Introduction — Gross National Distress

Introduction

This research begins with the image of docility cackling, screaming, resisting and pushing against the flow of assembly lines. This image takes place at the beginning of 1973, when female workers of a television assembly plant in Singapore were affected by episodes of Mass Psychoenic Illness(MPI). Certain workers would enter into states of trance while others started to scream and faint. This is seen by some to be a latent solution to swelling tensions not addressed in the factory.

At the time of this incident, Singapore was a developing nation in the midst of implementing its industrialisation programme. Industrialisation was a strategy recommended by economic advisors to entice foreign firms to invest in the state.The core of the strategy was to provide the firms with low wage labour and create incentives for investing. As a result, policies were put in place to favour interested parties over certain labour rights. The initial objective was to create a good amount of labour intensive and low wage work that could also function as a solution to the problem of mass unemployment.

In order for the strategy to be a success, workers had to adopt what the state termed as “productivity consciousness”. Deemed to be vital for Singapore’s survival, this mindset required workers to maximise the quality and quantity of output while minimising wastage of resources and labour inefficiencies. The state also tasked the unions with reshaping the attitudes of workers. In response to this, I devised a web of methodologies such as matchmaking images, recontructing archival material and oral interviews.

There are three things that will be introduced to the reader in this publication. The first being productivity - more specifically, productivity consciousness. A term coined by the National Productivity Board of Singapore. Productivity Consciousness is ideally a worker’s awareness of labour efficiency and minimisation of wastage. One of the goals of the National Productivity Board was the promotion of productivity consciousness in workers, management and trade unions. By trying to grasp this concept, there will be an attempt to look into strategies employed to increase productivity amongst workers. The second to be presented is Mass Psychogenic Illness(MPI). There will be an attempt by the research initiator to study this subject matter and think about how incidents in Singapore can be further understood through the social psychological framework. The third concept, which is where this publication will take a turn for the speculative, is Gross National Distress(GND). Gross National Distress was used by then secretary general of the NTUC(National Trade Union Congress) to describe the troubling circumstance of wages not reflecting growth in Gross Domestic Product. C.V. Devan Nair who was also the president of Singapore from 1981-1985, said that if the wages of workers were stagnant while GDP continued to grow, there would be Gross National Distress amongst the workers.

The conceptual basis of this research is to examine the relationship between productivity consciousness and Mass Psychogenic Illness.

In the process of examining this relationship, I propose that the findings be categorised into the originally facetious term,
Gross National Distress(GND). Through the framework of artistic research and practice, GND will attempt to push the idea that MPI is a pioneering method for the expression of tensions unvoiced. Additionally, by learning from the various sources of information that I studied about negotiation, imagination and presentation, I believe that GND can become a living organism that cultivates expressions of tensions unvoiced. From the section Inudstrial realisations to Experiences of a friend, I will be addressing research inquiries that arose from this process. From the section Gross National Distress to Graveyard shift girls, I will attempt to present these inquiries through works that are being made through various audiovisual experiments.