SINGAPORE — Sometime in 2021, migrant worker Miah Mohammad Afzal saw a traffic accident before his very eyes — a motorcycle crashing into a stationary lorry that was picking up a group of his colleagues.
measured in their support
The publicly available data do not provide a breakdown of the occupations of the victims or on which part of the lorry they were seated in. Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam said last October in response to a question by WP MP He Ting Ru that the Traffic Police does not track such breakdown in numbers.
However, Aespada managed to “maintain the status quo” in terms of its number of clients, with about eight in 10 of them being “big companies”. However, he mitigates such risks to his best ability by driving slowly and carefully, while his company monitors all vehicles’ movement using Global Positioning System.
“We rented a lorry before, but we felt that the cost was too high — in terms of rental, petrol and so on,” its co-founder John Aston, 40,He added that as young entrepreneurs — the founders are aged 40 and below — they need to constantly think outside the box to keep costs low. A director in a second generation family business in the construction industry with about 30 workers said that there was no incentive to plough in more money to charter buses or maintain its own fleet “because the customer always demands cheaper option”.
Mr Kumar said that it already takes a long time for the lorry, given current traffic conditions, to reach project sites. “ we gave only one guy S$100 as his transport allowance. The rest took the transport because they didn’t want to be responsible for being late,” said Mr Tay, whose company now mainly does consultancy work.
Agreeing, Mr Kelvin Lim, co-owner of Rae Transport services, said that while bus-driving jobs are plentiful, the main problem is getting drivers. Industry players acknowledged that different companies have different operational requirements, which in turn impact their ability to outsource worker transportation to other parties.
“But when the trade-off is endangering the lives of migrant workers due to lorries being a fundamentally unsafe way to transport people, we cannot simply acknowledge these difficulties and look the other way,” said a spokesperson from migrant worker advocacy groupSociologist Tan Ern Ser, from the National University of Singapore, said that it remains unclear whether Singaporeans are ready to foot the costs for these trade-offs — be it financial or social costs.
However, Assoc Prof Tan stressed that this was just his personal assessment, and that a focus group could better determine Singaporean attitudes on this issue. Also, granular details like “what exact costs and how much are they talking about” are also unclear, making the argument opaque, she added. “The final cost will likely be lower than what we would expect if we forced everyone to take buses,” said Assoc Prof Theseira.
It may be more economically efficient to deploy one bus to pick up one combined group of workers together, than multiple companies each deploying their own lorry. Not to mention it would also reduce the number of vehicles on the road, though it would take a certain degree of coordination and cooperation between firms.
In the meantime, they call for further interim measures, such as reduction of speed limits to 50km/h from 60km/h, forming workgroups which include NGOs to look into the issue together, and a further reduction on the number of workers allowed on the back of lorries. Mr Ng acknowledged that steps have been taken over the years, but “more action has to be taken to address the root of the problem”.A sociologist from the Nanyang Technological University, Assoc Prof Laavanya Kathiravelu, said that there is “clear public will to protect migrant lives” even amid the different spectrum of views.
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