Blinded by Privilege

I received a text from a friend today, containing screenshots of a post that a mutual acquaintance made on Facebook. It was regarding the Ministry of Manpower’s new regulations regarding foreign worker domitories.

The new rules will “require operators to provide workers with Wi-Fi, personal lockers, a way to provide feedback on their accommodation and at least one sick bay or contingency plans for infectious disease cases.” (The Straits Times)

To most people, these seem like more than reasonable regulations, considering the terrible conditions that our foreign workers live in. Given their indispensable contributions to Singapore, and the dangers (1, 2) that they face as part of their work, these regulations are long overdue in my opinion.

However, for this acquaintance of mine, this was his main takeaway from the article:

He lamented the lack of “these amenities” for NSFs, implicitly making a comparison between serving national service and life as a foreign worker. Despite his half-hearted attempt at political correctness, when he says, “it’s not really comparable, I guess”, his next statement shows that he believes otherwise: “Foreign workers are paid wages closer to liveable conditions too.”

There are two points to be made here.

1. These so-called ‘complaints’ of his are really non-problems.

How anyone can claim that the conditions in National Service are remotely comparable to those faced by foreign workers is beyond me. The article is talking about basic necessities like “bed frames and clean sanitary facilities”, and it explicitly mentions how dormitories “were found to be overcrowded, or have poor hygiene standards or other substandard living conditions.” Do army camps have poor hygiene standards or substandard living conditions? The necessities mentioned are all found in army camps, which, by the way, also have their own medical centres, and bunks that adhere to maximum occupancy restrictions.

His main complaint, therefore, appears to be Wi-Fi, which isn’t provided in army camps. For God’s sake, these foreign workers have travelled to another country, away from their families, in order to make a living. Providing them with Wi-Fi so that they can connect with their loved ones back home hardly seems like an unreasonable idea. The sheer audacity to compare an NSF’s experience with theirs, when NSFs are allowed to book out every day/week, is truly shocking. Sure, “many (NSFs) complaint (sic) of busting their data packet (sic)”, but is that really a comparable problem when you’re talking about foreign workers who have given up everything to be here?

2. This is about privilege.

This Facebook post is a classic display of privilege, to the extent that I initially thought the author was joking (he wasn’t). The person who commented on the post rightly pointed out the absurdity of such entitlement, albeit using sarcasm that might be lost on its intended audience. This acquaintance of mine chose to use an article about the poor living conditions of foreign workers to make his point about how, in his opinion, NSFs are being mistreated. The worst part of all of this is, he’s so blinded by his own privilege that he does not see the problem in doing so. To him, everything is about his struggles and his problems — a phenomenon that is, unfortunately, becoming all too common. I was left speechless by his post (although I later recovered to write this out of sheer frustration).

On an unrelated note, the author of that Facebook post happens to be attending The University of Oxford later this year, having completed his National Service, where, incidentally, he did not have to stay in any of the bunks he finds so underwhelming, because his was a stay-out vocation.

I hope there’s Wi-Fi at Oxford.