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Singapore Foreign Labor
Two groups comprised foreign nonresident labor in
Singapore.
The majority were unskilled work-permit holders who could
only
enter and work in the country if their prospective
employers
applied for work permits for them. Skilled workers and
professionals on employment passes comprised the other
group.
Work permits were for a short duration with no
guarantee of
automatic renewal. Malaysia, particularly the southernmost
state of
Johor, was the traditional source of such workers.
Singapore's
tight immigration policy was relaxed as early as 1968 to
allow in
these workers. At the peak of the economic boom in 1973,
noncitizen
work-permit holders reportedly accounted for about
one-eighth of
the total work force. Large numbers of these "guest
workers" were
repatriated during the 1974-75 world recession because of
retrenchments, particularly in the labor-intensive
manufacturing
industries.
With the tightening of the labor market in 1978-79, it
became
more difficult to fill less desirable jobs with domestic
labor or
labor from Malaysia, which also had a tight job market.
Foreign
workers were then recruited from Indonesia, Thailand, Sri
Lanka,
India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. By 1984 workers
from South
Korea, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan were being allowed in,
on the
basis that their Confucian cultural background might
enable them to
adapt more readily than immigrants from other cultures.
The increase in foreign workers was remarkable; by 1980
they
comprised 7 percent of the total compared with 3 percent a
decade
earlier. No figures on foreign labor were published after
1980.
According to the 1980 census, 46 percent of the foreign
workers
were in manufacturing, 20 percent in construction, and 9
percent in
personal and household services. The recession led to a
repatriation of some 60,000 foreign workers in 1985,
two-thirds of
the total employment decline. The foreign worker levy was
raised to
S$250 per month in July 1989, and the maximum foreign
worker
dependency at the firm level was reduced from 50 percent
to 40
percent. Both measures were designed to encourage firms to
speed up
automation of labor-intensive operations in order to
reduce
reliance on foreign workers.
Data as of December 1989
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