Hard at Work

Gerard Sasges received a PhD from UC Berkeley in 2006. In 2012 he joined the National University of Singapore where he is an assistant professor in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies.Ng Shi Wen is a photographer, educator and chronicler of everyday life. She is the founder of Photo Rikiki and has taught at the National University of Singapore and School of the Arts, Singapore.

“Their stories provide as good a glimpse of life as it really is in Singapore: raw, unfiltered, and in flowing Singlish. There is struggle, frustration, boredom, angst, but also grit, determination, hope and gratitude.” "It is a book of very personal stories and I found myself drawn into each vignette. It is a credit to the student interviewers and the editors that they have been able to achieve this effect again and again, especially considering that most of the accounts are just two or three pages long...The book contains no analysis per se, but its sixty stories provide a wealth of qualitative data for anyone—scholar, journalist, civil servant, or politician—who might want to tease out policy lessons, or simply understand better how Singapore works and how Singaporeans work."“The candor and colloquial tones reflect the decision of the student interviewers and editors Gerard Sasges and Ng Shi Wen to leave out commentary and, as much as possible, let the workers speak for themselves […] Hard at Work fills a vacuum in the country’s inequality debate that has been reignited in the last few years.”The interviews are often warm, authentic and relatable. The best ones are even funny, entertaining and inspiring. . . . Hard at Work stands out as an impressively authentic record of the real struggles of work and life in pre-pandemic Singapore. Reading it, one feels less alone in these dark, uncertain times.”