By Ng Jing Song
As we mourn the deaths and casualties begotten by the Downtown Line accident, the tragedy holds up a mirror for us to reflect on the larger looming issues confronting foreign workers.
Singapore has not received a stellar grade in the Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report issued by the U.S. State Department. Consequently, the Singapore Inter-Agency Taskforce has taken issue with “several inaccuracies and misrepresentations” in the Department’s report. “Singapore calls on the U.S. to improve the credibility of the State Department's annual Report,” the Singapore Agency said, “by ensuring greater accuracy of facts and by making the Report's [sic] methodology more objective.”
Rana Kumar Rai, a foreign worker who contended with 18-hour workdays, would have in turn taken issue with the Singapore Government’s response had he chanced upon the Ministry of Manpower’s website in his hometown.
For example, paragraph 3 of the Agency’s rebuttal says: “… under the Work Pass Conditions, the employer must ensure that all outstanding salaries and moneys due to the foreign employees are paid before the employee’s repatriation.”
This was not the case for Rana. The Nepalese had to apply for a Writ of Seizure & Sale in a bid to claw back the S$6,865 that a Woodlands coffee shop owner owed him. Getting this writ is costly. There is the stamp duty charge, the bailiff’s attendance fee, the accumulating living expenses burdening the jobless foreigner who lacks a Temporary Work Permit. Such lurking costs are prohibitive. Rana returned to Nepal an indebted person without the “outstanding salaries and monies due to [him]”.
Mr Jolovan Wham, the executive director of the Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics (HOME), a Singapore non-governmental organisation which provides aid to migrant workers, told publichouse.sg, “MOM needs to provide figures on employers who were prosecuted and taken to task for cancelling work permits without paying their workers.” He added, “The workers’ problems and grievances go beyond just ‘outstanding salaries and monies due to the foreign employee’, and MOM has failed to address this.”
The lived experience of Rana Kumar Rai is symptomatic of a broader problem with the Singapore taskforce’s response. There is a fissure between the letter of the law and the facts of raw reality.
Another example of how relying on the rules alone may not be sufficient is how employers are able to place employment bars on workers. The Agency said, in reply to the US report, “This is untrue. Singapore employers do not possess powers to place employment bars on foreign workers. Employment bars are imposed by MOM on foreign workers who have been found to have infringed Singapore laws and regulations.”
Although there are regulations barring the employer’s abrupt termination of a worker’s contract, Mr Wham explains that “employers only need to give one day’s notice, or one day’s salary in lieu of notice to workers who are in employment for less than 26 weeks.”
“While employers do not possess the powers to place employment bars on workers, they have considerable influence on MOM to do so, and this needs to be addressed,” Mr Wham says. “Employers may lodge police reports and submit negative feedback about workers and MOM may blacklist them based on such feedback. This method of blacklisting is unjust because the workers are no longer around to respond to the employer’s negative feedback and allegations.”
Another matter the Ministry for Manpower (MOM) also needs to address is the withholding of work permit cards and passports of workers by their employers. It is an issue which have been highlighted many times by the NGOs. “Almost all of the 2,000 workers that HOME sees every year on average have had their work permit cards and passports held by their employers,” Mr Wham says. “Workers who make official complaints about employers who hold on to their identity documents risk incurring the displeasure of their employers. They may subsequently be dismissed and repatriated. Even though the MOM acts on the complaints of workers whose passports and identity cards have been taken, they do not provide protection to workers who are repatriated when they have lodged a complaint about it. This needs to be addressed.”
Repatriation companies, which employers can engage to deal with “problem workers” are “still not outlawed,” Mr Wham says, even though their activities, which involve the confinement of migrant workers, are illegal. “Conducting just one operation to inspect what is an undesirable and illegal operation is insufficient as a response,” says Mr Wham.
As for the matter of human trafficking itself, Mr Wham says at the fundamental level, even Singapore’s definition of what constitutes human trafficking “is not in line with international and United Nations standards.”
“This means that many cases would have gone undetected,” Mr Wham explains. “Worse still, trafficked victims may have been criminalised. Law enforcers are not sufficiently trained to identify potential victims, and those who are undocumented especially are usually treated as immigration offenders only.”
Perhaps the Singapore Government should show a more concrete commitment to protecting the rights of the migrant workers, who are often heavily disadvantaged in disputes with their employers, by ratifying certain International Labour Organisation conventions and to make information such as statistics on human trafficking more easily available to the public, on top of enforcing what the regulations and the law say.
In a previous article, we explored ways to ensure that the regulations were not toothless. Perhaps a more preliminary and more fundamental step involves recognising that the letter of the law lacks bite in the foreign labour market: the rapid flow of people enticed by imperfect information and imperfect translations. Singapore’s taskforce should persist with and deepen its engagement with organisations like HOME and Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2). Such organisations have their ears close to the ground. These ears are sensitive to the muffled stories of manipulation and the wrenching disappointment of deceived workers, like Rana Kumar Rai.
Like the signs at construction and road repair sites, Singapore’s efforts to forge a just labour landscape untainted by exploitation is very much a work in progress, with lots more to be done.
So, instead of taking issue with the US State Department’s annual report each time it is released, Singapore should look into the real problems and correct the abuse and exploitation of these workers in a more concrete way.
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