Pane Rubati and their baker, part 1

“At the time, I totally furious.”

It is a weekday morning and I am having breakfast at a cafe with Than Lwin (name changed), a 35-year-old migrant worker from Myanmar. He sits across from me and watches as I swirl the squares of toast into my saucer of jammy yolks, preferring to keep his own kaya toast crisp and separate from the eggs. 

Over this communion of golden eggs and golden bread, he tells me about his experiences as an employee of Pane Rubati (name changed), a popular bakery chain in Singapore. For two and a half years, Than Lwin worked in the mixing room of its factory in one of Singapore’s industrial estates; the factory produced frozen buns, cakes, and pastries – that would then be shipped to Pane Rubati outlets across the island. 

Throughout his employment, he tells me, his attempts to address issues with his salary had largely been ignored by the HR department at the company. Their lack of compliance with the Employment Act was coupled with a lack of respect towards him, especially compared to the treatment that his Singaporean, Malaysian, and Chinese colleagues received.

This is the first of a two-part story of this baker’s quest for fairness – in the face of obstacles at his HR department, as well as the Ministry of Manpower (MOM). The first part deals with his experiences with Pane Rubati and their poor employment practices. The second part details his experiences at the Tripartite Alliance for Dispute Management (TADM), and how he claimed his hard-earned salary despite the misleading information he says he received.

A mix of discontents

Than Lwin arrived in Singapore in 2022, hired after two zoom interviews with the company. He started work at the mixing room of Pane Rubati the very next day.

Each typical workday, Than Lwin wakes up at 4am. He rents a room in flat in the Boon Lay area, and it is a 15-minute cycle away from the factory, where he will begin his shift at 5am. There, he works with 23 – 30 colleagues in a windowless room on the ground floor. Along two of the walls, there are dividing machines and industrial mixers of different sizes: small, medium, and large. The four large mixers can each produce batches of dough totalling 60 – 70kg. 

His job is to pour heavy sacks of flour and other ingredients into these mixers. When the machine has done the work, he reaches into the barrels to retrieve the dough, heaving 15kg lumps out each time. The dough is lifted into dividing machines which spit out bun-sized balls to be shaped, filled, and frozen.

“What kind of bread did you make?” I jump in. There is a certain excitement in meeting the maker of the pillowy buns that my family enjoys on a regular basis. The smell of fresh bread never fails to warm the soul – how can one not be excited to hear how it’s made?

Than Lwin barely pauses before rattling off a string of different names. He is almost mathematical in this list, given his well-practised daily routine. Each work shift, he produced 38 – 44 batches, with each batch consisting of around 15 kinds of bread. There is ham roll, anpan, mini anpan, focaccia, mexican, and shio butter.

“Oh, also mini butter roll, and butter roll,” he says, pronouncing ba-tah in a Japanese way, having worked in a bakery in Japan for three years when he was younger. “But which is your favourite?” I press. “All the same,” he says. Working at Pane Rubati was just a job, and one that was also more problematic than his previous roles in Japan and Myanmar. 

These problems cropped up quite soon after he began working at Pane Rubati.

In the first three months, he noticed that his colleagues, most of whom were from Singapore, Malaysia, and China, were getting six fixed days off a month, as well as public holiday pay. On the other hand, he was only getting four days off a month, which changed every week depending on the company’s schedule. He was also not compensated for work on public holidays.

When he visited Pane Rubati’s office on level 3 of the building, however, he was told that the HR team did not like him going directly to the office. Instead, they gave him an email address to write to about his problems, but his emails were often ignored. It was only after repeating his request two to three times that he was granted off-in-lieu for work on public holidays.

Overtime issues

He also started having issues about his overtime pay after five months of work.

Than Lwin’s shifts were usually 5am to 5pm, with an hour’s worth of rest spread over the day. This means he works 11 hours in total in this period. Under the Section 38 of the Employment Act, anything over 8 hours in a day is considered overtime work, and should be compensated at a rate of 1.5x the basic hourly rate. However, he tells me that from his employment agent, he had been under the impression that these shifts were his standard hours of work, and that he would thus be paid at the basic rate across the 11 hours. Even if his employment agent in Myanmar was mistaken about Singapore’s employment laws, why did Pane Rubati, a company registered and operating in Singapore, take advantage of Than Lwin’s misinformation?

Initially, he only stayed a little later than 5pm on most evenings. These extra pockets of time amounted to 5 – 6 hours of overtime a month, which wasn’t reflected on the payslips he received via the company’s HR app. Eventually, however, his work days grew longer and he stayed till 7pm on some evenings to finish the work. With this many additional hours, he requested to be compensated.

He tells me that by this point, in August 2022, he felt that he only had one channel of recourse: he had switched from emailing the HR department (futile) to talking to the level 1 manager. Than Lwin says, however, that when the manager spoke to HR, the message that was relayed back to him was: “We don’t have OT claim.” 

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