Men at work in Singapore

Two weeks ago, I played the role of Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock's "Rear Window" ... but I did not discover any crime, I was just taking shots of men at work on the building they are demolishing.

Slowly, slowly this building is going down, and these men were performing the tricky work of disassembling the very scaffolding on which they stand, which supports the dirty blue tarpaulin stretched around the building to prevent the dust from flying around the neighborhood.


A piece of scaffolding just removed is about to be dropped by the man holding it. I was glad to see that these construction workers were secured by a rope. It is not always true on construction sites in countries less advanced than Singapore. I could see that this safety measure slows their work down, as they have to adjust the rope and move it around when they go from place to place on the scaffolding.

Sometimes, on my way back from the office, I see these dark-skinned men sitting on the street exhausted after a long day of hard work, waiting for their transportation. You often see in the streets of Singapore these men from South India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, sitting on open flat-bed trucks as they are being ferried back and forth between construction sites and the dormitories where they live during the construction projects.

Has slavery really been abolished? At least these men get paid, and one likes to think that they have chosen this work, that they are making a lot more money here in Singapore than they would staying in their home countries where jobs are scarce, and that they send it back home to support their families.

But once in a while, among his peers on a flat-bed truck, I see a man with a noble face, accented by an aquiline nose and fiery eyes under a fierce brow and a dark mane, and lean and sinuous muscles bulging under a ragged T-shirt and I wonder: Is this the Spartacus who will rally his companions in a revolt against their soft-bellied masters who exploit their labor?