Five months ago, we wrote about foreign nationals working as baggage handlers at Changi airport under Employment Passes. Yesterday, news broke that the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) is investigating about 45 companies over this issue. Channel NewsAsia reported that about 270 foreign workers are involved. These workers were not directly employed by ground handling company SATS, but by SATS’ contractors and sub-contractors.
Even so, SATS bears ultimate responsibility to keep the airport running, and on Tuesday (3 November 2026), the Straits Times reported that SATS has had to redeploy its employees. The newspaper reported hearing from a SATS employee that staff were “encouraged to step up on a voluntary basis to help with baggage-handling services”. The company however denied that the request for volunteers came as a result of the probe. Whether one believes that is a separate matter.
We don’t know why it has taken MOM so long to unearth the problem when we wrote about it months ago. We wrote that foreigners were being hired on Employment Passes as Logistics Managers when their daily work was as manual labour. The two men who told TWC2 about it said the monthly salary that their employer declared to MOM was $8,000, but in fact they were paid $1,500. Job title, occupation and salary would be the details employers would have had to submit to MOM when applying for Employment Passes (or other kinds of work passes) and if these details were false, then the employers would stand accused of making false declarations.
It is important, however, not to get sidetracked by the nitty-gritty of what the 45 employers did wrong. The more important question, from a public interest point of view, is why it went undetected for so long until it’s grown to involve 45 companies and 270 workers, such that cracking down now, at this late stage, jeopardises operations at the airport, putting Singapore’s reputation at risk.
Steps before an employer can apply for an Employment Pass
Before any application for an Employment Pass can be made, an employer must advertise the vacancy for at least 14 days on the MyCareersFuture portal, which is run by government agencies Workforce Singapore (WSG) and GovTech. Naturally, the details of the job role and remuneration should be truthful. Only when no suitable local candidates are found can an employer then proceed to apply for an Employment Pass.
Does no one (not even a robot?) monitor what is advertised there? Is no pattern detected when 270 jobs, presumably for Logistics Managers at $8,000 a month, are advertised?
Did no one at MOM receiving the multitude of Employment Pass applications (albeit over a period of time) suspect anything? Is no background check made on the companies submitting applications for Employment Passes?
TWC2 will not have answers to these questions, but it should be obvious who should be answering them.
Post-facto clean-up, not preventive action
What we can say is that once again, this is entirely consistent with what we have seen in crisis after crisis. At their origin, it tends to be a story of the regulators just waving through all sorts of less-than-truthful applications by employers for work passes. It’s as if there is no system to check anything. It’s as if the entire machinery is paralysed out of fear that if we made things even a wee bit difficult for employers (e.g. asking a pertinent question) we would hurt our economy, risking the wrath of the god named GDP.
Just a week ago, another group of 240 foreign workers were in the news. They had not been paid for a number of months. The twist to that story was that these workers were hired by two companies, Process Maintenance Solutions and Jurong Technical & Construction, as Process Sector workers, a sector which MOM has defined as work related to chemical and petrochemical processing plants. Yet, these workers reported being made to do landscaping work along Orchard Road, mosquito fogging at the Tuas Water Reclamation Works, and construction work at Singapore Polytechnic. Some of them had been employed by one of these two companies, and had been doing such odd jobs in violation of Work Permit rules, for nearly two years.
Nobody at the ministry seemed to be any the wiser. Only when salary complaints flooded in did these possible offences against the rules get noticed. There might also have been violations of the condition that employers had to have a requisite number of local employees to qualify for so many foreign workers. It seems to take a crisis complete with victims – in this case, about 240 workers who were left in financial difficulty – for the matter to get attention. And then we have the media highlighting how MOM-affiliated Migrant Workers Centre is spending money helping the workers. Here at TWC2 too, we have spent over $5,000 helping those (well over a hundred of them) who have come to us for assistance.
In lieu of preventive vigilance, the attitude seems to be: we will crack down when we come to know of it. We can rephrase it thus: let a problem develop, let it grow until we can’t ignore it anymore, until there are victims, then we’ll do something.
This is not good enough. Say, for example, we were to run a production line and a not-insignificant percentage of the finished products rolling off it have defects. No conscientious quality controller or production controller will shrug his shoulders and say, we’ll repair them when we’re told about them some time down the road. Repairing has costs, financial and reputational.
Yet, based on what we see of MOM’s stance and responses, this is the closest analogy to their operating philosophy.
And now we have a critical economic node – the airport – jeopardised by this laidback operational model. This is no way to run a country.