COMMENT: Right to employment crucial in protecting migrant workers

For most people of working age, the right to employment is crucial. It’s the means through which we support ourselves, and for many, our families too.

This holds especially true for the hundreds and thousands of migrant workers who have come to Singapore. “I come to work because Singapore money is very high. I think working in Singapore make my family happy. All people are thinking of the future,” a Bangladeshi worker once told me. Workers like him come to Singapore in the hopes of earning money that will help them build houses, support families and pay for their siblings’ or children’s education back home.

But their right to work is a precarious one. Employers are able to cancel work permits at any time. Work permits are also usually cancelled when a worker is injured. The worker is then issued with a Special Pass that allows him to stay in Singapore while he receives medical treatment and his work injury claim is being assessed. But this Special Pass does not allow its holder to work.

This puts the worker in a difficult situation. I’ve seen workers who have been in Singapore for two years waiting for a conclusion to their injury claim. In this two-year period they have families back home in need of support, as well as the costs associated with living in Singapore. Some men continue to pay for their own accommodation – even a bunk in a shared room can cost over $200 a month. On top of that, some are still in debt because they’ve yet to pay off the loans taken to pay the recruitment fees required for their jobs in Singapore. How are they expected to shoulder these costs without the right to work?

I’ve heard of workers – those whose injuries might not prevent them from doing so – who resort to working illegally to support themselves and send money home to their families.

This then exposes them to an additional level of exploitation: they lack rights or protection while working illegally. Such workers are in a severely disempowered position; they cannot report employers for abusing them or not paying their salaries, because that would require them to first admit to working illegally. Workers who sustain new injuries in the cause of moonlighting are also unlikely to be compensated.

I write this in relation to my interaction with migrant workers, most of whom are construction or shipyard workers. But this also applies to others like foreign domestic workers or sex workers, some of whom might have been victims of human trafficking.

This was one of the major points highlighted by NGOs who came together for the Stop Trafficking SG press conference on Wednesday (22 Oct).

“Whenever we talk to migrant workers and trafficked migrants, and whenever we try to encourage them to file complaints, one of the first things they ask us is: ‘Will I be able to switch employers or remain in Singapore to work?’ This is the main reason they have left their countries in the first place. If we are not able to meet this primary motivation of leaving their countries, we will not be able to get the trafficked victims’ cooperation to stay behind for investigations – and investigations take a really long time,” said Jolovan Wham, executive director of HOME.

The right to remain in Singapore and work is crucial to empowering migrant workers to speak up about any abuse or exploitation that they might suffer while here. Without it, any prosecution or punishment of abusive employers could also end up as punishment for the victim too.