Jahirul assaulted and thrown to the wolves, part 2

In Part 1, we wrote about how Jahirul lost his job with a gardening company only a month and a half after coming to Singapore. He reported to the police that his boss punched and assaulted him. Learning that it was his very first job in Singapore, we asked how much he paid to get it. Jahirul said “ten lakhs” by which he meant 1,000,000 Bangladeshi taka, which is equivalent to $12,100 at the exchange rate prevailing in December 2023 (when Jahirul made the payment).

We ask him to recount how he got this job. But even before we got to the chronology, there was already a twist. Jahirul had never intended to be a gardener, he said. He was looking for a construction job.

Well, then, what happened along the way? We were interested.

Refrigerator assembly plant

At age 26 and married, Jahirul felt that his job in a refrigerator factory in Bangladesh was getting him nowhere. Paid only 15,000 Bangladeshi taka a month (about $180), spending his days fitting parts of a refrigerator together to make a final product, he felt he could do better as a construction worker abroad. He knew of someone near where he lived who had a reputation for helping young men like him find work abroad, and plucked up the courage to approach this guy in the second half of 2023.

Jahirul does not quite refer to this guy as an agent, maybe because this guy also spoke about a “main agent” in the capital city. So, we’ll call him the fixer. Jahirul has never met the main agent.

Jahirul told the fixer that he wanted a construction job. There was some discussion about a construction skills certificate, which was not something that Jahirul had. The rule in Singapore is that any migrant worker wanting to work here as a construction worker has to pass an SEC(K) exam to prove some basic trade skill that is relevant to the industry. Yet, the outcome of the discussion did not appear to be a decision to send Jahirul to a skills training centre prior to looking for a job. This was strange.

Then, even though he didn’t have such a certificate in hand, an In-Principle Approval (IPA) for a Work Permit came through. It was for a job in JKM Technologies Pte Ltd, a company in the Process sector. The occupation was stated as “Process maintenance and construction worker”, as can be seen in the image below, which we took of the IPA from his phone. The job came with a basic salary of $416 a month, with no deductions or fixed allowances added on.

When Jahirul showed us the documentation, we could see a key issue that the authorities really need to investigate, or their policy needs review. It is this:

JKM’s website has a section titled “Outsourcing” which lists a number of roles or occupations, e.g. electrician, excavator operator, driver, general worker. These occupations sound really similar to jobs in the construction sector, and the website gives the impression that JKM also operates as a labour supply company, supplying manpower to other companies. But Jahirul seemed not to know that that might have been his fate – as some kind of outsourced temp labourer – in this JKM job.

In the absence of an SEC(K) qualification, Jahirul had no skills or certification that would make him anything more than a general worker. The $416 basic monthly salary in the JKM Technologies IPA was commensurate with that. But general workers tend to be assigned all sorts of tasks, many of which would be indistinguishable from construction work.

If the answer to the first question is that workers employed by Process industry employers do not need SEC(K) skills training and certification, then the next question becomes:

Three months’ wait

But we’re running ahead of the story. The JKM job never materialised (even though an IPA was issued). Money changed hands, but it never led to a job.

Two weeks after the JKM IPA was handed to him, the fixer asked to be paid his fee of ten lakh Bangladeshi taka ($12,000).

And then nothing happened for three months. Whoever was in charge of buying a flight ticket to Singapore didn’t buy one for him. Jahirul got increasingly frustrated, and frustration reached full panic mode when the first repayment installment for the bank loan fell due. He screamed at the fixer. Where was he to find the money to repay BRAC Bank when he hadn’t even left Bangladesh? Jahirul had borrowed 250,000 taka – a quarter of the recruitment cost – from BRAC bank and the terms of the loan was for monthly repayments of 30,000 taka.

(The remaining three quarters of the recruitment cost was borrowed from relatives and informal money lenders, i.e. loan sharks).

To mollify him, the fixer agreed to repay the first 30,000 taka on his behalf.

Still, there was no sign of a flight ticket. Till today, Jahirul does not know what went on behind the scenes.

We pause his telling of the story temporarily to circle back to the issue of the SEC(K) certificate. Jahirul explains that he was given to understand that this would be arranged by the employer after he had started work in Singapore. He wouldn’t have known it but this sounds suspicious to us.

What do you know of the training requirement before you can take the trade test? we ask him. Jahirul tells us that he was given to understand that it would involve attending about five classes, roughly one class a week, lasting maybe eight hours. To us, this does not sound right. Our understanding is that the curriculum would be more than that.

The point is not just that there was likely a lot of misinformation about this requirement, it was also, as Jahirul stressed, the justification for the high recruitment fee; the $12,100 paid to the fixer would include the training and exam cost, he was told.

IPA cancelled

Jahirul waited three months for a flight ticket before, totally fed up, he found out from friends who had worked in Singapore how to access the MOM website and check the status of the IPA by keying in his passport number,. To his horror, he saw that it had either been cancelled or expired.

He screamed at the fixer again. It turned out that the fixer didn’t know the JKM IPA was gone.

TWC2 has seen too many instances where IPAs are issued to prospective workers abroad, but no arrangements are made to bring the workers in. Surely it should be suspicious that an employer has applied for an IPA, yet seems to be in no hurry to employ the worker. What is the benefit that such an employer is getting from what looks like an abuse of the system?

Second IPA

The fixer found another job for Jahirul, and an IPA was soon given to him. The employer this time was Koh Kim Keng Landscaping, a sole proprietorship. However, the fixer demanded an extra 60,000 taka (about $700) from Jahirul for the “trouble”.

Desperate to start on a job – any job, even a gardener job would do – Jahirul asked about a flight ticket. This time, one was bought, but the flight was a month later, and he had to wait some more.

When he finally reached Singapore in May 2024, it was a relief. At last he could start earning and have some hope of repaying his lenders. The latter would be a long haul. His basic monthly salary at Koh Kim Keng Landscaping was only $468 a month. It would take 27 months of basic salary to earn the equivalent of the $12,100 + $700 he paid for this job. Another way to see it would be that for the next 27 months, every dollar he earned from his basic salary would go to repayment of loans. In reality, it would be more than 27 months because there is interest to be accounted for, and daily living expenses.

Absurd though it all sounds, by 20 June 2024, such calculations anyway became irrelevant. Jahirul had lost the landscaping job, as recounted in Part 1.

On 4 July 2024, an extremely distressed Jahirul told TWC2 that MOM had ordered his immediate repatriation. His attempt to work in Singapore has left him much poorer than when he was working in the refrigerator factory. He will now have to deal with creditors demanding the proverbial blood.

Sure, the actors in the story are private actors, but the system the government designed gives them plenty of space to exploit and abuse, while the same system gives migrant workers no wiggle room at all.

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