Jamit Singh
IHF-SG Excellence Award For Achievement In Labour Movement
Unknown perhaps to even the Sikh community one of their more dogged sons was a person named Jamit Singh who fought tooth and nail against oppression and blatant injustice.
Even in the era he lived in, Singh was a bit of an unorthodox-kind of a lightning rod. He discarded his turn after his University days, though he kept his landmark beard and moustache.
Singh was the ‘flaming torch’ behind port workers in colonial Singapore against the Singapore Harbour Board and gamely won concessions for the people he campaigned for.
Jamit Singh was born in 1929 to a relatively well-off and respected Sikh family and was the son of a railway Station Master. His secondary education in Malaya was followed by university education in Singapore in the early 1950s.
In February 1953, Jamit and a group of undergraduates established the University of Malaya Socialist Club (UMSC) and he became its Publications Secretary. The new appointment was in addition to him being Honorary President or Secretary in other student clubs. Rightly or wrongly, his active involvement in social and political causes laid behind his adrift and consequent failure to complete his university education. He was unemployed for close to a year until Singapore’s future Prime Minister took him into his confidence and made him a full-time paid Secretary of the Singapore Harbour Board Staff Association (SHASA) in 1954.
Jamit’s proficiency in English made him a shoo-in, into the trade unions where negotiations with bosses often resulted in unfair arrangements and gridlock and street protests. One such protest was in 1955 when the Singapore Harbour Board Staff Association called out all its 1,300 members to paralyse the harbour and not service any of the ships lying in wait at the wharves.
The strike was generally peaceful and lasted 67 days ending only after a 15-point final agreement was reached after 100 hours of negotiation at the Ministry of Labour. The agreement gave the SHBSA members wage increases and offered shorter working hours thereby, also in the process firmly sealing the agreement to be an achievement of sorts for the trade union movement in Singapore.
But the restless Jamit did not just stop there. In 1956 he tried to unite various trade unions under a single umbrella ostensibly to provide a single unified voice and force. When the 1959 elections were held, Jamit began canvassing for votes for the Peoples’ Action Party (PAP). The PAP eventually won the elections winning 43 out of 51 seats.
Political fault lines soon erupted within the PAP and a historic split happened over the issue of merger with Malaysia.
Two factions arose with the PAP and the pro-government National Trade Unions Congress against the leftist-leaning Barisan Socialis and its affiliate body, the Singapore Association of Trade Unions (SATU). Jamit was one of its union leaders, and known as one of the TUC Six (TUC is an acronym for the Trade Union Congress). The other five were Lim Chin Siong, Fong Swee Suan, S Woodhull, Dominic Puthucheary and S T Bani.
On 18 October 1962, Jamit, then Secretary-General of the SHBSA and Yeow Fook Yuen were arraigned for embezzlement of funds. Their trial lasted 23 days with Yeow and Jamit found guilty and sentenced to nine and 18 months in prison respectively. Both however, appealed against the verdict and it was later alleged that the sums taken were loans assented by the Executive Council of the Association. Their prison sentences were suspended and replaced with fines.
On 2 February 1963, Jamit was arrested for supposed procommunist involvement during ‘Operation Coldstore’ and detained for a year in the Batu Gajah Detention Camp in the Malaysian federation. He was subsequently banned from entering Singapore which the government lifted in November 1990.
Jamit spent his final years upon release from prison as a school teacher in Anglo-Chinese School and thereafter went to Methodist School before retiring as its principal.
He died of a heart attack in his home on 10 December 1994 and was quietly cremated two days later.