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Thirteen months with a broken knee, part 3
Continued from Part 2. Monday, December 19, 2011, Manik showed up at Alexandra Hospital for his long-delayed knee operation. He was nervous, as anyone would be undergoing his first surgery. An operating theatre was ready and waiting for him. He changed into a gown and was placed in a gurney while surgeons and nurses scrubbed...
The perfect job
Abul Kalam thought he had found the perfect job, one that he could arrange directly with the employer and that didn’t require him to deal with an agent or recruiter in Bangladesh. Most Bangladeshi workers are recruited by a friend or acquaintance who takes $8,000 to $10,000 to line up a job in Singapore. That’s...
Tired of waiting
Unlike other stories at this site, 29-year-old Madasamy Muniyandi’s story is not one of grievous injustice. He has no major beef with his employer though he suffered a bad accident that has left him with a permanent impairment. But he’s tired of waiting. The process is very slow. As an only son, his mother...
Korean Churches & Missionary Association donates $2,500 to TWC2
En route to nearby countries for their missionary work, members of the Korean Churches & Missionary Association sought out Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2) to lend us a hand. They gave us a generous donation of $2,500 which they raised among themselves. They also paid a visit to our soup kitchen at Isthana restaurant, a...
“MOM and the Police will ensure that the worker is not confined against his will,” says Manpower minister Tharman
Below is the transcript from the Hansard of a parliamentary question asked by Mr Pritam Singh (Workers’ Party – Aljunied) on November 21, 2011. One employee of a repatriation company was jailed for voluntarily causing hurt in 2010, but from the absence of mention, it appears that no one has so far been prosecuted for...
Time-lapse: a typical evening at our Cuff Road Project
TWC2.org.sg from benjamin broekema on Vimeo. Benjamin Broekema spent nearly three hours on his feet making the above time-lapse video at Isthana Restaurant, one of the two places where Transient Workers Count Too operate our daily free meals programme for out-of-work migrant workers. At the start of the video, while the day is still bright,...
How low can a salary go?
Shobus never would have agreed to a job that promised only $9 a day. But of course that’s not what he was promised before he came. He was told that he would earn $800 to $900 a month for working 8:00am to 7:00pm. He dreamed of how much he would earn by adding a few...
Eighteen men, two windows
By the time a foreign worker comes to Transient Workers Count Too seeking help, he most likely would have been kicked out of company-provided accommodation. For many of the men we help, shelter is a cramped, stuffy room in tenement housing — that’s if they are lucky enough or rich enough to afford bedspace in...
Street work in Geylang
TWC2 community worker Kenneth Soh together with five volunteers devoted a Sunday afternoon distributing information leaflets in the Geylang area, targeting workers from China. Four of the volunteers are in the header image above (left to right): Chan Weng Hong, Guo Quanzhi, Serena Tan and Chou Yahuei. Chloe and Kenneth are not in the picture....
Not sent to a doctor for one month after the accident, further treatment still blocked by employer
By Rahul Advani Even before the start of my interview with Al Amin Kuddus, 24, he looked uncomfortable. “I have a boil under my arm” he tells me. “The pain is so strong I cannot even sleep”. As I ask him to lift his arm, he winces, hissing deeply at the pain. How he developed...
