Articles > Stories
“Don’t bother talking to my maid, she’s impossibly lazy”
By Gerald Lim, Lionel Ong and Marjorie Pang “Don’t bother talking to my maid. She knows absolutely nothing and is impossibly lazy” – the words of a Singapore employer, who wouldn’t allow us to speak to her Indonesian domestic worker as part of our survey. It speaks volumes. You can’t ignore
College mates in Punjab give strength to each other in Singapore
By Danielle The two make a striking pair – young men with slicked hair, tattoos and ear studs to boot. Pals from Khalsa College in Amritsar, in shirts and jeans, you would have mistaken them for undergraduates anywhere. Except that Manbir Singh (left) and Jhorar Hardeep Singh (right) aren’t in Singapore
Migrant dreams extinguished on the road
Two months, before he was due to leave Singapore, Mahalingam Rajesh was looking forward to marrying his fiancee and starting afresh in his homeland. Moving back to India, his dream was to set up a fish farm and settle down – a world away from the dusty construction sites he’d
Kamru worked more than two months, paid for only ten days
By Fuxiong Prior to coming to work in Singapore from Bangladesh, Kamruzzaman took a two-and-a-half month training course in thermal insulation. Expecting to work in a trade he trained for, here in Singapore, he was told his job was to hack concrete. When he protested that his hands hurt, "my
Chinese workers confused what went in or out of their pay
Zhang Bo (left), Zhao Shougui (middle) and Wang Qingshan (right) thought they had a simple problem when they came to Transient Workers Count Too. However, when we looked into their case, it became obvious that there were complications. In fact, the men may be luckier than they realised. Things could
Difference in medical leave raises question about standard of care
By Danielle Despite first-class medical practitioners and technology in Singapore, some injured workers complain that they do not even get a reasonable standard of care. Moniruzzaman's story suggests that employers' desire to limit costs and reduce their exposure to work safety investigation by regulators can trump doing the right thing for
Employer claims our article contains ‘too many . . . untruthfulness’
On 26 March 2013, we received an email from Wang Fatt Oil & Gas Construction Pte Ltd (a member of E S Goup Holdings), the former employer of Pastula Venkata Ramana, saying that several statements in our article about his case (link here) were incorrect. The company said in the email that
Worker claims breathing difficulties from dusty work environment, MOM says illness not work-related
By YC Loh Picture your workplace being five to seven metres underground and just a few metres wide, inside a one-and-a-half kilometre long drain under a road. The only source of ventilation is via mechanical means which prove inadequate. The air you breathe is saturated with dust particles, which is so
Response to complaint about our ‘demonise’ article
Transient Workers Count Too received a complaint about a post on this website about Singapore mums using blogs to vent about their maids. The blogger, Expat Bostonians, has written a rebuttal here. Her point was that she never intended to demonise domestic helpers and that it was unfair to her
Minimum wage will reduce temptation of illegal work
We usually write about the situations that bring workers to Transient Workers Count Too's Cuff Road Food Programme — injury, salary dispute, etc — but seldom about what they do to sustain themselves once their work permits are cancelled and they're put on special passes. A condition of the special