Vallathan Kowthaman is going home end January 2014. He has no reason to smile as broadly as he does in the photo above, being about $6,000 poorer than when we arrived for his second job in March 2013. But he gives us a big smile because TWC2 has been his lifeline since he was injured,
By Benjamin Wong The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) website states that for a worker to claim under the Work Injury Compensation Act (WICA), "the employee only needs to prove that he was injured in a work accident ..." (emphasis added by TWC2). In reality, many workers have difficulty even meeting this supposedly simple condition, because
By Keith W Nazim Chowdhury shows me a three-page document he printed out. It's the formal accident report that his employer provided to the Ministry of Manpower (MOM). The incident was described in the document thus: That he "... with a co-worker was tasked to remove a beam at the location. While handling the beam,
This downloadable document is a consolidation of the various recommendations that Transient Workers Count Too has made to the Ministry of Manpower in the last few months and years, with respect to injured workers. Injured worker issues are quite distinct from the salary non-payment issues. For the latter, the recommendations are more straightforward: detailed itemised
Continued from Woolim, part 1: How low can a salary get? Early January 2014, Iqbal comes to the office with a group of his co-workers telling us that three of the fifteen men have accepted a settlement offer from the employer Woolim, wherein each of them would receive $2,000. This, says Iqbal, is a far
By Joyce Wong 28 June 2013. Morning. Although he had reported to work, Ravada Gouru Naidu felt a headache coming on, and his supervisor allowed him to go back to the dormitory to rest. He could get a ride back on the company lorry, but since the cab was fully occupied by two other workers
By Pat Meyer and Christine Pelly, photos by Low Yim Kuan Over the course of two days in January, twenty migrant workers from Bangladesh and India talked about their lives with just over 200 students from over 40 different countries. The students were 14- and 15-year-olds from an international school in Singapore, United World College
Junnuri Subrahmanyam's flight was booked for the evening. He wanted a day off on his last day in Singapore so he could go downtown to buy gifts for this family. He had been working four years with Sin Hong Thai Engineering and was looking forward to going home. But instead of being on a plane
By Charmaine Yap On the very first day of our 3-week internship at TWC2, Alex told us most emphatically that we would need to “step out of our middle class mindset and assumptions”. That thought particularly stuck with me. Thinking back now, I doubt I had really understood then what he had meant by that,
By John Gee The annual report for 2012 of the Occupational Safety and Health Division (link to Part 1, Part 2), released in March 2013, ("OSHD Report") showed that the number of workplace deaths had fallen to 56, its lowest level in nine years. However, the total number of injuries had risen over ten per
