Between Cargo and Citizen – Lorry Rides and Racialized Moral Worth in Global City Singapore

Subadevan Boyd-Devan, Brown University

The humble lorry often goes unnoticed despite its ubiquity on Singapore’s roads. These vehicles, which are open-backed trucks meant for transporting cargo, facilitate the flow of people and equipment needed to (re)construct Singapore’s urban environment and ensure it continues to run. A closer look at the unassuming lorry, however, offers insights into how a particularly deadly form of urban inequality is organized through racialized frames of moral worth in contemporary Singapore. While using lorries for human transport is banned under Singapore’s road traffic act, a 1973 exemption allows the practice on lorries owned by the employer of the workers being transported. In effect, this subtly carved out an exemption for transporting migrant workers in the construction sector. Debates and public moral introspection over the practice have happened periodically, when particularly large or garish accidents make the news cycle and even influence parliamentary debate. Historically, however, the state has intervened by insisting the practice is largely safe, while promising to continue studying the issue, before diffusing the debate by highlighting the complexities of moving away from the practice, particularly an increase in construction costs. Effectively, the Singaporean state considers these migrant workers’ lives as amenable to cost and profit calculations, a notion that it would not be permissible if applied to citizens. Such divergent logics, however, are enabled by moral frames that naturalize unequal worth and differentiated deservingness. More recently, however, direct calls to ban the practice have problematized it by data humanization and challenging these moral frames, as exemplified in the use of the hashtag #humansnotcargo in a 2023 open letter campaign calling for an immediate ban to the practice. These efforts demonstrate how challenging the hegemony of abstract numbers with complex narratives might open avenues for progressive social change.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 5. State Power