A Form of Imbalance of Power: A Case of Indian Migrant Construction Workers in Singapore

On 8 December 2013, Sakthivel Kumaravelu, an Indian migrant worker, was running alongside the bus and fell in the path of its front wheel. He was crushed underneath the wheel and died instantly. This incident turned a Sunday casual weekend in Little India into a site of a riot. A crowd of about 400 people set fire to vehicles and clashed with police. This article takes the Little India Riot as an opportunity to scrutinize Singapore state’s governance of migration in Singapore and implementation of the state’s governance regulations at the level of the host society (Singapore), and to identify how those two things cause labour abuses in the context of neoliberalism. By doing so, this article also attempts to shed light on labour abuses directed at male migrant workers in Singapore. Studies with the important purpose of providing a female perspective on migration and focusing attention on female migrant domestic workers have in fact privileged these women at the expense of migrant men. This article will analyse the mechanisms of labour abuse directed at male migrant construction workers in Singapore and show that such male workers are also subjected to abuse in a different yet equally formidable way.