From Rajasthan to the Ministry of Manpower, part 2

TWC2 volunteers discussing Hulash’s evidence before his hearing date at the Employment Claims Tribunal. Hulash has back to camera.

We had not intended to focus on MOM in Hulash’s story, but once again, as in so many other stories we have reported on, the inadequacies of MOM just keep seizing attention.

After being fired

We’re now talking about the period after Hulash has lost his job. His Work Permit has been cancelled and he has been put on a Special Pass. His salary claim is in progress. He shares a room with friends paying (despite his loss of income) $350 a month.

Hulash is trying to get food support from his employer, otherwise he’ll be completely out of money soon.

Under the Employment of Foreign Manpower Regulations, employers (including former employers) are required to provide food to their ex-employees until the case is resolved and the workers properly repatriated. Despite this legal responsibility, Hulash has received no food support at all. He complained to MOM about it and below is a WhatsApp conversation between an MOM officer and him over this:

Part of the WhatsApp conversation between the first MOM officer and Hulash

Hulash’s English is weak, and in some parts of the conversation, Hulash provided a TWC2 volunteer his desired reply in Hindi. The volunteer then translated his reply into English.

There is vegetarian and there is vegetarian

Hulash knew what the company meant by “vegetarian” food. He had received it before. Vegetarian food varies depending on cuisine, and what is palatable for a Chinese may not be palatable to a Westerner or vice versa. Even South Indian vegetarian is not palatable to a North Indian.

This is Chinese Singaporean vegetarian food. Rajasthani vegetarian food is nothing like this.

Two days later, another MOM officer communicates with Hulash about the meals issue.

Half an hour later, the conversation continues.

As readers can see, MOM tells Hulash to work it out with the company when Hulash said they’re not speaking to him, which is hardly surprising since Hulash is suing them at the Employment Claims Tribunal. What helpful advice!

Moreover, MOM says the company “cannot” provide a monetary meal allowance. Really? Cannot or will not? Nothing in the law forbids that. Here is the relevant portion of the Employment of Foreign Manpower Regulations 2012, Fourth Schedule, Part III, under the heading “Cancellation of work permit and visit pass and duties before or upon repatriation of foreign employee“, section 11A says:

11A. Except as the Controller specifies otherwise in writing, the employer is responsible for —
(a) the upkeep and maintenance of the foreign employee in Singapore, including the provision of adequate food and medical treatment; and
(b) bearing the costs of such upkeep and maintenance.

The MOM officers seem to be taking a very narrow and literal reading of the law in saying that if an employer wants to discharge their responsibility in kind (as food), even if unsuitable, then MOM cannot require that it must be in the form of a meal allowance. Yet even under such a narrow reading, there is a lot that MOM can do that it is not doing. It shouldn’t be so lenient about the vegetarian option that the employer is proposing but which Hulash has said is culturally incompatible.

Nor should MOM ignore the issue of transport. Providing meals at a location where the worker is not staying is to impose an additional cost on the worker, and MOM should see through this attempt to subvert the intent of law.

A simple Google search reveals a number of restaurants in Singapore serving Rajasthani and Punjab food. MOM can ask the employer to contract with one or more of them and with a meal delivery service such as Grabfood or FoodPanda to make thrice-daily deliveries to Hulash. Yes, cost will be far higher than the cheap meals catered to dorms, but nothing in legislation says that there should be a cost cap. If MOM wants to stick to the letter of the law, then they should insist that the employer provide culturally compatible meals regardless of cost.

The more obvious question is why the law is so badly phrased. Why not require employers to provide a monetary meal allowance of a value commensurate with the actual cost of meals, at least as an option where catered meals are unavailable or logistically impractical?

We don’t know what the thought process was behind the drafting of this part of the law, but it strikes us at TWC2 that the approach implicit in the phrasing is in keeping with the way MOM tends to treat migrant workers as wards of employers.

On the one hand, MOM may want – in selected areas – migrant workers to be treated well, but seem almost paranoid about giving them autonomy. MOM seems to conceptualise the relationship between employers and migrant workers as something not too far removed from that of an owner and his dog. Treat the dog well, Give food. But who gives his dog money to buy its own food?

29 May 2024

On 17 May 2024, MOM posted a response to this article and its twin From Rajasthan to the Ministry of Manpower, Part 1.

In their boilerplate opening paragraph, MOM accuses us of “inaccuracies and misinformation”, but provides no example of such. We stand by our story.

Specifically, MOM said that “MOM and TADM officers did not receive any request from Hulash to assist with obtaining his face scan metadata from his employer. Hulash requested help with employment records like timesheets and payslips, but did not respond after MOM officers asked for more details to assist him.”

We’re a little incredulous that MOM may not realise that “face scan metadata” is the same thing as “time sheet”. When companies operate a digital clock-in system, modern technology uses a finger or face scan to determine the identity of the worker clocking in. Included in the stored data would be the time the worker arrives at or leaves work. A printout of such data would be the time sheet.

In a WhatsApp message 15 December 2023, Hulash informed an MOM officer he had “neither time sheet nor salary slip”. That statement, said in relation to an upcoming appointment regarding his salary claim was, as MOM acknowledges, a request for help in obtaining such documents. The reply from the MOM officer one minute later was “Where are your time sheet and salary slip?”, which made no sense since Hulash had already said he was not given these documents. It’s true that Hulash did not directly answer this question, but what answer could he possibly give? It should have been obvious that the question should have been posed to the employer – where are Hulash’s time sheets (face scan metadata) and salary slips; why have they not been issued to him?

MOM wrote in its response to our articles that “We would like to clarify that a worker’s ability to recover salaries is not compromised even if his employer does not issue itemised pay slips. The onus is always on the employer to prove that salaries have been paid.”

This is an oversimplification of the reality. At TADM, workers are asked to state the amounts they are claiming. Workers would need time sheets and salary slips (particularly when partial or incorrectly-calculated payments have been made) to compute the balance owed. Without these details, the owed balance cannot be calculated, and the claim amounts may be wrong. Incorrect claim amounts are a serious hurdle when a case is escalated to the Employment Claims Tribunal. For MOM to say that a worker’s ability to recover salaries is not compromised is shocking in its naivety.

On the matter of food, MOM wrote that “MOM had been engaging with both Hulash and his employer since October 2023 on Hulash’s dietary needs. The employer had provided vegetarian food for Hulash, and was willing to provide additional vegetables for him to cook his own meals, but Hulash rejected the offer.”

Indeed, we have 19 pages of WhatsApp conversations between Hulash and MOM, spread over several months, largely discussing about food, but the long and short of it was that the employer was only offering rice-based vegetarian food, when Hulash had made it clear repeatedly that this would be culturally alien to him. The issue is not whether vegetarian food was being offered or not. Our article made it clear that the issue was about the cultural appropriateness of the meals being offered.

Hulash had proposed early on that instead of trying to jump through hoops getting Northwest Indian-style meals for him, the easiest solution was for the employer to just give him a food allowance and he would do his own marketing and cooking.

His MOM officer WhatsApped him on 16 October 2023 saying “I cannot tell your boss to give you money. Because I tell the boss to give you food.”

This simply proves our point, that MOM was not effective in solving this problem. MOM went around in circles. On 20 October 2023, for example, the officer messaged Hulash to say, “If you want the dry ration, you can call MWC. Rice or Instant Noodle or canned food they have.”

Does MOM think that rice and instant noodles are part of the Northwest Indian diet?

Four months later, MOM might have finally realised that the Northwest Indian diet did not include rice or noodles. A message dated 22 February 2024 said Hulash could collect chapati flour from MWC at 51 Soon Lee Road. But Hulash was staying nowhere near there, and if he had just been given a monetary food allowance, he could buy the same much closer to his place of residence. Why go through the trouble of travelling to Soon Lee Road with all the time and cost involved?

So, when MOM said in their response that they “had also referred Hulash to the Migrant Workers’ Centre, who reached out to Hulash to provide food support,” and that “Hulash similarly declined the offer”, they should also have disclosed the details of the offer (like we have done here), without which readers may get the impression that Hulash was being unreasonable.

Likewise, when MOM wrote “While the employer provided food for Hulash, it was not accepted due to Hulash’s personal preferences,” MOM’s choice of phrase “personal preference” is also misleading. It was not a case of personal preference. This was a case of cultural inappropriateness.

Yet, despite the difficulty in getting culturally appropriate catered meals, it was clear from the start that the Gordian Knot could be cut simply by giving Hulash a monetary food allowance. That’s exactly what our Part 2 article’s point was: Why was it impossible for MOM to require employers to give a monetary food allowance? It is a question MOM avoids in its response to our commentary, instead accusing us of inaccuracy or misinformation, of which there was none.