Ratham calculating how much he is owed in salary

Ratham (not his real name) comes to TWC2 in September 2024, seeking advice how to get his salary paid before he goes home. Now 40 years old, he is an experienced construction supervisor, having worked in Singapore for most of the 16 years since 2008.

Up till late 2023, his employer (a construction company we will refer to here as Bungalow Builder) paid his salary regularly, but this year, salaries have been paid later and later. The December 2023 salary was not paid until March, which was some two months late. The January 2024 salary was not paid until May and the February salary not paid till August (six months late).

In May this year, his back began to hurt, and sometimes there was a shooting pain down his right leg. He saw a doctor and has been on light duty since June, but the problem remains and Ratham believes it is going to need prolonged rest to recover. He has decided to quit and go home for a while.

Naturally, he wants his salary fully paid up before he leaves, but this has become a sticking point. The employer said something – it was all quite vague – about paying the balance owed AFTER Ratham returns to Singapore from home leave.

“He not accept my resignation,” says Ratham, “only wants me to go home leave.”

Ratham was not agreeable to such an arrangement. What should he do now? he asks TWC2.

Assessing Ratham’s evidence

Before giving any advice about his options, our case officer asks to review what evidence Ratham has, firstly about not being paid and secondly, about his salary entitlement.  Ratham has sheaths of papers, and some parts of his evidence seem to be solid, namely bank statements and time cards.

Ratham’s time cards for December 2023, July and August 2024

From his bank statements, we can see that although often paid very late, he has received his salary up till (and including) April 2024. It’s the salary for May onwards that is outstanding. Knowing which months are in question is the easy part.

The harder part is: what’s his salary entitlement for May onwards? To calculate that we need to know what his basic salary is and how many overtime or rest day hours he worked. As mentioned above, Ratham has detailed time cards, but when we investigate the question of his basic salary (which also has a bearing on his overtime pay rate), we hit a snag.

Here’s where the history becomes relevant. Ratham joined Bungalow Builder in early 2020, and his In-Principle Approval for a Work Permit (IPA) shows a basic monthly salary of $936 (equivalent to $36 per day, on the basis of a 26-day month). Since then, he’s had pay rises annually – he has been promoted to supervisor – and he says his 2024 basic salary is now $73 a day, double the rate he started with in 2020. This translates to $1,898 per month if we use the same 26-day basis. However, there is no direct evidence showing his current basic salary.

The employer should have updated the Ministry of Manpower’s information system each time Ratham’s salary changed, but clearly has not done so. From case law (Liu Huaixi v Haniffa, [2017] SGHC 270), the salary stated in the IPA is by default the reference salary in case of dispute unless a party can prove that a different salary applies. The employer’s failure to update MOM’s database effectively shifts the burden of proof (about any new basic salary) onto Ratham, which is not terribly fair since it is the employer who is responsible for documentation. How can one ask the worker to prove his new salary when it was the employer who was responsible to documenting it in the first place?

Unfortunately, MOM does not require employers to update an employee’s salary details if the salary has gone up. See this webpage (accessed 20 September 2024). This does not seem like good policy. Employers should be required to keep such information up to date if dispute resolution at the courts relies on such information.

There are other ways by which an employee can prove that a higher basic salary was in effect. One would be if, every time the salary and terms of employment changed, the employer gave a formal letter confirming so to the employee. Good employers do this routinely. Another way would be if the employer issued detailed itemised payslips each month on which the monthly basic salary is clearly shown. Good employers do this routinely too.

But readers will notice that such documentation is also the responsibility of the employer to produce. Failure of the employer to do either or both likewise undermines the employee’s ability to prove his current, improved terms of employment.

And that’s what we found when we reviewed Ratham’s papers. There was no letter from the employer confirming his salary increase; there were no detailed itemised payslips. How is Ratham to prove that his current basic salary is $1,898 per month?

All Ratham has are photos he managed to take of payment vouchers prepared by the company; they ar so poorly prepared, any bookkeeper doing things in this slipshod way should be fired. As readers can see below of an example, the voucher only has the employee name and some enigmatic figures. It does not show the company name. Neither does it have a date or the salary period for which these numbers are said to be for. Needless to say, there is no indication what those enigmatic numbers are based on.

A so-called salary voucher

The indirect method

However, since Ratham has bank statements and time cards, we could work backwards from these details to derive the rates used by the employer for basic pay and overtime. Fortunately, when we did this exercise we could see that the employer had indeed applied a basic salary of $73 a day for Ratham. He can then use these documents to prove his basic salary.

Ratham can count himself lucky. We’ve had other cases where, when we tried the same reverse engineering method, we found the employer using different rates or, worse yet, rates that vary from month to month, as if salary was an entirely whimsical matter. In such cases, it gets really difficult for the employee to assert his rights to proper salary.

So once again, we stress the importance of enforcing existing rules requiring detailed itemised payslips. If employers get away with ignoring them, workers have no easy way to prove their salary entitlement, and what we then have is a situation inherently biased against workers.

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