Part 5: the Section 6A requirement The long name for this rule is “Employment of Foreign Manpower (Work Passes) Regulations 2012, Fourth Schedule, Part IV, Section 6A”. The clause in the subsidiary legislation says: 6A. (1) The employer shall not — (a) Reduce the foreign employee’s basic monthly salary or fixed monthly allowances to an amount less
Part 4: MOM begins at last to respond to changing circumstances In Part 2 of this series, we described how workers with salary claims often pointed to the stated salaries in their In-Princple Approvals for Work permits ("IPA") [footnote 1] as the basis for their claims. However, the Ministry of Manpower ("MOM") itself took the
Part 3: Getting around IPAs in salary disputes Part 2 of this series described the uneven way in which the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) officers and the ministry’s Labour Court [footnote 1] handled salary claims. Sometimes, the In-Principle Approval letter ("IPA") [footnote 2] was admitted as the basis for adjudicating claims. When that happened, employers
Part 2: Salary terms Very few of the migrant workers from India and Bangladesh working in non-domestic sectors have written employment contracts. Contracts are more common with workers from China, but typically these contracts are signed in their home country between the agent and the worker. TWC2 noticed that Ministry of Manpower (MOM) officers often
For a long, long time, TWC2 has been calling for electronic payment of salaries to be made mandatory. Giving employers the option to pay in cash allows all sorts of abuses to happen and seriously disadvantages workers when salary is not paid or only partially paid. Workers are left with no evidence as to how
The news site TodayOnline reported that the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) "plans to clamp down on employers who abuse salary vouchers — such as by having employees indicate receipt of their wages before they are paid." The news story was dated 26 November 2018 (Link). On the face of it, this sounds like progress. It's
In this article "$" represents the Singapore Dollar unless we specifically say otherwise, e.g."US$". It's been some time since we last wrote about recruitment costs. It's not a topic we should lose sight of. No progress is being made on this front, and high costs remain the chief reason why migrant workers cannot exert their
By Ada Cheong, based on an interview in September 2018 Miah Younose takes his arm off the table and leans back into his chair, laughing to make light of his predicament. Unpaid for four months and bearing the sunken cost of $4,800 in agent fees, he is desperate to remain in Singapore to find
For several months in late 2017 and early 2018, we puzzled over a statement by the then-Minister for Manpower Lim Swee Say that in the first half of 2017, only about 600 of foreign workers with salary claims indicated that they wished to find new employment (see footnote 1). We felt that 600 was an
By Darren Tan, based on an interview in August 2018 By July 2018, Munshi Kader was reaching the end of his temporary job with a chemical factory in the Pioneer district of Singapore. He had worked two six-month stints at this factory, and the boss liked him enough to want to retain him permanently. "MOM
