Contractualism and COVID-19 : deontic motivations to improve migrant worker welfare in Singapore

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which migrant workers in Singapore may have their welfare neglected, many of which became especially evident over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ways in which contractualism may resolve these issues. The migrant worker population was particularly hard hit by the pandemic, which then led to increased scrutiny on the conditions experienced by these workers as they work in Singapore. Said conditions proved to be extremely inadequate, meaning that migrant workers here very often needed to suffer in order to keep costs low for their employers and allow for a lower cost of living for Singaporeans and rapid growth for local infrastructure. In this paper, contractualism is applied to these circumstances. I explore the ways in which the conditions experienced by migrant workers did not account for the need for informed, unforced agreement, and left significant scope for reasonable rejection on the part of the workers. This then, applying contractualism, necessitates better treatment of the workers, predicated on their entering into informed and unforced agreements of their own volition, and on moral agents involved in defining policy related to their well-being accounting for the deontic considerations that contractualism takes into account.