This is an AI-generated image. Any resemblance to any real person is unintended.

This is a story of a 26-year-old from Bangladesh and his short-lived job in Singapore. He is one of tens of thousands of young men from the country hoping to make a better life by working here. At first glance, there is little in Forohi’s story that is unique – he came to us for help over unpaid salary – but what was unusual was that he had been lured into a rather suspicious-looking work pass set-up.

That – the start of the journey – and how it all came to an end are the two bookends of this story.

When we sit across the table from Forohi, we don’t see a construction worker though, from the documents, that is what he is. He is slim-built, soft-spoken and neatly dressed in a white shirt. For some weird reason, clarinet teacher is what flashes through your writer’s mind.

It must have been sixth sense, for when we get around to asking him what sort of work he was doing in the years leading up to the decision to come to Singapore, he mentions that he was indeed a part-time tutor, though no musical instrument was mentioned. His steady job, however, was with an online retail company, where he worked for about five years.

The problem was that salaries were abysmally low in his country. He was making only the equivalent of $150 or $200 a month, not enough to support himself and his new wife. Out of sheer economic desperation, Forohi, who had never performed a day’s physical labour in his life, took the decision to work in Singapore where most jobs open to Bangladeshis are in the construction sector.

Perhaps a rosy future was sketched by his cousin who was already working in Singapore. In fact, this cousin said he could connect Forohi to the same company, and there would be no need to use the services of agents. Ultimately, this did not turn out to be as wonderful as it might at first sound, for “twelve lakh” or about $12,000 was asked for anyway by the cousin. How much of that was shared with the boss, Forohi does not know.

Forohi was self-aware enough – he looks like an intelligent and thoughtful chap – to know his limitations, particularly with respect to physical labour, and he was happy to hear from the cousin that the position was that of a Construction Supervisor. It would be a supervisory position. “Won’t be a hard job,” the cousin assured him. Possibly Forohi saw a desk-bound job dealing with deliveries of materials and worker rosters.

An IPA arrives

An In-principle Approval (IPA) letter came into his hands in September 2025. On the document were outline details of the S-Pass job that had been promised to him. The employer would be an engineering company, the position would indeed be “Supervisor” and the basic salary would be $4,008 per month. No additional allowances were stated, but more importantly, no deductions either.

To those of us familiar with going rates in the construction industry, $4,008 for someone with no trade skills and no industry experience would be a massive red flag. But how would anyone from outside Singapore know what the going rates are? It might help if there were a centralised jobs portal – something that Singapore badly needs for a hundred different reasons – on which are listed all available vacancies by all employers of foreign workers so that jobseekers can compare salaries as they browse through the site. But there isn’t. Employers and agents keep what they know about vacancies close to their chests (for commercial reasons, no doubt) and such comparative information is simply not available anywhere.

IPAs are issued by the Ministry of Manpower, indicating prior approval of a work pass – in Forohi’s case an S-Pass, meant for foreigners working in mid-level jobs, such as skilled technicians or supervisors. Although IPAs are unilaterally applied for by the employer with no involvement by the job candidate, the details submitted by the employer to the ministry are supposed to reflect the terms of employment that had been agreed between employer and candidate, otherwise the employer (a.k.a. applicant) could be accused of making false declarations. For that reason, courts have enforced the terms of IPAs as if they were employment contracts.

We mention this because later events would lead us to wonder if there had been a parallel verbal contract between Forohi and the employer with different terms e.g. different salary. We generally do not explore this with our clients; it’s not all that important anyway. If employers are foolish enough to make fraudulent IPA applications, declaring salaries way higher than verbally agreed, only to have courts later enforce the higher salaries, employers have only themselves to blame.

Forohi arrived in Singapore in October 2025. He quickly discovered that the promised job as a construction supervisor was a mirage. The company didn’t even have projects of its own. Instead, it supplied labour to other contractors. Forohi found himself sent from one site to another quite regularly and was tasked to “carry items or mix cement” or other basic unskilled work. Naturally so, because he had had no training in construction. If he imagined that he could supervise construction without trade skills or experience, he was clearly in a world he had never inhabited before.

It was a painful lesson. And the hours were long. It was “hard work every day”.

Employer buys an airticket

We see Forohi for the first time in the first week of April 2026 when he shows up at TWC2 with a bigger problem than he can handle. By this point, it is about five and a half months after starting work. He tells us that he is scheduled to sit for a “BCA exam” the following week, and after that, he will be repatriated.

A “BCA exam” is a skills test conducted by the Building and Construction Authority (BCA). All Work Permit holders in the construction industry must possess a valid BCA basic-skills certificate. Obviously, Forohi must have attended some training classes in the weeks leading up to this. Apparently the employer paid for them because when we asked how much the course and test cost, Forohi cannot give us a clear answer. “I did not pay for it,” he says.

We reckon it may be $1,200 to $2,500, depending on the skill course. The important point to note is that it must have been bundled into the $12,000 that Forohi paid to his cousin for the job. It is this detail that makes us wonder if there is more to the employment “contract”, which could have been verbal, than can be gleaned from the IPA. Was there a training sponsorship component and a sunset clause? Was a different salary agreed between them?

We begin to see the arrangement not so much as a job, but more of a pretext to bring Forohi to Singapore so that he can attend a basic skills course here rather than have to attend one in Dhaka. The training centres in Dhaka charge $5,000 to $7,000 for these three-month courses, but the training centres in Singapore charge much less. A whole recruitment model has grown up to take advantage of this arbitrage.

Here are the advertised prices from one such training centre in Singapore:

There are plenty of other courses, from other centres too. For example, there is rope access training from SB Rope Access at a cost of $1,500 and gondola operator training from Eversafe Academy costing $163.50.

Not paid his salary

Coming back to Forohi’s story, his problem is that he has not been paid his salary for the five or six months that he’s worked. He doesn’t seem to mind losing the job – he probably hates it – but it’s not fair to repatriate him without salary.

Helping workers claim their rightful salary is the bread and butter of TWC2’s work. Fortunately, Forohi has time cards showing the overtime hours that he has put in, and we calculate that he is owed well over $20,000. We assist him with the precise calculations needed to ensure that the claim is legally sound and we make the online filing for him.

The employer cancels his S-Pass within a day or two of his BCA exam, but as there is a claim pending, the Ministry of Manpower issues Forohi with a Special Pass, allowing him to stay legally in Singapore while the claim is in progress. At the end of the process – Forohi eventually arrives at a settlement with the employer for about two-thirds of the claim amount – Forohi also gets a chance to look for a new job.

By this point, he has learnt that the whole notion of him qualifying for an S-Pass job is a pipe-dream. At best, his next job will be at Work Permit grade with a monthly salary around $500, though even that is much better than what he can earn in Bangladesh.

However, since most Work Permit jobs open to Bangladeshis are in construction, Forohi has to resign himself to working in that sector, and also be able to show that he has a BCA certificate. The latter proves to be the next mystery: Where is the certificate? Has it been sent to the former employer who possibly sponsored the course?

We write to BCA and it takes a while before we get a reply – which is that Forohi didn’t pass the skills test.

Construction isn’t for everyone

We can understand the desperation of young Bangladeshis for overseas work. Their own country simply doesn’t have enough jobs, and due to the competition from the masses of unemployed and underemployed, what jobs there are don’t pay well. Unfortunately, the reality is also that destination countries like Singapore tend to take in migrant workers only for the jobs that their own citizens do not want, and so the positions open to foreign workers tend to be the dirty, dangerous and demeaning ones, including physical labour.

Forohi is really not cut out for a construction job. He may be better off looking for his next job in countries like the UAE or Qatar, where retail, F&B and office jobs are open to Bangladeshis. This is because these countries have very small local populations (only 10 to 15 percent of total population in the UAE and Qatar) and so these economies depend on imported workers for a wide spectrum of jobs.

Forohi flew home at the end of June 2026.

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