Humans Aren't Cargo

The following photograph and accompanying text was posted on STOMP on 22 August 2010. STOMPer dazzlaser was travelling along the ECP recently when he saw foreign workers being transported on a lorry, huddled under an umbrella that offered little protection from the thunderstorm. He thinks that the employer needs to show more welfare to them. The STOMPer wrote: "Last Fri, 20 Aug, I was driving on the ECP when there was a heavy downpour in the morning. "Saw these foreign workers carrying umbrellas travelling on a lorry. "The employer should be fined for mistreating his employees like animals. "This isn't the way to ferry workers in bad weather. "All of them must have been drenched. "Very ashamed to be a Singaporean."

The following AFP story was published in the Straits Times on 18 August 2010. Focus on worker safety Aug 18, 2010 SINGAPORE - ALAM Khali can still remember vividly how he feared for his safety whenever he squatted on the back of an open-topped lorry while being ferried to construction sites in Singapore. Squashed in with other foreign labourers, the 40-year-old Bangladeshi said he clung on to whatever part of the lorry he could get his hands on as the vehicle made its way around the wealthy city-state. 'Of course scared, but boss says take lorry, we take,' Mr Khali, who has been working in Singapore since 2003, shrugged in an interview at a hotel construction site while having a lunch of plain vegetables and white rice. Thanks to a new boss, Mr Khali now gets a stipend to travel by subway to work, but most of the estimated 245,000 foreign construction workers from poorer Asian countries are not so lucky. Transported around like cattle even under pouring rain, the workers are a

Posters designed by Isaac Tng (sixmoredays@gmail.com) The following statement was posted by TWC2, a local migrant worker welfare organization, on its website . Three Chinese workers died when a lorry in which they were being carried skidded and crashed onto its side on the morning of June 22nd. Some among the 14 survivors needed hospital treatment. The lorry crashed off the Pan-Island Expressway. TWC2 has argued strongly against transporting workers on the backs of lorries and trucks and in favour of transport in enclosed vehicles. Road safety measures are not only meant to prevent accidents, but to minimise the harm done when they do occur. If the 17 workers had been travelling in a coach or a minibus (preferably with seatbelts), would the outcome have been this serious? We think that is not likely. In an article on 'Safety on the Roads' that was published in the September-October 2007 issue of the TWC2 members' newsletter, our position was set out clearly: '(T)he prob