Seven checkboxes on page two

Wolshad (left) shows our volunteer his documents

The very first of the ten Principles says:

No fees are charged to migrant workers

The employer should bear the full costs of recruitment and placement.
Migrant workers are not charged any fees for recruitment or placement.

The Dhaka Principles were developed by the Institute for Human Rights and Business (IHRB) after wide consultation with business, governments, trade unions and civil society. They were first shared publicly at a migration roundtable in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in June 2011 and launched on 18 December 2011. See these reflections penned to mark the tenth anniversary of the Principles.

It was a shipyard worker who handed us a copy of the document referencing the Dhaka Principles. We will call him Wolshad; it’s not his real name but we need to protect him from retaliation; we will call his employer Trogar. Our understanding from Wolshad is that Trogar is a contractor at Keppel shipyard.

(Keppel and Sembawang shipyard have since merged into Seatrium.)

How Wolshad got that document we will narrate in detail below. First, we will describe what we saw on that document and what it seemed to mean.

The document had the letterhead of Keppel Offshore & Marine, but it seemed to be a standard form completed, signed and stamped by the Director of Trogar. Since we have never seen such a form before, we can only make an educated guess as to its purpose. It seemed to be an application by Trogar to ask Keppel to “sponsor” a two-year Work Permit for Wolshad. We would add that to the best of our knowledge, legislation and regulations relating to labour migration in Singapore do not use the word “sponsor”, so we cannot say what is the meaning and significance of this word being used here.

Our sense was that the form was between Keppel and Trogar. It had nothing to do with the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) and, despite its title (“Electronic Work Permit Application Form”), it would not have been the actual application submitted to MOM for Wolshad’s Work Permit – which submission would have been done online.

At the top of page 2 (imaged below) the section subtitle says “Section A2: Dhaka Principles (EPP)”, followed by a sentence, “All Subcontractors are to comply and align your recruitment standards as per Dhaka Principles: Employer Pays Principle (EPP). No worker should pay for a job – the costs of recruitment should be borne not by the worker but by the employer.”

The opening sentence is followed by seven pairs of Yes/No checkboxes asking the form signatory (in this case Trogar) to declare whether the recruited worker paid for any of these (abridged here):

• Fees for application, hiring, processing, etc
• Fees paid to agent, subagent, intermediary or employer,
• Fees/costs for skills tests, training, medical exams, etc
• Costs associated with documentation, e.g. passports, certificates,
• Transportation, lodging or relocation costs after job offer had been made,
• Costs of post-arrival orientation, training, medical exams, etc
• Whether worker paid for any legal requirements – deposits, bonds

All seven items were checked “no”. The credibility of these declarations, signed and sealed by the Director of Trogar, is the point of this story.

Wolshad came to TWC2 for assistance over his salary dispute with his employer Trogar. The roots of that dispute went all the way back to the events surrounding the way he was recruited. Naturally, we obtained from him the details of those events in order to better understand the facts of the matter.

It should be said that the Keppel form described above has no real relevance to his salary dispute. Trogar, however, thinks it has – and that was why they gave him a copy of the form, to convince him that he had no basis to dispute his salary – but they are mistaken.

Nonetheless, what Wolshad told us how much he paid to get his job stood in such sharp contrast to the seven checked boxes on the form that this story could not but emerge.

How Wolshad got recruited

In late 2022, twenty-something Wolshad decided he would look for a job in Singapore. He asked around in the township where he lived (in Bangladesh) and got to know someone he refers to as “agent #1”.

Agent #1 asked for 4 lakh Bangladeshi taka (400,000 taka) which, at the exchange rate prevailing in late 2022 was equivalent to around $5,200. Wolshad borrowed money from his brother and others, and paid. This sum was referred to as the “deposit” because at this point in time, no firm promise of any job was on the horizon.

What agent #1 did, however, was to enrol Wolshad into a training course. The training was just five days, during which he learnt the absolute basics about pipe-fitting. Since the training centre was in Dhaka, some distance from his hometown, he had to sleep at the training centre itself. Put some bedding on the floor, grit, grime and grease notwithstanding, and sweet dreams.

He had to buy his own food.

Do the math. $5,200 for five days’ training with zero-star accommodation works out to $1,000 a day.

Along the way, Wolshad was introduced to agent #2, a Dhaka-based man operating out of a small office, who showed up one day – Wolshad recalls that it was on or around 5 January 2023 – with another man whom Wolshad refers to as the “company delegate”. The latter was actually a Bangladeshi native but represented the prospective employer, a Singapore company. The company delegate conducted interviews, at the conclusion of which, one man was selected for the position of pipe fitter and 13 others (including Wolshad) were selected to be general labourers. The company had only one vacancy for a pipe-fitter – it’s not clear if this was made known to Wolshad earlier.

The general labourers were told they would each get a basic monthly salary of $620. The sole candidate selected to be the pipe-fitter would get a bit more, but Wolshad is not sure about the exact salary promised to him.

Upon the arrival of the IPA, the second major payment to agent #1 came due, and Wolshad paid him 3 lakh 30,000 taka. In addition, the preparations in late March included medical tests and other exit registration as required by the Bangladeshi government, and Wolshad paid 70,000 taka for all these. In total (inclusive of the $5,200 deposit), Wolshad forked out eight lakh, or about $10,200 (roughly US$7,500 or €7,000).

Note: Wolshad was not asked to pay Dhaka-based agent #2. It was agent #1 who collected 7 lakh 30,000 taka, i.e. the full amount minus direct disbursements for medical or documentation.

A side note: the $10,200 he paid to his recruiter and for other expenses would be equivalent to 16.5 months of monthly basic salary.

Finally, a ticket materialised. The flight would be on 5 April 2023 (three months after the interviews). They were going to Singapore, at last.

The night before the flight

The night before the flight, all fourteen men, recruitment fee paid up, were summoned to the Dhaka office of agent #2. The agent then told him that there had been a “mistake” on their IPAs. Since there were 14 separate IPAs, one for each man, the mistake had been repeated 14 times. Whereas the basic monthly salary was stated as $620 (probably more for the sole pipe-fitter), the “correct” salary would be $18 per day. On the basis of 26 working days a month, $18/day translates to just $468 a month.

Naturally, there was an uproar. However, the men all knew that having paid hundreds of thousands of taka, there was nothing they could do about it. They couldn’t possibly walk out of the office and not take the flight the next morning.

Deceptive recruitment and abuse of someone’s position of vulnerability are indicators of human trafficking. See this ILO document (page 4).

After the uproar exhausted itself, the men were then told that they would be video’ed. In the video, they would have to say that they did not pay any money to secure the job. Knowing full well that resistance would be futile, all 14 men complied. The video was made, though none was given a copy. As if all that wasn’t enough, the men were then moved into another room where each had to sign a small stack of paper, all written in English. They had no chance to read any of the content; the agent’s hands were strategically placed to obscure much of the text leaving only the signature box open for signing. No copies were given to any of the men.

One year later –  salary claim

Fifteen months later, in June 2024, Wolshad came to TWC2. He explained that in the preceding months, he was not paid the $620 basic monthly salary stated in the IPA. Interestingly he wasn’t paid at the rate of $468 either – that was the rate that agent #2 said would be the “correct salary” the night before departure. Instead he was paid at a rate of $510 a month, a figure somewhere between the two. Where that $510 figure came from, he didn’t know. In any case, it wasn’t the rate he had agreed to.

This section of the story (about the salary claim) is only tangentially related to the Keppel form. We’re going through some key details in case readers are interested – we’ll avoid all the other gory details – but also to show how undisciplined the recruitment and payroll operations are, leaving open plenty of opportunities for abuse.

TWC2 helped Wolshad calculate what he was owed, including overtime, for which he was also short-paid. He then filed a formal complaint with the authorities. The details of the numbers in his salary claim are not important here. Instead, it’s what happened next that is interesting.

Soon after he filed his claim, Wolshad was asked to go to his company’s office. There he was given a copy of the Keppel form discussed above.

The Trogar officer did not point to Page 2 of the form (with the seven checkboxes). Instead the officer pointed to a different part of it in which Trogar had said something about salary to Keppel.

In that (salary) part of the form, the figure of “$510” appears twice.

Basic Monthly Salary: S$510
Fixed Monthly Deduction for Housing: S$110
Fixed Monthly Deduction for Food: S$0
Fixed Monthly Salary after taking into account Food and Housing: S$510

Prior to accepting the job, Wolshad freely agreed to $620, which was the salary figure stated in the official IPA document. Any other figure that was either unknown to him, or unilaterally presented to him while he had been put under duress, cannot constitute contract.

It may be of interest to compare these numbers with the numbers stated on the IPA, which was the document that Wolshad was shown prior to his taking the job, and which, in law, represents the salary declared under oath by the employer to MOM as being what had been agreed between parties as the terms of employment:

The IPA is unequivocal that Wolshad’s basic monthly salary would be $620.

However, as we’ve mentioned, this story is not about Wolshad’s salary short-payment. It is about what happened at the time of his recruitment and the huge sum of money he had to pay. And how those events contrasted with what we saw on the Keppel form.

Educated guess

Our educated guess is that shipyards in Singapore such as Keppel (now Seatrium) are under pressure from their customers – international shpping and oil-and-gas majors – to demonstrate that their labour supply chain is free from human rights violations. Putting workers under debt by charging recruitment fees is considered a violation, as doing so eviscerates their bargaining power, ability to resist unfair and unsafe instructions from management and freedom to quit. Increasingly, first-world countries are enacting legislation that puts legal liability on companies for having such violations within their entire supply chain. See our recent article Council of the European Union adopts new supply chain rules. Companies can be sued in their own countries’ courts for complicity or negligence. Thus, the international customers would want the Singapore yards to do whatever is necessary to prove that violations are eradicated.

In this context, the making of the video the night before departure wherein the workers, put under duress, were told to say they had not paid any money, and the seven “no” answers on page 2, solemnly signed off by the Director of Trogar, begin to make sense.

What remains is whether the international customers of the yards are happy to accept such “evidence” of a clean supply chain at face value.

13 September 2024

Following the publication of the above article, Seatrium reached out to us to work together to address the issues that Wolshad was facing. TWC2 was more than happy to engage with Seatrium. Another of Wolshad’s colleagues also faced similar issues though we did not mention him in the above article. The first issue and the focus of the article was on the likely misrepresentation by the two workers’ employer (a contractor for Seatrium) with respect to their recruitment costs. A secondary issue was the salary dispute the workers had with their employer (not Seatrium). Seatrium carried out an investigation, particularly over the first issue.

The investigation having been concluded, TWC2 is pleased to carry this statement from Seatrium:

Seatrium would like to thank TWC2 for bringing the matter to our attention.  Your extensive engagements directly with migrant workers well complement our in-house initiatives to ensure that our migrant workforce is treated fairly by our contractors at all times.  In this regard, we are pleased that our collective efforts have led to the workers being reimbursed their salary arrears from their employer, who is also our contractor.

Our investigations uncovered that the contractor had made certain inaccurate representations during their recruitment process.  The contractor had also utilized the services of an Overseas Training Centre (OTC) that was found to have engaged in recruitment practices in violation of Seatrium’s policies.

We have removed the errant contractor from our approved contractor list.  We have also issued a clear directive to all our other contractors informing them that we strictly disallow the use of the aforementioned OTC.

Seatrium is committed to upholding the Dhaka Principles for Migration with Dignity, and expects all our contractors and their associates to do so as well.

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