SEPTEMBER 14 — Years ago, I witnessed an awful incident on a public bus; a Singaporean man attacked a foreign worker. The young man accused the worker of staring at him, then proceeded to assault him, slamming his head into the window, as a bus full of passengers looked on or even more shamefully, away.

I did what I could to help the worker, and later chronicled the incident in a local paper. I found myself heartened by the responses to the article and reassured that most Singaporeans adhered, or professed to adhere, to a standard of morality that didn’t allow for someone to be mistreated simply because of their economic status.

Still for sometime I remained troubled by what I saw that day; more than the attack it was the fact that at least 40 ordinary people failed to take any kind of action that haunted me.

I suspected that a lot of the inertia came about because the people on that bus didn’t believe a foreign worker was worth protecting and that their attitudes might have been different if the victim had been local or a foreigner from a more affluent part of the world.

Since that incident, I have carefully followed the transient workers’ plight but I will admit I haven’t done enough to contribute to this cause. This is my shame.

After all, it was some years ago and the whole incident had largely seeped from my memory until a few weeks ago I found myself next in line at the Changi Airport check-in counter for a flight to South Asia when my usual state of distraction was interrupted by the raised  voice of a security officer as he insisted that a middle-aged foreign worker ahead of me hand over a blender.

“Is this yours?” he asked the increasingly frightened man who could only manage a hesitant nod.

“No, it is not” continued the officer, “I saw somebody handing it to you. That’s not allowed”

And on it went in this vein, with this poor man hardly able to follow the conversation and genuinely confused as to why he wasn’t being allowed to check-in his blender and the officer berating him for taking somebody else’s item until I could no longer take it and interrupted.

In the end, the officer insisted that one was not allowed to check-in an item belonging to somebody else — though in this case the man was insisting it was his own blender which his friend had just been helping him carry.

Still unable to communicate this to the officer he ended up having to hand his precious purchase back to his friend, who seemed equally puzzled.

It wasn’t a major incident, just one of the many little altercations and frustrations that characterise 21st century check-in and boarding, but it struck me at the time that it is incidents like this that are the root of the problem; the innumerable petty instances of discrimination and intimidation foreign workers are subject to on a daily basis that enable the larger scale abuse.

Labourers work on scaffolding near the Marina Bay Sands casino and resort in the financial district of Singapore August 22, 2014. — Picture by Reuters­­

The officer couldn’t be bothered to take the time to find out what the man had to say, or to inspect the contents of the box to ensure they were harmless. Instead he simply bullied the man who was unable to communicate and used to his subordinate position, simply gave up. 

This sort of thing happens all the time from taxi drivers who lean on their horns in Little India to people who refuse to sit next to foreign workers on the bus, or refuse to give them directions when they ask for help -– there’s just a barrage of causal discrimination that reinforces the dehumanisation of these people.

And I suspect there’s a direct correlation between this culture of casual degradation and the horrific headlines that confront us when an employer abandons a worker to die in the back lane rather than bear the time and expense of a hospital visit.

I am uncertain if this is a matter of race — after all, foreign workers and the people who discriminate against them hail from a variety of races. So perhaps it’s a matter of class and as such it is more subtle, more deeply internalised and arguable and degrades us more pervasively community and as a nation.

A couple of days ago, a friend emailed me a link to a photo published by The Straits Times of the living quarters on a construction site in Punggol. In the photo, the men are hunched over buckets in an unfurnished bare-breeze block space. It looks like a shanty in any part of the Third World.

Of course migrant workers’ lives are difficult regardless of where they end up migrating to but Singapore and Singaporeans have an obligation to do better by the people who are literally building our nation.

When we see pictures of these men living in effective slums it is not enough to say well this is what they are used to; these are simply not the standards we would expect in Singapore. We’ve worked hard for generations to ensure that we live in a nation where nobody lives in a slum.

Yet our casual indifference to the rights of a class of people, hundreds of thousands of the island’s residents, migrants like the ancestors of the vast majority of our population, has allowed these slums and shanties to re-emerge in one of the world’s richest nations. 

It’s shameful and we need to do better than this.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.