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
"How many of you received the Chinese-language version of the letter from your employment agent?" asked TWC2 social worker Kenneth Soh soon after commencing his talk to Chinese workers. He was referring to the Ministry of Manpower's In-principle Approval for a Work Permit (IPA), a document that a worker had to have in hand upon
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
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
By YC Loh Picture your workplace being five to seven metres underground and just a few metres wide, inside a one-and-a-half kilometre long drain under a road. The only source of ventilation is via mechanical means which prove inadequate. The air you breathe is saturated with dust particles, which is so stifling that after every ten
We usually write about the situations that bring workers to Transient Workers Count Too's Cuff Road Food Programme — injury, salary dispute, etc — but seldom about what they do to sustain themselves once their work permits are cancelled and they're put on special passes. A condition of the special pass issued by the Ministry
The above video was created by a group of students from the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University. Introducing themselves to TWC2 at the start of their project and seeking our endorsement, they wrote: "We have chosen to do our project on construction worker and how they are human too
