials conducted regular inspections, she said in a Facebook post. In India, millions of migrant workers attempted to walk hundreds of miles to their homes in distant villages after the government imposed a nationwide lockdown on March 24.
Their anxiety was partly fuelled by the unsanitary conditions in which they lived – shacks and tenements in crowded slums in cities such as Mumbai, which have become hotbeds of infection. A national urban rental housing policy, which commits to social rental housing for vulnerable groups including migrant workers and the urban poor, has remained a draft since 2015.
Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation
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