By Fuxiong The banana was meant to be eaten, but in telling me his story, Shamsuddoha was waving it and hitting the table with it. It was soon bruised. He was too agitated to eat, particularly when he recounted the moment when he confronted his site manager. "Then who is responsible if accident happening during
By Alex Au Many stories on the website of Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2) tell of the abuses inflicted on migrant workers in Singapore. TWC2 holds the view that the regulatory system governing the recruitment and control of foreign labour lies at the root of these abuses. Fortunately, many employers refrain from taking full advantage
By Nissa Mai The flight from Singapore to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, wasn't long — just under two hours — but for Margarette, the journey represented a whole new beginning, a fresh take on life. After years of domestic labor, she was finally going to begin her career in the hospitality line. Margarette, a Filipina national,
Alleged mistreatment by employers have led to riots in Malaysia by foreign workers, various news sources are reporting. Most serious was what happened on Tuesday night (26 August 2014) in the Malaysian state of Johor. As reported by Malaysian newspaper The Star: Some 800 workers of a factory here set fire to the building Tuesday
This letter by TWC2 immediate past president John Gee was published in the Straits Times on 14 July 2014: ---- Get to the bottom of unfair maid placement fees The imposition of considerable placement costs on domestic workers by many employment agencies has, regrettably, been a common practice since 1998 ("Any breach of maids' fee
The report Training centres in Bangladesh have become money-minting machines (published September 2013) was based on research done in Dhaka. Drawing from anecdotal information, we asserted in the paper that "Most workers report that their Singapore jobs are unrelated to the skills they trained for." This anecdotal information was from workers whom Transient Workers Count Too
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 Joyce Wong Where is next month’s money going to come from? Sitting in front of me is a very young, clean-shaven man. He is neatly dressed with his hair slightly touching his collar. Some would call him good-looking. He is here for his dinner at TWC2's soup kitchen when we ask to interview him.
The scab on one of Das Thiru's knees about three weeks after the accident Continued from PART 'The employers believe these workers exaggerate their injuries to fool doctors' – so reported the Straits Times on 9 November 2013 (‘Hospitals give too much sick leave for injuries: Bosses’ by Amelia Tan) Is this true?
It started as a way to ensure that migrant workers coming to Singapore had some basic skills, but the raison d'etre has since become something else: to extract as much money as possible from the poor. "It" is the tangled business of providing training, testing and recruitment in Bangladesh. The key to its metamorphosis is
