Voices of Change: Exploring Sentiment Shifts and Responsibility Attribution in Singapore’s Labor Debate

• In Event: Public Policies in Comparative Perspectives

Abstract

Singapore’s lack of minimum wage laws and social security protection for foreign labor in the private sector has fostered heavy reliance by companies on foreign workers, constituting 47% of the workforce in 2022. In the past 4 years, however, the youth unemployment rate increased amongst citizens, which has led to various economic demands by citizens to force Singaporean firms to employ citizens (i.e. through nationalization quotas) and this has coincided with an often xenophobic rhetoric in online forums and media against migrant labor.

Using thousands of 2019-2023 posts from Hardwarezone, a Reddit-like forum popular among unemployed Singaporeans, I address key questions. First, I explore whether online sentiment among the unemployed correlates with labor policy changes, and I find that the share of negative words written by Singaporeans on Hardwarezone fell from 72% to around 49% after the government introduced nationalization quotas. Second, I test responsibility attribution amongst Singaporeans by exploring if they assign more or less blame over their economic status to the governing party, PAP, or private firms after implementing employment nationalization quotas.
I find that the share of posts critical of the PAP declines from 53% to 19% post-policy implementation with greater blame attribution to companies and government entities like the Ministry of Manpower. Third, I analyze changes in the online mentions of economic demands directed to the PAP and collective action coordination to vote against the PAP. The preliminary results suggest that economic demands decreased by one-third of their pre-implementation levels while collective action mentions fell by approximately 42.3%.

Author

• Meshal Alkhowaiter, London School of Economics