Under our "Inspiring People" monthly column,
we highlight the incredible journey of one person
who has overcome tremendous odds to achieve personal
success. This column celebrates the triumph of the human
spirit and we hope it will inspire you to reach for your
dreams too. This month, we bring to you a man who pursues a
not-so-lucrative career in helping a very large, but neglected,
community.
Once some of you learn what 32-year-old Jolovan
Wham does for a living, you might not take an immediate
liking to him.
In a nutshell, he works full-time on one mission: to provide
support to the expanding community of foreign
workers living in Singapore.
As the executive director and one of the founding members of the
Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics (HOME), Wham has
for the past seven years reached out to migrant
workers here to help fight for their rights.
Despite the groundswell of xenophobic sentiment among so many
Singaporeans toward foreign workers, Wham
took particular interest in them, even while in university.
“As a social work student I learned a lot about stuff involving
Singaporean families and Singaporean issues, and it struck me that
we had so many migrant workers among us and
we weren’t talking about them,” he told Yahoo! Singapore.
“So it started out as a kind of curiosity for me — what kind of
problems and issues did they face? Why aren’t we talking about
them?”
With this in mind, he volunteered once a month during his final
year with the Commission for the pastoral care of Migrants and
Itinerant people (CMI), the only group in Singapore dealing with
migrant worker issues at that time. There, he spent two hours on
one Sunday of each month at Lucky Plaza getting acquainted with
Filipino domestic workers.
A new view on foreign
workers
Wham’s interest in foreign workers’ issues
was sparked at a young age. Having grown up in a family that hired
domestic help, he remembers how his mother was once scolded for
“spoiling the market” after deciding to give her Indonesian helper
one day off each month.
“Even as a child, I thought to myself, ‘I didn’t want to go to
school every day, so why should I expect my Indonesian maid to work
for us every day of the week?’ So even back then, that logic made
sense to me,” he said.
Why reach out to help foreigners and not locals? Wham dismisses the
categorisation of “local” and “foreign” workers, arguing that
people should be fighting for the rights of all workers here.
“I see it as a false dichotomy,” he says. “If we didn’t see them as
different, we wouldn’t have this situation. They’re easier to
bully, so employers continue to hire them because they accept much
lower wages. It’s very frustrating,” he adds. “These people
literally built this country. Literally… yet the kind of
recognition we give them is disproportionate to their
contributions.”
Abuse, exploitation, underpayment — Wham says he’s pretty much seen
them all. He cites how some Bangladeshi cleaners live, sleep and
cook in bin centres, earning about $15 for between 12 and 16 hours
of work each day, and how many workers from China are forced to
sign outrageous contracts that withhold pay or subject them to
punishment, for example, should they file complaints with the
authorities.
He says he has lost count of the number of construction workers’
dormitories he has visited, most of which are unlikely to ever
sniff acceptable standards of sanitation or hygiene. He shares that
one of the worst container blocks he visited required workers
living there to squeeze into three beds stacked on top of one
another — with 10 of these stacks crammed into a room that fits all
30 beds just nicely, leaving hope of having any available walking
space zero to none — sleeping on wooden boards to reduce the number
of bedbugs they would have to deal with, should they have
mattresses.
He often has to pay late-night visits to the dormitories, where
security is not as tight, taking pictures of the appalling state of
living conditions so many of them are used to, and frequently
submitting them to the Ministry of Manpower (MOM), whose
representatives he is now familiar with.
“I don’t see myself as a pest. They do!” he says, laughing. “I
always think I am giving constructive feedback.
More seriously, he points out, “It’s important to raise awareness,
to hold those in power accountable for their actions. I speak out
to effect change, to shape attitudes and opinions.”
Working every day, round the clock
His is pretty much a 24/7 occupation, saying he receives calls at
1am from workers on the brink of being forcefully repatriated after
being dismissed, and has at times travelled to Changi Airport to
help them negotiate with burly, gangster-looking men from
repatriation companies.
“They usually refuse to let me talk to him (the worker), so I have
to call the police, inform immigration officers of the matter; I
have to insist that the workers are allowed to remain behind,” said
Wham, who shared that he once sat down with a worker and the
repatriation staff for more than an hour, refusing to leave until
the latter gave up.
He admits, however, that it is often quite difficult to dispute
their being sent back when salary issues or injuries are not
involved.
“You get very disheartened, and I’ve had a lot of these kinds of
setbacks,” he says. “It’s inevitable, it’s part of the work, and
it’s going to be difficult for workers to realise their rights
because of the way policies are,” he added.
Since beginning his outreach efforts with HOME in 2004, he has
frequently found himself at the receiving end of strange looks,
angry phone calls, news of complaints filed with the MOM and
more.
“You’re dealing with a lot of people’s anxieties, you’re dealing
with people who dislike you, employers who think you’re poking your
nose into their business and agencies who say you’re siding with
the workers and no one else,” he says.
In HOME’s first three years, Wham says they were frequently visited
by angry employers of domestic workers who, with policemen in tow,
demanded that they handed over their helpers to them.
Despite the intimidation, which he says he experiences “less often
these days”, Wham says he simply explains “very rationally” to the
employer that his or her helper does not belong to them, and that
there is no law that says a maid is required to stay with her
employer at all times.
“There’s nothing they can do. We haven’t violated any laws,” he
says confidently.
Impact and recognition
Despite the challenges he and HOME face, the organisation helps
between 1,000 and 1,500 foreign workers each
year on various human rights issues.
“What we see is probably the worst of the lot,” he said. “We can’t
say it’s indicative of the scale (of conditions faced by low-wage
foreign workers here), but the fact that
these do happen shows that there are gaps in our policies that need
to be corrected.”
Yet, he estimates that the number of people HOME helps amounts to
less than one per cent of the total number of foreign workers in
Singapore now, which he believes should have hit — or even exceeded
— one million by now.
“We only see these because they happen to find us,” he adds. “There
are so many others out there who probably have no idea we
exist.”
Wham’s passion for the cause has been recognised. Two awards were
conferred upon him recently — independent political research
initiative Think Centre gave him the Human Rights Defender Award,
while The Online Citizen at its inaugural awards named him Social
Worker of the Year 2011.
His joy at receiving these awards, however, comes partly from the
knowledge that they help raise awareness for foreign
workers’ plight.
“It adds recognition to the importance of the migrant worker cause.
That for me is significant; it’s a cause that’s not very popular…
so anything that helps to raise the profile of the issue is good,”
he says.
Wham says he is driven by the stories of injustice and mistreatment
he hears each day, whether or not he’s heard them before.
“I’m amazed at how I still get shocked and outraged (hearing these
stories), even though it’s the same thing every day. I go to work
with a sense of déjà vu,” he says with a laugh. “You need that
anger, that sense of justice, otherwise it becomes another case…
and you don’t do the work any justice.”
-- Yahoo!
