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This is the third of a series of articles commenting on the results of the Ministry of Manpower’s (MOM’s) Migrant Worker Experience and Employer Survey 2024. The results were released in the third week of August 2025. In this Part 3, we will focus on three questions in the survey touching on migrant workers’ opinions about worklife in Singapore.
TWC2’s immediate response to the highlights of the survey report can be found on our Instragram page: https://www.instagram.com/p/DNrZKi_J0Vv/?hl=en&img_index=1. These series of articles will analyse the findings in more detail and wherever possible, offer solutions.
The survey opened with a broad statement “Overall, I am satisfied with working and living in Singapore”, asking participants to respond to it. There seemed to have been five possible answers (Very dissatisfied, Dissatisfied, Neutral, Satisfied and Very satisfied), but the published results merged the percentages for the first two together, and the last two as well.
95.3% said they were Satisfied or Very satisfied. That’s an overwhelming result, but we’ll come back to it towards the end of this article.
It would have been useful to see the split between Satisfied and Very satisfied, but this was not published.
This highly positive sentiment is mostly corroborated by answers to the second question, but when we later look at the third question, there is food for thought.
What was in their minds when faced with such a question?
Satisfaction levels are relative to alternatives. What are the alternatives for a migrant worker? Surely not jobs at home. There are hardly any, that’s why they’re migrants in the first place. Seen in this light, any paid work anywhere would be far more satisfying than persistent unemployment. The opening question of the survey was almost guaranteed to get a strongly positive response.
Respondents are likely aware that there can be work opportunities in other destination countries. In some countries e.g. Japan and South Korea, salaries may be higher than Singapore’s, but barriers to entry are higher too, especially the need to speak the local language. In other countries, the salaries are lower, though the cost of living is lower too.
Who is the ‘migrant worker’?
MOM’s survey report speaks of the ‘migrant worker’. It takes a little digging into the text to see that the survey’s scope was limited to Work Permit holders in non-domestic sectors. In other words, domestic workers are not part of this discussion.
In December 2024, there were 1,165,900 Work Permit holders here. Excluding domestic workers (301,600 of them) that meant 864,300 in non-domestic sectors. Of these, 456,800 (54%) were working in construction, marine engineering and process engineering (“CMP sectors”). The remainder (46%) would be in services (retail, hospitality, food and beverage, security, etc), manufacturing, cleaning (including town council work), landscaping and so on, with even a tiny number in agriculture.
Given this mix of sectors, we can assume that they are majority male. and they mostly come from Malaysia, India, Bangladesh, China and Myanmar (Burma). There may be small numbers from the Philippines, Thailand and Sri Lanka.
While a great majority of the 54% who work in the CMP sectors would be living in dormitories, that still leaves a few hundred thousand non-CMP workers living in rented rooms and apartments all over Singapore. A significant number of Malaysians also commute daily from Johore.
Huge majority want to continue working here
The same lack of viable alternative may underpin the responses to the second question.
Four in five migrant workers (80.2%) said they would want to continue working in Singapore with their current employer. This is TWC2’s sense of the ground too: the majority of migrant workers want stability and are happy enough to continue. Even if they are not fully happy, switching to another employer in Singapore, let alone in another country, is fraught with huge uncertainties and regulatory unknowns. It shouldn’t be any wonder that a large majority would much prefer the devil they know (renewing their contracts) over the devil they don’t.
Just because they would like to renew their contracts does not mean they will get their wishes fulfilled. Some workers will find that their bosses do not wish to extend their contracts, others are terminated prematurely (a major complaint among workers coming to TWC2 for help).
So, whilst 80.2% of MOM’s survey respondents would like to continue working for the same employer, our insight is that many will not get that wish.
What is more interesting is what the minority say. 10.0% said that at the end of their current contract, they would go home first and later come back Singapore to work. This does not necessarily signify any unhappiness with their current jobs; they may feel that they need to see their families. However, even if that’s their desire, it raises the question of why they feel they need to give up their jobs to see their families. What happened to the option of home leave?
Some employers are known to refuse to grant home leave. This is an issue worth looking into. We need some statistics about this.
Even if employers are not denying the possibility of home leave, the fact remains that home leave is almost always no-pay leave, and the worker has to pay for his own flights. It’s a costly luxury for the worker. As a result, many workers stay on the job for years without going home to see their families. Eventually, they will feel the need to do so, and this may explain why 10% of survey respondents gave the answer they did.
The third most common answer to this question is the 6.5% who said that when their current contract expires, they would want to continue working in Singapore, but with a new employer. This almost surely indicates unhappiness with their current job, and it would be interesting if another survey is done to understand their reasons in greater detail.
This may not happen anytime soon, though. These surveys are often deployed to “prove” how wonderful things are in Singapore. The 95.3% overall satisfaction rate and the 80.2% want-to-renew-contract rate will be waved for exactly this effect. This is what tends to happen when State mantra is that we have data-driven policy-making. So long as the broad data looks good – “the average worker is happy” – little attention is paid to the margins. The data has done its job. What the un-average worker is unhappy about tends to get neglected.
A glimpse of the problem areas
Responses to the third question strike a different tone from responses to the first two questions, giving us a glimpse into what workers really feel.
First, a brief discussion of what workers might have understood as the difference between the first and thrid statements. Our sense is that workers took “working environment is safe” to mean mitigation of physical dangers, whilst “workers are protected here” would probably be taken to mean that there are defences against exploitation and abuse.
Frankly, none of the metrics look all that good; not even the best of five results. 15.6% (roughly one in six workers) didn’t feel that the working environment was safe from hazards. That’s not laudable at all.
Nearly one in three didn’t agree that their salaries were good enough to recommend Singapore to family and friends. Read this against the response given to the very first question (top of this article) where the “overall” satisfaction rate was 95.3%. Clearly, the latter, very high figure may need to be re-interpreted.
Another one-third had no faith that workers would be protected.
Then it only gets worse. The majority couldn’t bring themselves to agree with the statement that “living conditions are good”. Nor that “the jobs are stable here”.
As often is the case, it is the granular details in surveys that often reveal what’s going on.