The Ministry of Manpower has once again refused calls for a law making it mandatory for employers to give their foreign domestic workers (FDWs) a day off every month and the refusal has led to some fairly negative reports and commentaries (see here and here).

According to a Channel News Asia report, acting Minister of Manpower Gan Kim Yong said accredited employment agencies are required to use a standard contract and that the contract already stipulates the number of rest days the employer is obliged to give every month (note: the range is 1 to 4 days), and if the employer wishes to engage the service of the domestic worker on their rest days, the employer has to compensate the domestic worker.

Curious about the terms of contract between an employer and a foreign domestic worker, I went to Case Trust website and dug up the employment contract and the explanatory notes (all are in MS-Word format). After reading the contract, I must say Gan does have a good point.

The standard contract drafted up by CASE is actually pretty comprehensive and detailed. It even specifies the nature and scope of jobs that the domestic worker should perform. If the domestic worker is not agreeable to the scope and nature of the job required by a potential employer, she can refuse to sign the contract, assuming there is no undue pressure from the agency.

And the contract, when signed, makes it compulsory for the employer to provide for the upkeep of the domestic worker at all times. Even if the employer decides to terminate the contract prematurely, upkeep has to be maintained until the worker either goes home or finds another employer. And, in the agreement between employer and agency, the employer has to agree not to obstruct the re-employment of the domestic worker in the event of termination.

The only reason as far as I can see for support of legislation mandating a rest day for foreign domestic workers is that such a law, if passed, will apply across the board, whether it's a Case Trust accredited or non-accredited employment agency. The only concern is that foreign domestic workers working under non-Case Trust accredited agencies might be shortchanged by both agency and employer.

If that is the case, then proponents of legislating mandatory rest day for foreign domestic workers are barking up the wrong tree. They should really be calling for legislation making accreditation compulsory, i.e. licensing. The problem would be solved if only licensed employment agencies that adhere to the kind of standards set by Case are allowed to operate. Accreditation in itself is voluntary and has little bite unless either majority of employment agencies are accredited or employers mostly shun non-accredited agencies.

However, one can still argue that even though there is a legal contract, the domestic worker can still receive the short end of the stick because some of them are not well-versed enough in the English language to understand their rights under the contract. A translated equivalent of the contract in the worker's native language in the same signed contract will resolve this issue.

I think the Case Trust accreditation scheme for employment agencies is certainly the right way to go. The only chink in the armour is that accreditation is not compulsory. If there is a way to make accreditation compulsory, then it might be unnecessary for a legislation mandating compulsory rest days for FDWs.

Just read TOC's interview of Martyn See; it will be interesting to see if Speakers Cornered will be given the green light for public viewing. Rather ironically, if it is given the red light, then I will definitely watch it on Youtube. Just like how I had no initial interest in the Singapore Rebel film until it was banned.

Guess that's the kaypoh in me: 'Wah, kena ban ah! Must have good show to see one!' And perhaps some of the Hokkien kwailaness in me too: 'You dowan me to watch, then die die I must watch.'

In 1988, then-Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto criticized Ayatollah Khomenei's fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses. I was listening to a BBC World Service interview where she argued eloquently about how the fatwa had transformed an issue of blasphemy into one of free speech which rallied the liberal West, despite their multiculturalist misgivings, around Rushdie; even worse, the dramatic nature of the fatwa generated so much publicity that it caused The Satanic Verses to become a huge bestseller, thus 'spreading the blasphemy even further' she said.

Last year, after Hong Kong University philosopher Professor Ci Jiwei spoke about agency and order, he was asked about censorship. His reply was, if my notes serve me right, that in of itself, censorship was neither good nor bad though it suggested the domination of one group over others. More importantly, it was inefficient - an important way that we feel that we have 'agency of freedom' is our ability to attribute our power to the constitution of our subjectivity, i.e. we believe that we have freedom and responsibility for our actions because we can attribute our actions to our will and decisions. What censorship does is that it makes us aware that something other than our will and decisions is acting upon us, interfering with our power and will, dominating us. And that it is in human nature to resist, in small and big ways, domination when we become aware of it.

Or to put in a Singlish way: PAP kiasu and kiasi brings out the kaypoh and kwailan in me.

I've just watched the final episode of the BBC's documentary, Around the World in 80 Gardens - South East Asia: Bangkok, Singapore and Bali (available on the BBC iPlayer for a week) and it was agonizing.

Monty Don, the BBC's gardening guru, secured an interview with MM Lee who was described as the Master Gardener. When asked what inspired him to make Singapore a city in a garden, the alarmingly aged and wispy haired Minister Mentor said that he had found Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok to be hideous, awful concrete jungles. He paused. And then said that he probably shouldn't say these things in public. Oh dear.

NParks also sent Monty a horrendously cheesy coffee table book, The Tale of the Magical Seeds, which does all those things that Alfian Sa'at rages against in his 2001 anthology, A History of Amnesia, which presents Singapore's history prior to 1819 as a tabula rosa, erasing the deep roots of this island's Indo-Malay heritage. To his credit, Monty managed to read through the book with a straight face and voice, without sounding smug, patronizing or condescending, instead it was the cartoon 'history' that came across as smug, patronizing and condescending of our human and natural history.

Later Monty did make it clear that he found Singapore's gardens to be beautiful, neat, tidy and well-planned, but he admitted to being disturbed by the pervasiveness of the state and the corporation in our landscape (Bishan Park and Shangri La Hotel respectively) and described it as 'soulless'.

Monty did heap unreserved praise on a HDB community garden project led by Wilson Wong; he was excited by how passionate young people took action, organized, obtained resources and actually did something rather than just comprain. However the final shot showed the community garden's official opening plague by Mrs Lim Hwee Hua; I'm not certain that Monty realized that the party-state is probably deeply involved in the project through NParks and various PAP controlled grassroots organizations like the Residents' Committee.

Of course, none of this should detract from the fact that young people like Wilson have managed to tap resources from the gahmen apparatus and the party-state's patronage networks (nod to dansong) to do something worthwhile for his fellow Singaporeans. Which is much much more than I've done.

It was an agonizing program to watch because while Monty made some valid points and comments, I was also asking who was he to pronounce judgment on us if Singaporeans derive real enjoyment and benefit. Given the brief whistle stop nature of his visit, he both under-estimated the extent of the party-state's gardening hand (e.g. in the community garden) but also over-estimated it.

If he had scratched beneath the surface, he would have discovered the daily dramas of HDB void deck hanging gardens where neighbours could be doing their own thing or helping to look after each other's plants or disputing over territorial spaces. Or the vitality and diversity of the local gardening trade with Singaporeans buying bags of black Indonesian volcanic soil, chicken manure fertilizer from Malaysia, tree saplings, flowers, shrubs from all over the world.

There are still spaces where the totalitarian ambition, as termed by Yao Souchou, of the party-state has yet to be fulfilled. Long may that continue to be so.

The latest issue of Survival includes 'Debating Bush's Wars' (free access) with contributions from Peter Wehner, a former White House speech writer, the Brookings Institution's Philip H. Gordon whose article 'Winning the Right War' frames the debate as well as Dean and Professor of the Practice of Public Policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Kishore Mahbubani.

Always a provocative writer, Mahbubani claims that 'America, as a geopolitical actor, has stopped thinking and acting strategically.' I would dispute that US policymakers had ever abandoned means-ends rationality, if that's what Mahbubani means by thinking and acting strategically and the changes, however slow, to policy since November 2006 provide evidence of that.

However, Mahbubani's faith and optimism in the US also leads him to say that the current state of affairs can be fixed relatively easily, concluding that 'With a little less moralising and a lot more pragmatism, America may once again find itself on the winning side in the global political arena.' This is a little bit hard to square given how Mahbubani had criticized the US for Guantanamo and for underestimating how much this had damaged 'a precious national asset - moral authority in the eyes of billions of people'. Guantanamo represents the nihilism that is the victory of pragmatism in extremis.

Pragmatism may be an attractive slogan, appealing to what is practical, what works but it doesn't tell us works for what? For who? And as Prof Chua Beng Huat's Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore (1995, esp Ch 2-3) tells us, pragmatism may present itself as non-ideological but the reverse is often true - the 'ideology of pragmatism' often leading to dogma and dysfunctional outcomes.

If only things would revert to the lessons drawn from a somewhat selective understanding of the past: 'America succeeded in the Cold War by looking for potential allies and partners everywhere and by being ready to make the right political compromises to keep such partnerships.' Which seems to translate into: 'Let authoritarian regimes be. ;)' The flip side is that many these 'political compromises' turned sour; one of those being with a certain Mr Osama bin Laden in the days when the CIA supported the mujahideen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan .

Those who are watching the developments in the Mas Selamat Kastori manhunt would have noticed the ire and ridicule targeting the Ministry of the Home Affairs. When the Ministry issued a press statement about the escape of a Jemaah Islamiyah leader, they mentioned that the fugitive walked with a limp. The security agencies probably assumed that this description would have been a boon in their manhunt and the public would be able to help spot anyone with this physical disability.

However, the wolfs of public opinion turned that "limping" fugitive lead into the Ministry's bane and it became the main criticism of the prison break and manhunt. Questions on how a limping fugitive could have escaped and why the authorities could not catch a limping fugitive within hours tore up the credibility of the Home Affairs Ministry and its agencies.

Conspiracy theories also spawned out of this "limping" fugitive description. How could a limping man escape in the first place as it defies all sense of expectations on a jail break? Conspiracy theorists then filled in the information vacuum created by the Ministry. They concluded that the authorities are not honest about what actually happened as there is no way a limping man could escape unless the escape was not really an escape but a pretext for another event e.g. Mas Selamat died in custody.

From a public relations and not from a manhunt point of view, with the benefit of hindsight, the Ministry could have dropped that description of Mas Selamat. The photographs with and without goatee were enough for a public manhunt. Furthermore, things would have turned ugly if there were mistaken identities and people with limps were unfortunately roughed by by vigilantes on the streets, simply because they fit the description of the fugitive the agencies gave..