Learning the lines for showtime

Showtime soon

After nearly a year of hoping for a new job, it was finally the day of departure to Singapore. Date: 12 February 2025. Edrazul (name changed) showed up at Stanford Employment Pvt Ltd in Dhaka to pick up his flight ticket and complete final formalities. The full recruitment fee of 300,000 Bangladeshi taka (“three lakh”) had been paid by this time. This amount was equivalent to $3,400 at the exchange rate then prevailing.

“That day, have drama,” says Edrazul, as he sits down with us, relaxed, knowing that TWC2’s office is a safe space.

Drama? Sounds ominous, but that’s only if we apply the colloquial use of the word in Singapore to mean a scene of conflict and tension. Edrazul is conveying a different meaning. He’s using the word to mean play-acting. But why was there play-acting?

“Make video,” he explains. We think we have heard this before, but it’s still interesting to hear the story from another worker. We’re all ears.

“First we sign paper,” he begins. As often is the case, he cannot describe what exactly he signed because he hardly had a chance to read the agreement, let alone get a copy of it. However, someone told him that what was written there was to confirm that he had not paid any agent fee. He had to sign it and his fingerprint was also pressed onto it.

Edrazul and the several other workers there (also their day of departure) were asked to pay a further 3,000 taka each (about $34) as some kind of administrative fee to cover the cost of producing the agreement and the video to follow.

In the video – where they appeared individually, not as a group – each worker had to say, once more, that he had not had to pay any agent fee. “Then we have to say, ‘Thank you, Seatrium’,” for instituting the company policy that workers should not have to pay for their jobs. It was explained to him that this was “Seatrium law”.

Not having access to the video, we cannot verify what Edrazul is telling us. But we have heard similar stories before and there is enough of a pattern to add credibility. Two-and-a-half years ago, we even published one such story: Ready, lights, camera, action!

The job search

To be clear, Seatrium is not Edrazul’s employer, at least not this time. He had been employed by Seatrium before, but by early 2024, Edrazul was back in Bangladesh where his new job search began. He asked around his social contacts and surfed the internet, chancing on a webpage or chatgroup he describes as “Stanford Community”.

Edrazul made contact with Stanford and later went to their office in Dhaka. There he met with a lady named Nilima. After Edrazul shared with her his biodata and curriculum vitae, she explained to him that for a “U-turn worker” like him the fee would be 300,000 Bangladeshi taka.

We are going to have to get used to a few unusual terms in this story. A “U-turn worker” is someone who had worked abroad before and is wanting to go abroad to work again (in TWC2, we more often refer to them as “repeat workers”). This is distinguished from a new worker or, as Edrazul sometimes says, a “general worker”. Later in the story, he also refers to “trade workers”, of which he is one, which seems to refer to workers with specific trade skills. Edrazul’s skill was welding.

Nilima asked for Edrazul’s passport, but he would not agree to handing it over. If he did, it would foreclose any possibility of him working with another agent and looking for other jobs. Nonetheless, Nilima said she would start looking for a job for him and would call him when a vacancy was found.

A few months later, in either July or August 2024, Edrazul got that call. He was to go back to Dhaka, but this time, turn up at Nanyang Stanford Skills Training Centre. It wasn’t a job interview, he explains to TWC2, but a mass briefing session for two groups of potential hirees. Somebody somewhere must have gone through all applicants’ CVs and shortlisted them for the briefing session. One group comprised the “new” workers or “general workers”. Edrazul’s rough estimate was that there were perhaps 50 men in that group, “maybe more”. Edrazul’s group comprised trade workers or U-turn workers, and he recalls that there were perhaps 40 in the room. The briefing was given by an ethnic Chinese person (probably Singaporean) whom Edrazul would later learn was a manager at the future employer, which we will call Walrus Marine.

There was no discussion at all of recruitment fee during the briefing. However, one thing that emerged from the briefing was that hirees would be staying in Mega Dorm. Several attendees (being U-turn workers) had stayed at this dorm before as had Edrazul, and they all agreed that while the dorm itself was habitable, the catering arrangements (specifically, food quality) was unacceptable. This notwithstanding, several attendees agreed to sign up with Walrus Marine right after the briefing, but Edrazul held out, maybe because he was still hoping for something better.

It didn’t make much difference. Even those who had agreed to take up the jobs were kept waiting for the In-Principle Approval letters (IPAs). IPA letters are issued by the Ministry of Manpower (“MOM”) to indicate their approval of Work Permits for these workers.

“Why were they kept waiting?” we ask Edrazul. He isn’t totally sure, but he says he heard there was some difficulty getting “quota” from MOM. We can’t judge if that really was the reason.

As 2024 comes to an end

After yet more months of waiting, in December 2024, Nilima called again. Walrus Marine was looking for two steel fitters, she said. Was Edrazul still interested? Not having found a better job in the meantime, Edrazul said he was, horrible food at Mega Dorm notwithstanding.

Nilima had more details about the salary this time, but also reiterated that he would need to cough up three lakh ($3,400) if he wanted the job.

Just to be sure we understand what this three lakh taka was for, we check with Edrazul. “You earlier said something about Nanyang Skills Training Centre, did you have to attend a training course there?”

“No training,” he replies. “I only go there for the briefing. I already have certificate.”

“So, the three lakh was not for any training course? It was purely to get the job?”

“Yes, must pay for the IPA.”

Interesting. This document, issued free by MOM, now has a market price.

Coming back to the December conversation in Stanford, Nilima asked for Edrazul’s passport so that the IPA process could begin, and for a deposit of one lakh ($1,136). The balance must be paid up before departure, she stressed. We don’t ask too many details of the various installment payments he made except whether the amount was paid through bank transfer or in cash. Edrazul says his first payment (of 30,000 taka) was paid by bank transfer, but the balance was in cash. “No give receive paper,” Edrazul adds even before we ask about receipts.

A day or two after the new year, Nilima or someone from her office sent the IPA to him. We can see that the IPA application date was 26 December 2024. The monthly basic salary on the IPA was only $548. After a housing deduction of $120, his net monthly base salary was only $428 – this for an experienced welder who had worked in shipyards before. Nonetheless, Edrazul found the details therein to be roughly what he had agreed to, though he mentions to your writer that the basic salary was one dollar per day less than promised by Nilima.

Over the months of living and working together, they naturally compared notes with each other as to how much they each had paid for their jobs. Edrazul summarises his impressions thus: U-turn workers paid an average of 300,000 taka ($3,400), just like him, with little variation from one man to another. General workers paid much more, and there was greater spread too. The highest he heard was 850,000 taka ($9,700), but most seem to have paid 700,000 to 750,000 taka ($8,000 to $8,500). There was one guy, however, who said he only paid 550,000 taka ($6,250) – but Edrazul does not know why his rate was unusually low.

“After arriving in Singapore, was any additional payment required?” we ask.

“No,” says Edrazul. “Nobody ask money.”

Asked to resign

Edrazul is no angel. In August 2024, there was an incident in which he was accused of involvement with duty-unpaid cigarettes. We don’t get into the details of that in our interview, but he does not seem to be contesting the accusation.

The fallout from that incident included a more thorough check by the shipyard’s security team, who discovered that Edrazul had once been a direct employee of Seatrium from 2022 to early 2024. According to Edrazul, he was then told that Seatrium has a rule disallowing any of their direct employees from working for their subcontractors (such as Walrus Marine) for two years after resigning from Seatrium. Thus, Walrus Marine should not have hired him in early 2025.

Edrazul tells TWC2 that he is being asked to resign. As a sweetener, his employer said something about returning some of the recruitment fee that he had paid, although no specific figure seemed to have been mentioned.

This offer is interesting in the least. It indicates that Walrus Marine knew that Edrazul had to pay three lakh taka to get the job. One cannot help but wonder if Walrus Marine even had a cut of it. How else would it be in a position to offer a refund?

That doesn’t look good at all.

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