By Fuxiong Five days after the three of them lodged a salary complaint with the Ministry of Manpower on 1 March 2013, they were summoned to the company office. They were each handed their passports and an airticket back to Bangladesh. Rowshan (at left in picture) protested to the foreman, "Only passport and ticket give,

By Joyce Law and Geng Zhaochong We undertook some outreach for TWC2 recently, which involved talking to foreign domestic workers and finding out more about the challenges they face working in Singapore. Domestic workers play an increasingly important role in Singaporean households today due to the rise in dual-income families: when neither spouse is around

By Davina Tham Imagine sleeping ten hours a night, watching TV and movies all day, and getting friends to pay for all your meals. Most people would call this heaven. But for Mahmudul Hasan, this was a lifestyle wracked with anxiety and frustration, waiting for the work and the salary he was promised but never

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 the indifference with which some

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 for leisure. They are migrant

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 foreman, he from behind kick

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 have turned out much worse

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 another human being.  It also