By Keith Wong Some workers need to hold on to their jobs to support their families, but lose them anyway through no fault of their own. Sikder Gopal needs to quit his job, to go home to be with his extremely ill mother, yet is stymied every step of the way. Oh, the irony! It
By Sam Myat San I have always taken my sense of smell for granted. I used to imagine that losing one’s sight or hearing would be debilitating but that the olfactory sense was dispensable. That was until I met with a young man called Pugalenthy Karthikeyan (or Karthi, as he prefers to be called) who
By Lindene Cleary Shabul came to Singapore in 2009 to work for a marine company. During those five years he has dedicated himself to working hard to support himself and his family back home in Bangladesh. He’s never been injured, and has taken only a handful of days off for illness. Earlier this month, he
The Ministry of Manpower has accused TWC2 of publishing a "grossly untruthful account" relating to Indonesian domestic worker Wahyuni (see our earlier article here). This quote was contained in a story published in The New Paper on 8 March 2015 and archived on AsiaOne. See here and here. Transient Workers Count Too stands by our story
It was Sadhin who first saw her. She was crying, lost in a foreign country, knowing nobody. All she knew was that her tourist visa was about to expire and she would soon be an illegal overstayer. Broke and with no means to purchase a flight home, she could soon be spending time in prison.
By Samantha Ege His name is Shohag, a young graduate from Bangladesh with a Bachelor of Business Studies. He sits opposite me and spreads three cards on the table between us. ‘Building Construction Supervisor’, ‘Work-at-Height’, ‘Lifting Supervisor’ they read, giving me a glimpse of the post-degree path Shohag has taken here, in Singapore. But the
By Jacintha Gopal Amy (not her real name) hadn’t been home for Christmas for seven years. The mother of two boys, aged 13 and 10 years, is a domestic worker from the Philippines working for an expatriate family living in Singapore. Having lived apart from her husband and children since 2007, Amy told me that
By Maya Nguyen Sixteen days after an accident, Sahajahan, 28, went to a lawyer to seek help with his case. He was then sent to the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) where he was told his Work Permit had been cancelled eleven days before. No one had told him. Sahajahan was completely unaware that his overstay
Late November 2014, an email came from the blogsite TR Emeritus about an Indonesian domestic worker who was not allowed to leave her employer's house for two years. The email sender said "hope you guys can take a look at this case seriously. The poor maid is said to be always hungry and begging for
Express Point Engineering Pte Ltd took exception to our article published on 17 December 2014, titled 'Injured Hossian hidden away in locked container'. The employer asserted that this was untrue, though this was possibly later qualified with a further nuance: that they had no knowledge of any such incident. Following an email from Express Point,
