Type of issue: skills training and costs
By John Gee In 2011, when looking into the costs Bangladeshis face in coming to work in Singapore’s construction industry, one of the expenses about which the research team asked workers was that of training. They quickly discovered that, though the workers had to pay significant amounts to training centres to gain skills that would qualify them to
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
The Straits Times reported, 22 August 2013, that Singapore is looking to Sri Lanka and the Philippines as regular sources of construction workers. "The first 20 Sri Lankan construction workers who were trained at a Building and Construction Authority (BCA) approved training centre in Colombo will arrive in Singapore next Friday, bringing some relief to
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
