This is a love letter to all the TADM officers in MOM.

Their job is no easy task. I have not personally seen it, but workers tell us that on Level 3 of MOM’s building in Bendemeer is a floor full of harried officers who deal with a slew of disagreements between migrant workers and their employers. It is challenging to understand the woes of a migrant worker, told through an unfamiliar tongue and broken English. On top of this, they have to survey the often patchy and contradictory evidence that both sides present, and try to get them to compromise. When there are targets to meet and more workers than you can see in a day, the pressure can be exhausting.

Never having personally spoken to an officer, I cannot possibly claim to fully understand the difficulties of their job. But from what I have seen of the workload borne by TWC2’s  case officers, salary claims take an extraordinary amount of time and energy to deal with.

I found myself in the same position of having to listen to a worker’s salary complaint last evening and to grasp its contours. Mamoon (name changed) arrives at around 7pm, tired from a day of work. His face has a sheen of sweat, and wears the worried expression that newcomers to TWC2 usually have. Some of them are afraid of being seen by their co-workers who may report to management that so-and-so is speaking with an NGO; some are worried that their stories will be dismissed as inconsequential or hopeless by TWC2’s weary staff and volunteers (no, we never do that); others are anxious because debtors are at their family’s doorsteps and, not having received their salaries, there is no money to pay off loans.

Mamoon’s worries are a little more rudimentary: he just wants to know what he can do because, he tells us, he has been underpaid for four months. What avenues of recourse are open to him? I take down his details, and go through the basic questions that our caseworkers ask:

“Boss pay you by bank transfer or hand cash pay?” He tells me that he is paid by cash even though he lives in a dormitory in Tuas and the law necessitates that his employer pay him by bank transfer.

“Timecard have?” “Have, but alibaba writing. This boss no counting correctly.” He says there aren’t even whatsapp conversations with his supervisor that mark the start and end of each workday. So Mamoon keeps a record of how many hours he works each day on a phone app.

And as for payslips, he tells me he is never given a copy: he says that numbers are written on the back of these timecards, his signature collected, before they are whisked away again by his boss.

When he realises that I can more or less understand the inflections of his English, and am not accusing him of lying about his problems, his anxiety subsides. But mine rises. In the silence between us, we know that his evidence is not strong. Without official documentation of his work hours, or a paper trail of how much he had actually been paid, his claim stands on shaky ground.

How do I tell him that his case could boil down to his word against his bosses’? How do I tell him that, for all his hard work, he might be left with the bitter taste of injustice – because of a lack of evidence that is not his fault? How does one tell him that despite our laws, and how safe our country is, we’ve seen workers going home with much less than is righty theirs?

He looks at me calmly, waiting for me to speak again.

“Okay,” I begin, now resolved that I should refer them to TWC2’s case officers for assistance. “Brother in office can try, but we cannot promise okay?”

Our case officers are always wary of giving men false hope, or having to deal with the disappointment of unrealistic expectations. I do my best to guide Mamoon gently through what he can expect from a salary claim. He will likely lose his job and if he is unlucky as other workers we’ve seen, he might be harassed in his dormitory, or his next boss might receive malicious messages from his current employer to defame him. While he will not have to go home until his claim is settled, he may not be allowed to seek a new job in the meantime. However, he will receive our help and advice for free if he decides to proceed with the claim. These bits of information are repeated for emphasis, couched in warm tones of assurance, and bathed the deepest empathy I can muster.

I start the process of writing a referral note to our caseworkers, and by the time it’s done and Mamoon leaves, it is past 8pm.

I’d spent an hour with just one worker and his salary complaint, and I was drained. How do case officers do this, day in and day out? Case officers, both at TWC2 and TADM, are not just calculators who crunch the numbers, but people who do this very human work of mediating between workers and their employers, between fears and hopes. It is work that is time-consuming, and can, quite frankly, be emotionally draining.

Love by the numbers

As the number of salary cases by migrant workers have risen over the years, for both TADM (up by 55% in 2023 over 2022) and TWC2 (up by 88%), case officers are under an inordinate amount of stress. The problem, however, is bigger than these numbers suggest. What isn’t captured in MOM’s official data is (1) the workers whose claims were not filed, or were withdrawn, and (2) that the ‘full recovery’ of their salaries might exclude months where the men have worked but did not have the grounds to claim for. Likewise at TWC2, not all the workers we speak to eventually proceed with their claims; for Mamoon, this remains to be seen.

We have heard stories of workers forgoing their claims for months worked just because they didn’t have the right evidence. Workers have told us that they were given the impression that their rights to remain in Singapore would be revoked if they didn’t settle for their bosses’ (much lower) offer (here). We have heard workers tell us that they were pressured to withdraw the case during the mediation process, when their bosses threatened a future ban on ever returning to Singapore. The latter is not within the power of bosses, but workers don’t know that, and that’s how the threat has bite.

All this to say that unless we address the roots of the problem, it will not go away. We can build as many AI chatbots as we want, and force case officers to deal with more workers than they can humanly cope with – but salary complaints will not be substantially reduced until there are fewer salary abuses to begin with, and that can only happen when there are structural improvements.

At one level, as Mamoon’s story illustrates, workers’ rights to proper documentation must be enforced; without which claims can go unpursued or unfairly disadvantaged. Payslips must be detailed and accurate. And given to workers. Salaries must be paid into bank accounts so that bank statements can show the truth of the matter. Employers who fail to do these – which are anyway in the law books – should be penalised once a case has come to the attention of the authorities.

At a deeper level, we need to understand that unethical employers feel they have a vice-like grip on their workers, stemming from the rule that workers have no job mobility. Employers can cancel Work Permits at any time and repatriate them. If workers want to seek another job without going home, they need their employer’s consent. Exploiting this hold over workers, employers may feel that they can get away with salary abuses because workers would not dare complain, for fear of losing their jobs altogether and being repatriated with debts hanging over their families.

The antidote is simple. Let workers resign and seek new jobs without having to get the old employer’s consent. Once employers realise they can lose their workforce if they treat them badly, it would be the most natural thing in the world to treat their workers better, and be prompt and accurate in paying their salaries.

For the sake of the mental health of our beloved case officers both in government and in civil society, these fixes are overdue. They can’t be working late into the evenings, tracing the shapes of injustices suffered by a never-ending stream of migrant workers.

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