This is the story of Baitob, a shipyard welder, who endured five months of negative salary despite having paid $8,000 to secure the job. With the support of TWC2, he filed a salary claim against his employer.

We first wrote about Baitob in the story Sometimes there is light, in which we detailed his journey to the shipyard job and how much he had to pay along the way. In that story, we mentioned that he also had a salary issue after starting work. Here, we go into the details of that.

Baitob arrived in Singapore in April 2024 to work for Wirodar Engineering (a pseudonym) and earn a basic monthly salary of $384. He had hoped to repay the $8,000 loan he took out for the recruitment fee he paid to a Bangladeshi agent within 1.5 to 2 years. Although this salary of $384 is a mere quarter of Singapore’s sectorial minimum wage for cleaners who are citizens or Permanent Residents (currently $1,570), it is perfectly legal as Singapore does not set minimum wage for low wage foreign workers (i.e., work permit holders) in any occupation.

The In-Principle Approval (IPA), issued by the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) is a document encapsulating the details of employment. The information shown therein would have been provided by the employer, on the basis that these were the details agreed between employer and employee. It therefore indicates the terms on which the employee agreed to take up the job.

Baitob’s In-Principle Approval shows a shockingly low basic salary of $384 a month

Little did Baitob know that Wirodar would not only fail to pay him his full basic salary as declared in the IPA but would also deduct $357 from it. Baitob was shocked when his first basic salary for May 2024 amounted to negative $49.70. Below is the May salary breakdown. 

May 2024 Salary
Basic salary: + $307.13
Deduction: – $357
Net Salary: – $49.70

Baitob found out that the $357 deduction was for meals, accommodation, laundry service, and utilities from the agreement paper Wirodar asked him to sign. To our relief, he told us he refused to sign it. Despite his refusal, the company implemented the deductions anyway as can be seen from their subsequent salary calculations.

The list of deductions, totalling $357, presented to Baitob for his agreement.

The negative salary was offset by additional pay for overtime and rest day work. This resulted, despite having worked two or more overtime hours daily and often working on Sundays, Baitob’s net pay was a meagre amount of $225.79 for May 2024, less than half of what he hoped to earn.

Net Salary: – $49.70
Additional salary (Overtime and Rest day): + $247.57
Net Pay: $224.70 (paid by bank transfer)

This payment pattern persisted for another four months, during which Baitob’s fixed salary (net of the illegal deductions) remained in the negative. In such a situation, if Baitob did not work overtime, he would have to pay his employer. Another way to see it would be like this: his normal working hours would be free labour.

Over five months of work, he earned only $1,150. By October 2024, six months later and unable to endure the consistently low wages, he sought assistance from TWC2.

Illegal deductions and many more violations of the Employment Act

Upon the discovery of massive deductions, TWC2 quickly confirmed that these deductions were illegal for several reasons. Firstly, Baitob’s IPA indicates a deduction of “$0.” This means the job was offered to him, and he accepted the job on these terms. Secondly, Baitob never provided written consent for these deductions subsequent to joining the company. Thirdly, as of October 2024, Baitob’s fixed salary was still registered with MOM as $384 with no deductions. To legally reduce a fixed salary, employers must comply with a two-step procedure: obtaining the worker’s written consent and reporting the change to the IPA salary. Neither was done.

Baitob’s In-principle Approval shows no deductions.

TWC2 also helped Baitob verify, through accessing the Ministry of Manpower’s (MOM’s) information system regarding salaries, that the IPA figures, including the “no deduction declaration” from earlier in the year, have not changed.

Baitob’s salary information, as retrieved from MOM’s data system, confirming that he was not liable for deductions for housing and other things.

Baitob and TWC2 faced challenges calculating his owed salaries, having to piece together a jigsaw of fragmentary information. Like many employers involved in salary disputes, Wirodar did not regularly provide payslips to Baitob. This in itself was a violation of the Employment Act. Naturally, our assistance began by requesting MOM to press Wirodar to produce payslips.

Through this process, we uncovered many more Employment Act violations by Wirodar, beyond the illegal deductions. Even when Baitob obtained the asked-for payslips with MOM’s assistance, they were poorly prepared and failed to meet the format and detail requirements under the Employment Act. Nor did Wirodar pay salaries on time, instead making two bulk payments to cover five months of wages. They also failed to provide Baitob with an employment contract or a “key terms of employment” document. Each of these actions and omissions constituted a clear breach of the rules.

Nonetheless, with our assistance, Baitob managed to calculate the amounts owed and successfully filed a salary claim against Wirodar mainly for (1) short payment of basic salary and (2) unlawful deductions. The total claim amounted to approximately $2,400, most of which he managed to recover from Wirodar within a few weeks, as recounted in our earlier story.

Although Baitob’s case concluded satisfactorily, he disclosed that many Bangladeshi coworkers — earning the same monthly basic salary of $384 — continued to work for Wirodar under similar conditions: illegal deductions, irregular payments, and a lack of payslips. However, they were too scared to come forward. Our happiness at seeing Baitob succeed in his claim was heavily tempered by the knowledge that there were many more workers out there suffering in silence.

Cases like Baitob’s continually remind us that huge parts of Singapore’s economy profit from the exploitation of low-wage migrant workers.

While MOM takes pride in strictly enforcing laws and regulations and claims to care for low-wage workers, it rarely addresses the systemic vulnerabilities that leave migrant workers susceptible to exploitation. These vulnerabilities hinder workers from fully taking advantage of the legal protections in place. For example, we have consistently flagged issues such as rampant payslip violations and other breaches of overtime and rest day rules, restrictions on job mobility, and insufficient effort to eliminate exorbitant recruitment fees in both source countries and in Singapore.

Unlike Baitob, who bravely reported these injustices, his colleagues remained silent, fearing job loss and repatriation, which would expose them to ruthless debt collectors.

MOM’s assurance that any worker with a valid claim would get permission to seek new employment without being repatriated does little to encourage reporting of illegal practices by employers like Wirodar. The marine engineering sector, in particular, has an infamously low transfer success rate because, unlike the construction sector, there are far fewer employers (and job vacancies) in the marine sector. This means that a worker terminated for filing a salary claim — or for any reason — faces a high likelihood of being repatriated without securing another job.

MOM’s prohibition on cross-sector transfers compounds the problem by denying laid-off marine sector workers the chance of looking for construction jobs.

Any enforcement system that relies mainly on the principle of “we will investigate if workers file complaints” is unsuitable for such a situation. Workers are too scared to file complaints most of the time, so investigation and enforcement can never be more than sporadic and narrowly focussed on a single worker’s complaint.

Instead, Singapore needs to step up its game on two major fronts:

Victim protection. There’s a need to reassure victims that they will have a good deal of protection from financial disaster should they step forward to lodge complaints. There are two main prongs to this: (a) an easy way to find new jobs, including access to a wider range of available jobs, so they are not repatriated to face long periods of unemployment; (b) stamping out massive recruitment fees (in Singapore and in source countries) so that victims do not have a debt and moneylender barrier to speaking up.

Monitoring. In a situation where we know victims are disempowered from speaking up, enforcement should rely more on regular, intensive monitoring of employer behaviour, through mandatory employer reporting.

For example, now that MOM has set up a standard requirement and format for pay slips, a centralised portal can be set up for all Work Permit holders’ payslips. Employers should be required to enter details into an online format and print payslips through it (or let Work Permit holders access payslips electronically using SingPasses). Once such a system is in place, it will be easy to monitor

  • whether payslips (and salaries) were issued/paid on time;
  • whether pay rates conform with IPA rates;
  • whether there are unusual deductions or other items on payslips that merit a closer look;
  • whether there was excessive overtime;
  • whether overtime and rest day pay were paid at the proper rate; and so on.

None of these ideas are new. But, as Baitob’s case underscores, there is an urgent need for systemic change to protect all migrant workers from exploitation.

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