For many Singaporeans, the process of resigning from a job is straightforward. The law makes it clear that every employee has the right to resign at any time and that employers cannot reject resignations. This is one of the few points of leverage an employee has over an employer – a threat to disrupt the manpower balance in order to make a statement.
Although migrant workers are entitled to the same right to resign, many workers often do not utilise that right when faced with bad employers or working situations. Why not?
I speak to a few workers at TWC2’s free meals programme to get a sense of their situation.
After having invested significant amounts of energy and money to get the job in the first place (recruitment fees, often thousands of dollars) resigning from a job is often the furthest thing from workers’ minds. Employers know this, and workers’ reluctance to leave a job due to the perceived sunk costs can be capitalised on by employers – if they choose to be unethical and exploitative.
The workers I speak with came to TWC2 due to salary problems which had gone on for months before they finally came to us for help and file a complaint with the Ministry of Manpower (MOM). I take the opportunity to enquire about their decision to stay with their company instead of resigning even though their employers were not paying them. Empty promises regarding the payment of salary (coming soon!) emerge as a common thread among the workers I speak to. Even though the men did not totally believe their employers’ promises, the general consensus is that they were scared to leave the job. Their concern was that there was no clarity as to whether, after quitting, they would anyway be successful in claiming their rightful salary. It’s a big gamble. By playing into this fear, employers are able to continue exploiting the labour of migrant workers, while withholding their salary.
Owed $10,000
One worker is still working for his employer. He is currently employed in the renovation sector and has been having salary problems for six months. He reckons that he is owed around $10,000 in overdue salaries. He has worked at this company for a total of two years.
He describes to me how, every month, his boss makes promises to pay him his salary but persistently fails to follow through on it. At the time when his salary problems started, he and his coworkers noticed cash flow problems in the company and signs of gambling addiction in his boss. Despite his concerns regarding the financial wellbeing of the company and his boss, he says he has to continue to take his boss’ promises of payment on trust as he fears being denied compensation if he resigns and goes home.
During our conversation, he mentions that when he was back to Bangladesh on home leave in December of 2023, a fire destroyed the family home where his parents, siblings and wife lived. There is a twisted irony in this take – his family now lives in a rented house (it’s been two years now) while he is currently exploited for his labour to renovate other people’s houses. While the profits that employers earn do not trickle down, the effects of employers’ poor financial decisions reverberate throughout their workforce, compounding the financial precarity that many workers are in.
Paid sporadically
My second interviewee, who has worked in Singapore for 13 years, tells me that the most recent company he worked for has gone bankrupt. For four months prior to that, the company only paid workers sporadically. The company would pay them for a month, then not pay them for the next. Even when workers were paid, it would sometimes be less than their stipulated salary.
Did you raise this matter with the boss? I ask.
He did, together with ten other coworkers, he says. However, they only got non-committal replies. Mostly, they were asked to “wait”. But with the option of resigning so far from reach, migrant workers are left with little agency over their own financial stability. They remain subject to the whims of their employers who bait workers into staying with the company by paying them occasionally – just enough to keep them on the job.
Then there is the question of how to survive a longish period of unemployment should they resign. Many migrant workers earn low salaries even in the best of times. They don’t have much by way of savings. This makes the idea of quitting even more unrealistic.
So, the bottom line is this: While workers have the right to resign, resignation is often not viewed as a viable choice due to the financial cost associated with it. That cost includes living expenses while surviving unemployment, often with an overhang of debt from having had to pay recruitment fees. This illusion of choice greatly plays into the power dynamics that allows employers to withhold the payment of salary and continuously exploit unpaid labour from migrant workers. When resignation is not viewed as a choice by employees, it emboldens employers to test the boundaries of what they can get away with while still keeping workers under their employment. If resignation is truly a right, conditions that make workers feel like they cannot resign must be addressed and dismantled.
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