A Narrative of Low-Wage Migrants in Singapore

As a migrant worker in Singapore, Saddam remembers 20 December 2010 as the day when a workplace accident washed all his dreams away. The Bangladeshi national, who was working in construction at the time, fell from a wall into a drain, fracturing two bones below the left knee. Shortly after the incident, he fled his dormitory to escape the clutches of “a team of gangsters” hired by his employer to send him back to Bangladesh after the employer had refused to buy state-mandated insurance for Saddam’s accident or pay him medical leave wages. Still nursing his injury and already in debt from paying recruitment fees to migrate, Saddam was close to sleeping on the streets before he received the kindness of a civil society activist, who put him up in her home to recover and resolve his injury claims in Singapore. He received only a third of his work injury compensation due to a lack of insurance, but received the remainder in installments after returning to Bangladesh.  Saddam’s story, recounted like a diary entry in a first-person perspective, has one of the better endings in A Thousand and One Days: Stories of Hardship from South Asian Migrant Workers in Singapore, a collection of eight challenging migration experiences in the Southeast Asian city-state.