The story made it to the front page. When TWC2 received a copy from Healthserve of a circular letter issued jointly by the Ministries of Health and Manpower to all registered medical practitioners, we knew it would be something the Straits Times might be interested in. We contacted the newspaper and shared it with them.
Media Statement: Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2) is gravely concerned that current bad haze conditions will affect the health of workers in many trades, e.g. construction, marine, sanitation, landscaping. TWC2 strongly urges the government to impose a mandatory Stop Work Order when 3-hour average PSI readings, issued hourly, exceed 200, or when PM2.5 readings exceed
Amran Hossain returned to Bangladesh on 4 Oct 2012, still with a limp, but empty-handed. He did not receive the work injury compensation that was due to him. His experience in Singapore almost broke his spirit. He had come in January 2009 as a construction worker, worked 23 months, but fractured his lower right leg
Five companies were convicted for a variety of offences involving mistreatment of their foreign employees, reported Channel NewsAsia on 30 May 2013. (Link). They were named as: Soon Aik Marine Engineering Pte Ltd, Soon Aik Offshore Pte Ltd, Soon Aik Shipbuilding Pte Ltd, Yong Soon Shipbuilding Pte Ltd, and Yong Soon Marine Engineering Pte Ltd.
In a letter published by Today newspaper, TWC2 immediate past president John Gee proposed a means by which good labour standards can be propagated in Singapore. Companies should write labour standards into contracts with their subcontractors. Government-linked companies should lead the way, he says, among other suggestions. --- Today, 31 May 2013, Voices section Companies
A report in Today, 24 May 2013, provided a glimpse into and some figures relating to raids conducted in Little India to ferret out illegal workers. In "Two foreigners arrested for suspected illegal employment", the newspaper reported that officers from the Ministry of Manpower checked twelve shops along Kinta Road, Race Course Road and Race Course
This is an investigative report by Jamie Lin Weirong, based on interviews with five S-Pass holders, originally from the Philippines. They work in different trades: retail, catering, and project design and management, but together they sketch out the issues faced by S-Pass holders. These include a difficult-to-understand hiring process, an opaque work pass approval process
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 been slaving on. Squeezed into
The Sunday Times featured a newly-hired male domestic worker from Myanmar on its 12 May 2013 edition. 31-year-old Lum Hkawng comes from Kachin state in northern Myanmar. The former steel welder, who speaks Mandarin, is working for a partially-handicapped man in his 50s who was injured in a traffic accident. The employer lives alone. Journalist
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 the Ministry of Manpower "have
