Featured Articles

The Lives of Others – an investigation into the issues faced by S-Pass holders

This is an investigative report by Jamie Lin Weirong, based on interviews with five S-Pass holders, originally from the Philippines.  They work in different trades: retail, catering, and project design and management, but together they sketch out the issues faced by S-Pass holders.  These include a difficult-to-understand hiring process, an opaque work pass approval process...

Migrant dreams extinguished on the road

Two months, before he was due to leave Singapore, Mahalingam Rajesh was looking forward to marrying his fiancee and starting afresh in his homeland. Moving back to India, his dream was to set up a fish farm and settle down – a world away from the dusty construction sites he’d been slaving on. Squeezed into...

Not one among 500 workers could read his IPA

“How many of you received the Chinese-language version of the letter from your employment agent?” asked TWC2 social worker Kenneth Soh soon after commencing his talk to Chinese workers. He was referring to the Ministry of Manpower’s  In-principle Approval for a Work Permit (IPA), a document that a worker had to have in hand upon...