Languages of labour: representational strategies in Singapore’s labour control regime

This paper argues that discursive strategies are an important component of local labour control regimes. Institutional approaches to the relationships between capital, labour and the state need to be supplemented with an awareness of the power of representational devices to shape the range of viable options open to participants in the labour system. We use a case study of Singapore’s labour market in the late 1990s to illustrate the argument, looking in particular at the labour market discourses mobilised to justify responses to the Asian economic crisis. Firstly, we consider how a discourse of exogenous forcing was used to portray the necessity of short-term salary and benefit cuts for preserving regional competitiveness. Secondly, we analyse how the retrenchment of workers during the crisis was discursively constructed as providing opportunities for the retraining and upskilling of ‘model workers’ in the medium to long term. The discursive tropes deployed in this instance ranged from modernity and developmentalism, to national security. A variety of textual evidence from government speeches and the Singapore press is used to illustrate our argument.