The term 'placement fees' will, after May 1, 2012, only include the cost of medical check-ups, document processing and charges by Indonesian training centres, unlike currently where the term includes fees by recruitment agencies and other middlemen. This change will mean lowering placement fees from about $3,000 currently to about $1,600 for first-time maids and

In a statement issued March 26, 2012, the Ministry of Manpower announced that work permit holders from "non-traditional sources" such as Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand, as well as from China, can be employed for a maximum of ten years, up from six years previously.  The statement can be seen at http://www.mom.gov.sg/newsroom/Pages/PressReleasesDetail.aspx?listid=415 The ministry

Shokkanarayanan Ramakrishnan, 43, was sentenced to four weeks'  jail for abetting a false declaration as part of an S-Pass scam. The Permanent Resident was then an employment agent with Islets Solutions Pte Ltd, and had helped an employer (not named in the Channel NewsAsia story, March 26, 2012) "to falsely over-declare the monthly salaries of

Chinese-language newspaper Lianhe Wanbao and the Straits Times reported that a domestic worker from Indonesia fell to her death on Saturday afternoon, March 17, 2012. She fell from her employer's home on the 13th floor of a flat in Pasir Ris Street 71. From the bamboo clothes pole found next to her, it probably happened

In a side panel to an article in the Straits Times story on Wednesday, March 21, 2012 (Retire on CPF savings? Think again, by Radha Basu), associate professor Hui Weng Tat cautioned about the possibility of employers attempting to recover higher levy rates by lowering foreign worker wages, and urged greater attention to raising productivity. Straits

Vitria Wahyuni was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment by Justice Choo Han Teck for killing her employer, Madam Sng Gek Wah, 87, on November 25, 2009. The domestic worker, then aged 16, had been in the job for only four days when she strangled the older lady after being subjected to scoldings and

Masud al Manum met a tragic and untimely death when a concrete slab fell on him. He was operating an excavator three or four storeys deep inside a hole in the ground when the slab, measuring 4m by 2m, fell. It occurred at the construction site of the Downtown Line's Botanic Gardens Station,

At the parliamentary sitting of Monday, March 5, 2012, the member for the Silat precinct of Tanjong Pagar group representation constituency, Indranee Rajah, spoke of what she recently discovered about the situation injured foreign workers found themselves in. Residents had complained about the large numbers of foreign workers in their area. The People's

Four foreign workers were made to live in a rubbish bin centre by their employer. However, to conceal this fact from the Ministry of Manpower, general manager Lim Jiun Wei, 38, and  site manager Wan Kar Hou Francis, 32, made false declarations about the residential address of these employees. Today newspaper reported on March 7,

Chinese national and Singapore permanent resident Wang Jianping paid Central Provident Fund (CPF) contributions for 41 Singaporeans whom he had declared to be his employees. between May 2007 and February 2009. On March 5, 2012, he was jailed a month after pleading guilty to using this ruse -- the workers were not genuine employees --