All Singapore Stuff – Real Singapore News From Tuas to Changi, All Singapore Stuff brings you Real Singapore News!
Credit: Andrew Loh
MOM and perhaps MinLaw need to get their act together.
It is ridiculous for a decent honest worker to be denied his pay for 9 months, and at the end of this to be told to sort things out himself.
What are the law, the courts and the MOM for, when there is no teeth to them? Just for show?
Bottomline is employers do this – treating their foreign workers like this and ignoring the courts’ orders – because they know they can get away with it.
And indeed they can, because the authorities do not care and are not interested to help.
And the poor worker has no means to bring his employer to account.
All the employer has to do is to wait it out, worker gets homesick or exhausted all means of recourse and has to go back home to his country, empty-handed.
In the end, the employer gets away with free labour, and the authorities get to cover their own backside and say well, we have tried to help him (by telling the employer to pay up, nothing more), as if that is really all that is needed to force the employer to do so.
Why not make it a criminal offence for employers to not pay their workers, especially after being ordered by the courts to do so?
You will see employers taking such things more seriously then.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, see how quickly our ministers go to Parliament to increase their salaries if they fall behind the benchmark.
It is a matter of interest and the MOM doesn’t seem interested to help foreign workers in such predicaments.
I mean, these problems are not new. They have been around for years.
In the meantime, the law forbids the poor worker from seeking work while his case is sorted out.
What do the authorities expect him (and his family back home) to live on? Empty air and grass?
