This is an AI-generated image. Any likeness to any real restaurant is unintended.
“I can take harsh criticism, but that time, I lost so much weight, my body was ringing like a bell in my clothes.”
When Helen (name changed), a 33-year-old Burmese woman, came to work in a cafe in Singapore, she was prepared to work hard. But little could have prepared her for all the other problems she faced at this job: wage theft, discriminatory work hours, and workplace harassment.
Helen happened upon a supervisor role at a Peranakan eatery — we’ll call it Tommy’s Cafe here — while visiting Singapore for a friend’s wedding. She found the job through a Myanmar agent in Bedok by the name of Kyu Kyi (named changed). The job, she was told, would pay her $1,200 per month on an S-Pass to work eight hours a day, six days a week. Being unfamiliar with Singapore’s employment laws, Helen did not spot the first warning sign: S-Pass jobs have to meet a minimum salary requirement. At the time of Helen’s interview, this was S$2,500; it has since been raised to $3,300.
Helen vividly remembers Kyu Kyi pointing to the printed salary of $2,500 on her In-Principle Approval (see explanation in Glossary) and telling her that it would not be her actual salary. While she found it odd, she accepted the IPA and took the job since she had already borrowed from an aunt to pay Kyu Kyi’s agent fee of $3,600.
Another warning sign surfaced when Helen arrived to start work at the restaurant. She was put on mandatory training for a food safety course, but the course fee of $100 was later deducted from her salary. This was a violation of Singapore’s employment laws, which states that deductions from employees’ salaries for compulsory training are not allowed.
Imaginary accounting
The $2,500 salary figure continued to pop up throughout her employment. Helen was made to sign a logbook twice a month, to confirm receipt of S$1,300 and S$1,200 respectively. However, only the latter amount would make it into Helen’s bank account.
We’ve seen this before through other migrant workers’ experiences. One part of the salary is paid through a bank account but the other part is supposedly paid in cash — which takes some imagination to think it was actually being paid. The point of such bookkeeping is to appear compliant with S Pass regulations in Singapore, though the rules are smarter than that. S-Pass employees must be paid electronically; there is no allowance for any part of their salaries to be paid in cash.
The trouble is, rules only work if they are enforced, and TWC2’s observation is that enforcement is weak. Hardly any wonder that business owners continue to hire migrant workers on such illicit terms and maintain fictional accounts.
Such behaviour fits into the known struggles of F&B businesses to keep labour costs down to stay afloat. A $2,500 salary (if fully paid) might be able to get them local or Malaysian workers, but those would never tolerate the half-payment arrangement that migrant workers might put up with.
Twelve-hour days, never mind the law
Then there were the excessive working hours. Sans compensation. Helen ended up working twelve hours a day, from midday to midnight. This was at least 28 hours of overtime a week or about 90 hours a month, exceeding the legal maximum of 72 overtime hours a month. Helen also did not have regular days off. This was a far cry from the work patterns that her Singaporean and Malaysian colleagues enjoyed at the cafe, who were not required to work overtime.
To make matters worse, Helen was given accommodation in a room above Tommy’s cafe, where she was subjected to constant supervision — and criticism. Tommy found Helen’s language skills to be subpar, and told her that her broken English was getting into the way of communicating properly in the workplace (TWC2 found Helen’s English more than adequate). Furthermore, he often criticised what Helen ate, and even where Helen went on her days off. Outside of her days off, she was only allowed to leave the premises if she was tagging along with Tommy and his wife.
Three months into the job, tired from overwork and demoralised by constant criticism, she reached out to Kyu Kyi to say that she wanted to quit but the agent said that there would be no refund for the agent fees. Dejected, Helen continued to stay on the job because she needed to make enough to pay back the debt she owed.
Head harrasser
Things took a turn for the worse when a Malaysian man called Siong was onboarded as the head chef. Siong made passes at Helen despite him having a wife and family of his own. Helen reported this matter to Tommy, wishing for it to stop. To her dismay, instead of protecting Helen, Tommy blamed her for Siong’s behaviour. Worse still, after Helen raised this matter (which might have put Tommy in a fix), his criticism of her doubled. There were many nights when this weighed on her mind so much, she could hardly sleep.
After 18 months working at the cafe, enough was enough. Helen quit. She didn’t feel defeated. Instead, she says she’s proud that she worked diligently for as long as she did despite such conditions. “We know how much Burmese people work diligently,” she says.
Her experience, she says, reflects many practices in the F&B and service industries: deceptive hiring, excessive overtime and wage manipulation to extract as much labour as possible for the lowest possible salaries. It is migrant workers who bear the cost.
Now, Helen is helping Burmese workers in Singapore reclaim money from agents that have scammed them. She says, “As long as they paid the agent in Singapore dollars into a Singaporean bank account, I try to help them reclaim the money. But if they paid it in [Myanmar] kyats, then I can’t really do anything.”
Soon, she wants to start an educational channel on TikTok for Burmese workers on how to avoid being scammed by agents. “I’ve been here ten years, there’s a lot that I’ve learnt, so many things about agents, how they make money from scams. I want to share what I know.”
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