Migrant worker

Meanwhile, the 24-hour PSI across Singapore is still in the good to moderate range.

Nearly 240 migrant workers in Singapore have gone without pay for up to three months.

Most are from Bangladesh, and some say their work permits have also been cancelled.

The Straits Times reports that the two companies involved are linked.

need Jawas to fix robots.

Well, it's not just Jawas, but we've relied on slave labor and immigrant labor, every society has, for thousands of years.

And so when now, hopefully, you know, even though it's not gone in the world, but hopefully at one point we'll have no more slavery in the world and you'll have no more poor immigrants in the world that are doing these jobs because we're protecting the immigrants.

And so I don't think it's that far fetched to say, you know, instead of a team of 30 Mexican undocumented workers getting paid four dollars a day, we're going to have a group of three robots out there picking the oranges.

I'm Carolyn Beeler.

There are roughly 200,000 migrant workers in Lebanon.

They come mainly from the Philippines, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and Sudan.

They clean homes, care for children and the elderly, work on farms or as drivers.

Many have left their own families behind.

It is a vulnerable population in the best of times.

But now, as war rages between Israel and Hezbollah, the lives of Lebanon's migrant workers are especially precarious.

The World's Shirin Jafari reports from Beirut.

Something great.

A TikToker has distributed food and masks to migrant workers at a Tampines construction site amid the haze, saying that while people may complain from the comfort of their own homes, the workers are out there day after day, Building our houses, maintaining our houses, looking after our gardens, emptying our rubbish chutes.

They are our everyday heroes.

And TikToker Kai Emilio wanted to recognize them.

He gave them food, he gave them drinks, and him and his companions also handed out surgical masks.

We can't forget those guys.

In fact, this week, I think, is it Wednesday? We're having an interview with our friends from TWC2 about our migrant workers who have to work day after day in these hazy conditions.

That's right.

And yeah, I think I, I appreciate kind of, um, a similar, similar thing with both of these chapters, like you said, with Brian's chapter focusing on, um, the Turkish imams and teachers, and it's so fascinating, his methodology, but then Paige's as well of, like, focusing on, um, like care and, uh, like maternal, uh, maternal Behaviors of organizing, like, um, like, labor on the shop, like, on, like, the factory floor, but then also, like, how then that's not really accepted in East German society, um, with Vietnamese women having families.

And, um, it's actually so funny, just this past summer, somebody was, like, saying to me, they were like, "Someone needs to write a book on Vietnamese migrant workers in East Germany," and I was like, "I already know who's, who's got that in the works." And so, um, it's great to see Paige's chapter come forth, but then, um, I'm really looking forward to seeing how that project continues to develop.

Can I jump on that, Jenna?

Yeah, please do.

A total hub.

Well, they got there and found those public walkways completely jammed with people, just hundreds of migrant workers sitting right there on the floor.

Just hanging out.

Exactly.

It is intense.

And look, the frustration is absolutely real.

But if we step back and look at the broader structural reality, and I am saying this specifically to challenge your friends' perspective, we have hundreds of thousands of migrant workers living in Taiwan.

Right.

So there was a lot of outrage and, and there was certainly a psychological sense of ownership, even if there wasn't a legal sense of ownership.

So if we come on then to the nineteen-nineties and the early two-thousands, so as is well known, China's recent economic rise was fueled by the exploitation of, of migrant labor, uh, moving from the Chinese countryside to the cities.

Now, that process might seem comparable to, say, migrant workers moving from Mexico to the United States, and therefore just another sort of symptom of, of a convergence between, uh, China's model and neoliberal capitalism.

But you explain in the book how, in fact, the role of those Chinese internal migrants, in fact, demonstrates the way in which the institutions of the socialist era still existed in the Chinese countryside and to an extent still do, and have paradoxically supported and enabled the rise of Chinese capitalism.

So as I already suggested a little bit, the typical story of resource extraction from the countryside is you re-- extract resources and then these dispossessed, expropriated peasants then, you know, move to cities and become industrial labor.

The interesting thing that in China, the kind of move to state capitalism, again, unlike the English case, for example, did not entail the expropriation of the peasants who continue to own the rural land collectively.

Rather than settling permanently in the cities, they have become indeed migrant laborers, which is to say they shuttle back and forth, back and forth between city and country.

I forget the exact figures, but you, you point to the extraordinary movement that occurred right after the financial crisis of oh-eight, oh-nine, right?