Undermining Poor Women's Labor and Caregiving: State Welfare Policies, Social Workers and Differentiated Deservedness in Singapore

“Work-life balance” as public problem has come to the fore in Singapore as in other developed countries. Women’s capacities to balance wage-earning and caregiving has received a great deal of attention. In Singapore, research (including my own) has focused on the norms among middle-to-high income families that heavily involve foreign domestic workers and grandmothers. Less attention has been paid to the families and women for whom these are not viable options, and for whom “work-life balance” is a problem they lack access to. In this paper, I argue that the state’s approach in public policy has produced uneven outcomes for women across class lines and thereby deepened the reproduction of inequalities across generations. I focus on how the state’s welfare approach, with its principle of what I call “differentiated deservedness,” constraints the lives of mothers who are poorly educated and in low-income households. I first outline the multiple ways in which they and their needs are negated in Singapore’s pronatalist policies of the past three decades, before turning to a discussion of how the implementation of specific policies targeted at them, and the everyday practices of social workers who work with them, cast them as unimportant and undeserving both as workers and caregivers. I end the paper with a discussion of the importance of paying attention to this group of mothers: their invisibility in scholarship holds up the myth that “everyone has maids” and obscures the multiple ways in which public policy has failed to address the needs of care in contemporary Singapore.