Coping with foreign workers who don't speak English

OK I awoke this morning to see my Facebook wall flooded with angry Singaporeans protesting against the PRC bus driver who went on strike because he couldn't explain the child fares policy to some Malay passengers - clearly, migrant workers from China are unlikely to speak much (if any) English and thus when they encounter locals who don't speak Mandarin, this kind of shit happens. I'm kinda aghast as well with the kind of reaction from local Singaporeans as well who post one-liners in response to that on social media, clearly they are not happy with the situation but it also irks me that Singaporeans are so inarticulate when it comes to expressing their feelings over what is quite a complex situation. I tend to be rather unsympathetic to Singaporeans who are inarticulate like that, as if posting a line like, "oneself check onself izzit?" is any kind of commentary that is going to help the dire situation. Yeah the situation is awful, but let me share with you my perspective when it comes to foreign workers around the world having encountered them in so many countries. Let's get some of my favourite Lulu (Michelle Chong) skits up whilst we're talking about PRCs in Singapore.

In this day and age, low-cost foreign workers are a fact of life - you can't turn back the clock to the 1980s when they were a lot more rare. I will talk about foreign workers in three places: the UK, American and the UAE (United Arab Emirates). Let's start with the UK where I live. Since 2004, we have had a huge influx of foreign workers from Eastern Europe when the EU expanded eastwards - the Labour government then welcomed the Eastern European migrant workers with open arms whilst countries like France, Austria and Germany required them to apply for work permits before they could get a job. But in the UK, they didn't need work permits, they could literally hit the ground running and start working the day they arrived (the paperwork can be sorted before payday). That was 13 year ago and there is now a well-established Eastern European minority in the UK now, with the biggest group being from Poland. Polish is now the second most spoken language in the UK after English, overtaking Welsh - well, despite the fact that there are more Welsh people here than Polish people, only a tiny minority of Welsh people are fluent in Welsh whilst all Polish migrants will speak Polish.

Many of the Eastern European migrants arrived in London as that's the most obvious place to start if you are looking for work - it is the capital city, the biggest city and has the most number of employment opportunities. Some have moved on to other parts of the country in search of other opportunities but most have settled in London and it is pretty common to see Eastern Europeans working everywhere these days in every single industry from IT to catering to finance to education to tourism. The standard of English varies: there are the highly educated Eastern Europeans who speak English with an accent, but have no problem whatsoever communicating in an English work environment; then you have those who have limited ability in English and are reliant on their colleagues to help translate complex instructions into their native language. However, there are virtually no Eastern European migrants who speak no English at all - English is taught as a second/foreign language in all Eastern European countries so most migrants speak at least some English.

So are there situations where we have had problems with Eastern Europeans who don't speak English? Not really. Let me give you an example - I had to use the services of a plumber some time back as I had a problem with my sink. The plumber who arrived is Hungarian and he came with a 'foreman' type guy who was also Hungarian. The foreman spoke English fluently, the plumber struggled with the language: however, the foreman acted as the translator and once it was established what the plumber needed to do, the foreman said, "okay, he will fix the sink now, I'm on the mobile and any problems, call me and I will translate." When the plumber finished the job, he called the foreman and then passed the phone to me, the foreman then asked me if I was happy with the work. It seems that this company uses a lot of Hungarian plumbers who do not speak much English, but this arrangement with a bilingual 'foreman' (for want of a better word) at the end of a mobile phone seems to work and I was very happy with the service. Would they have saved more money if they didn't need to hire a foreman to perform this role? Perhaps, but most big plumbing companies have admin staff anyway to deal with customers, so it wasn't such a big deal. I was a happy customer and would use them again.

But this division in labour within this plumbing company is interesting: it shows that those who do have the English language skills will be placed in positions where they would interact with the English-speaking clients, whilst those who speak little or no English are still able to do their job but with the help of a strategically placed colleague only a phone call away to resolve any issues. If a plumber who spoke little or no English turned up at my flat, then that would have been a problem, but the company had planned ahead to make sure any communications issues could have been dealt with. Likewise, this reminds me of a situation I had in Miami when I asked a supermarket employee what time the supermarket closed. This was an older lady who was working behind the deli counter, preparing food. She shook her head and said, "No hablo ingles" - she couldn't even say, "I don't speak English". Anyway, since that was Miami, I switched to Spanish and promptly had a conversation with her, since I do speak Spanish rather well anyway. However, in the meantime, another younger supermarket employee had witnessed me asking that older lady a question and had rushed over and asked me, "Hello Sir, can I help you? Do you have everything you need?" Again, clearly evidence of good team work going on in that supermarket there. So even if I didn't speak Spanish, I would have still been okay in that supermarket.

This brings me to the situation in Dubai (in the UAE) - you see, the vast majority of the people in Dubai are in fact foreign workers and locals are in the minority in Dubai. Thus the lingua franca in Dubai is always English, the local education ensures that English is taught to a very high standard at an early age, because it is necessary to speak English to communicate with the vast number of foreign workers there. The level of English spoken by the foreign workers vary: typically, those who speak English very well come from the Philippines and sometimes India. Then you have vast amounts of foreign workers from various places like Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and various parts of Africa who speak little or not English - the workers who do speak English well end up working in customer facing jobs, such as in supermarkets and malls where they are cashiers, managers or sales assistants. Those who don't speak enough English end up working in jobs like cleaners, lorry drivers, construction and maintenance where they work together with other workers from the same country and there will be an English-speaking foreman who would also function as the translator for the group. Needless to say, these foreign workers who spoke little or no English are paid a pittance for the kind of work they did in Dubai whilst those who do speak English commanded higher salaries and had better living conditions.

So let me give you an example of how foreign labour is organized in a place like Dubai - there is an Indian restaurant near where I lived where you could get a really good meal for a decent price. There are the official waiters in their nice uniforms, then there are the 'cleaners' whose job is to clear the tables once the diners have finished their food and make sure the table is ready for the next group of diners. The waiters speak English, the cleaners don't and when there's something that needs to be done, the waiters would give orders at the cleaners to get it done in Hindi (and a variety of other Indian languages). So when you arrive at the restaurant, you would be greeted by a waiter (in English, of course), be shown to a table and the waiter will take your order. The food is then prepared in the kitchen by chefs who don't speak English and the dishes will be carried to your table by the cleaners whilst being supervised by the waiter who is there to ensure that the diners get what they want. The cleaners never speak to the guests - only the waiters do, clearly this is because of the language barrier. There seems to be a pecking order in that restaurant, with the English speaker management and waiters ranked higher than the non-English speaking staff; but all in all, you will have a pleasant experience at that restaurant. Tasty Indian food, excellent service, reasonable prices, the place is always packed - so the fact that some of the staff do not speak any English isn't an issue at all because everything is just so well organized.

Coming back to the PRC bus drivers in Singapore who don't speak English, well SMRT are simply not acknowledging the gravity of the situation. If these PRC bus drivers don't speak any English at all, then giving them a few weeks of English lesson isn't going to make much difference at all. Let's talk about how much training is necessary in order to achieve a basic level of conversational English that would allow the bus driver to give directions ("I want to go to Dhoby Ghaut, does this bus pass by there?"), read road signs, explain what the fares are and deal with other matters that may arise on a bus in English such as a passenger being taken ill or being involved in an accident. We have a guide here for English speakers to give an indication of how long it would take you to master another language - a lot of it depends on how similar the language is to your mother tongue. So if an English speaker wants to learn Swedish for example, then it is a category 1 language - the easiest - as there are many similarities between the two languages. But if an English speaker wants to learn Korean for example, then that's a category 5 language - the hardest, as the two languages are radically different. So for a Chinese person who has little or no knowledge of English, the two languages are so different that it would be the equivalent of a category 5 language challenge. So even if you are just trying to achieve a basic level of conversational proficiency, that would take at least 1100 hours of learning: to break that down for you, if you attended classes for 10 hours a week, that's still 110 weeks or over 2 years before you can achieve that standard of conversational English. We may laugh at Lulu's attempt to speak English, but really, what happened on this bus was no laughing matter.

Is SMRT making that kind of investment in their staff? Hardly. SMRT have claimed that they do send their staff for English lessons, but for how many hours a week and for how many weeks in total? How many English lessons do they have to take before they are allowed to drive a bus on the roads of Singapore and is there an exam they need to pass at all? They have grossly underestimate the training needs of these PRC bus drivers. Oh dear, it seems like there is a serious lack of quality control on the part of SMRT, but then again - these are PRC bus drivers at the bottom of the food chain who are being paid a pittance anyway. Would any organization invest a lot of money training their staff who are at the bottom of the food chain? Clearly not - a decent two year part-time English course is expensive. Indeed, with the EZ Link System in Singapore, the vast majority of the passengers do not ever need to speak to a bus driver. That is why we have ended up in the situation where you have PRC bus drivers who can barely speak any English ending up in such situations - it isn't the first time and it won't be the last. This is something that one would just have to get used to in Singapore, given that cheap foreign workers from China are here to stay and 70% of Singaporeans have voted for this.

But wait, is this yet another excuse for us to indulge in a bout of nasty PRC-bashing? Are Singaporeans seeing the past through rose-tinted lenses? Time for a history lesson: back in the 1980s when I used to get the bus to school and the Chinese-Singaporean bus drivers then didn't speak a word of English - perhaps they spoke a little Malay but when it came to communicating with Indian passengers, it was down to other Chinese-Singaporean passengers to step in and translate for them. We merely accepted that yeah, he's an old man and a bus driver - he's not going to speak any English and the well educated young people who speak English well, they don't want to work as bus or taxi drivers, that's why we had to deal with the Ah Pek bus drivers who don't speak any English and it was really no big deal. We just accepted things the way they were and dealt with the situation - the Chinese-Singaporean bus drivers of the 1980s didn't speak much or any English at all. My father is in his late 70s and is exactly like that: he speaks Mandarin, Malay and a few Chinese dialects, but doesn't speak any English. I need to point out that absolutely nothing has changed since the 1980s when it came to bus drivers in Singapore not speaking much/any English - it is only the nationality of the bus drivers that has changed in the last 30 years. Why did Singaporeans simply put up with the situation back then and why are they kicking up such a big fuss now? Nothing has changed at all. The situation is exactly the same as it was 30 years ago!

I do have two solutions that would improve the situation with PRC bus drivers' inability to communicate in English - the first would be to do what the Hungarian plumbers did, bus drivers could have a radio system to connect the bus directly to a bilingual English-Mandarin speaker sitting in a call center, the operator would then function as the translator for the passenger who cannot speak Mandarin. This isn't that unusual - a system like that operate on most trains anyway, but it could be expensive and installing such a system would increase the cost of public transport. There are always mobile phones of course, or in a worst case scenario, I would like to think that you could rely on the goodwill of Chinese-Singaporeans to step in and translate. The second solution I have is to recruit bus drivers from poorer countries like Moldova, Turkey or Russia - given that English is an Indo-European language, it is far easier for Moldovan, Turkish or Russian people to learn it than for a PRC to learn English. You could teach them far more English in far less time. In any case, Singaporeans totally hate the PRCs anyway - but they have nothing against Moldovans, Turks or Russians coming to work in Singapore. Ironically, they would probably fit into Singaporean society far better than PRCs ever will.

So there you go - I hope I have shown you how foreign workers are organized in other countries. At the end of the day, I don't see anything wrong with PRC migrant workers who don't speak English, but I definitely think that there is something seriously wrong in employing them as bus drivers when a bus driver needs to communicate with passengers in English. Use PRC migrant workers by all means, but put them in roles where they don't need to speak to the public or at least have some kind of contingency plan where you have a 'foreman' in place to facilitate communication with the public. This is a HR issue that has been badly handled by SMRT, they well and truly fucked up. Let me know what you think please, what do you think needs to be done to improve the current situation then? Leave a comment below, thanks for reading.