• phantom jobs - being brought to Singapore by labour agents for promised jobs, only to discover that the jobs don't exist.
   
• promised overtime work does not materialise, so they end up earning much less than originally indicated when being recruited.
   
• salaries not paid.
   
• arbitrary deductions made by employer from salaries, thus net wages far lower than expected or promised at time of recruitment.
   
• deplorable housing conditions.
   
• lack of medical care.
   
• abandoned with no accommodation, no food and no money.
   
• early termination by employer leaving them stranded with debts back home.

What I have noticed is that the Manpower Ministry is not taking a pro-active approach to these problems. There is an unmistakable tendency to merely play passive mediator when complaints flood in, even when employers have clearly violated one or more laws. One cannot but get the sense that the civil servants just want the problem to go away, and their actions seem to be mainly directed at chasing complainants away and looking good to the media. Perhaps they think it is too much trouble to deal sternly with employers and labour agents even when they are clearly at fault?

After hundreds of Chinese workers descended on the Manpower Ministry in late December 2008 and early January 2009, the ministry said it would investigate the cases with a view to prosecution of the employers. See Muddy Singapore swallows China workers, part 4. However, I have yet to see actual cases brought to court. I may have missed the news while I was travelling, so if any reader knows otherwise, please drop me a note.

Nonetheless, I am all too aware that the problem of mistreated workers is complex one, especially when we’re in the midst of an economic downturn. Companies whose orders suddenly dry up or construction companies that face cash flow problems have to adjust too. Most jobs in Singapore, even for locals, don’t come with lifetime guarantees. It would be absurd to argue that companies shouldn’t have flexibility to trim their workforce if conditions call for it.

 
Two underlying problems

Yet, it is also true that sometimes we can get caught up with so much detail, we don’t see the forest for the trees. It should be apparent that one thread running through all these problems is that the workers have very poor bargaining power for two underlying reasons

• Their stay in Singapore is contingent upon having a job, so when the employer terminates them, they are very quickly put at risk of deportation.
    
• They get into debt in order to get the job.

Unscrupulous employers and labour agents will undoubtedly take advantage of the above to exploit workers. That's why we keep hearing of arbitrary deductions. In the December case that I wrote about, the workers finally settled for much less than they were owed, because they just didn't have the leverage to demand what was due, not when the ministry would not use the law against errant employers.

Some people may say the workers are adults; they made their own decision to come to Singapore and put themselves in this disadvantaged position. Why do we want to get ourselves into a twist trying to help them? Saying that would be too simplistic. Was theirs an informed decision? Were they given false or misleading information by employers and recruiting agents to entice them to sign on?

In any case, we should be doing more than just reacting to problems and spending time assigning blame. Addressing the two underlying problems mentioned above will help a great deal towards preventing problems from arising.

 
Forceful and speedy action when complaints surface

Let me take the first underlying problem: workers have to leave Singapore within 30 days after their employment is terminated -- and employers can terminate employees at will. I am not suggesting that we should let unemployed foreigners hang around Singapore indefinitely, but what it does mean is that when a complaint surfaces, the authorities must act speedily. If within 30 days an employer is still not charged with breaking the law (if the complaint is one of not paying salaries on time, which is an offence), then what happens to the employee who must leave Singapore?

However, other complaints do not involve a breach of the law, for example, early termination. If there is a provision for it in the employment contract, then while the workers may be unhappy that they don't get to keep their jobs, so long as their salaries are up to date, it is hard to fault the employer.

 
Workers must be dissuaded from getting into debt

This is where the second underlying problem must be licked -- that of workers getting into debt in the hope of recovering that amount by working 3 - 5 years in Singapore. Who can guarantee that the job will last that long?

We've heard from numerous reports by now that workers typically pay labour agents about S$8,000 to get a job. Sometimes they sell their house or farm to raise this money. Others go to money lenders. Where does the money go to? Part of it covers the airfare, but most of it, I'm pretty sure, is revenue for the labour agencies.

I have experience hiring domestic maids, and every time, it strikes me that the employer hardly pays the labour agency anything for the service. Clearly, their revenue originates from the workers. This means that profitability for labour agencies come from high turnover, not from happy workers employed here for a long time. The more churn, the better.

Worse still, from time to time, reports surface of labour agents paying commissions to employers to take new workers. This means that employers may be tempted to get rid of existing workers halfway through their contracts and take on fresh workers.

I think the system is wrong. The employer should pay the full cost of recruitment. There should be no reason for workers to have to sell their farm or go to money lenders to raise the initial S$8,000 or whatever the amount currently is. Once they get into debt, it will be very hard to help them when they find themselves in conflict with their employer later.

There are two, not mutually exclusive, ways of doing this.

1. This first is to regulate the recruitment companies much more tightly than hitherto has been the case. Any company caught taking money from potential workers should be deregistered. This includes its subcontractors in the home country. Eventually, it should be reduced to only about 10 - 20 vertically integrated companies of good standing.

It's unrealistic, you might be tempted to say, to do recruitment without using a constellation of home country subcontractors, all wanting to take a cut. I don't think so. The British army sent teams directly to remote Nepali villages to recruit soldiers, and the generally uncorrupt system produced brave and loyal Gurkha regiments for over a century.

 
2. The second prong is to actively counter any misinformation labour agents pass out to gullible villagers, empowering the latter to negotiate with recruiters from a position of greater awareness, including refusing to pay the high fees. One idea I have mentioned to quite a number of people -- though so far, very few seem interested in it -- is that the Singapore government should fund a series of videos explaining:

• the rules for working in Singapore 
• the likely working conditions 
• the cost of living 
• the permissible and impermissible salary deductions 
• the risk of early temrination

Other videos should consist of honest interviews with workers already here, so they can speak of their real experiences and concerns, e.g. living conditions, medical care, working hours.

The videos should also list the approved labour agents registered under Singapore law. It should spell out clearly: Do not sign up with anyone else. This should at least stop cases of workers transported to Singapore only to discover that the promised jobs did not exist.

But most important of all, the videos should say they must not pay the labour agents anything above a small fee; that getting into debt before they even start a job is the biggest mistake they can make.

Naturally, these videos should be in their native languages.

It is very cheap nowadays to produce VCDs and DVDs for the tens of thousands, and we should be able to work with NGOs in the home countries of these workers to distribute them to as many towns and villages as possible where workers are sourced.

 
Singapore is a human trafficking blackspot

The Singapore government uses a self-serving definition of "human trafficking", allowing it to claim that such does not exist in Singapore. They generally use the word to mean either the act of forcibly kidnapping and transporting people across borders, or that of forcing arrivals to do a kind of work they had not agreed to earlier, e.g. providing sexual services.

Most of the world use a broader meaning of the term, which includes enticing people to move across borders through misleading or exaggerated information, and exploiting their vulnerabilities once they are in the foreign country, e.g. withholding salaries, arbitrary deductions. By this measure, Singapore can be said to be one of the major human trafficking capitals in the world.

The actual acts are not acts of government, but of callous individuals. However, after seeing so many cases of protesting workers, we cannot pretend to be unaware of these human rights abuses -- and human trafficking is an abuse of human rights. There are ways by which we can counteract it. To be aware of an evil and still do nothing is to share responsibility for the evil.

© Yawning Bread