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More disputes arising from Casinos!

TeeKee

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This is totally outrageous! How many similar cases are being hushed up by MOM in order to hide it from the public?

http://www.yawningbread.org/arch_2008/yax-962.htm

Muddy Singapore swallows China workers

Yawning Bread and reporter Shree Ann Mathavan of the New Paper met with 4 China workers on Friday, 5 December 2008. They had a distressing story to tell. There were 2 other workers who could not make the meeting because they had been detained by the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority.

Wanting to press for a resolution of his dispute with his employer, Xue Hanming, a construction worker originally from Jiangsu, China, called the Ministry of Manpower on 3 December 2008. "Ms Foo [Kim Hui] told me to go down to the ministry the next day," he told me.

On the 4th, he arrived and asked the reception clerk to inform Ms Foo of his presence. He was asked to sit in the waiting area.

After a long while with no sign of Foo, Xue began to wonder if something else was up. Fresh in his mind was the case of a fellow worker, Xue Chengming (no relation), who had been seized by security agents hired by their employer on the evening of 2 Dec. More on Xue Chengming's seizure below.

Fearing a similar fate, Xue decided to leave. Moments after stepping out, he saw his manager and a couple of security guards enter the Manpower Ministry building. It was a near miss.

It doesn't take much to put two and two together. Who would have alerted the employer that Xue Hanming was in the ministry building? Why did Foo never come down to meet someone with whom she herself had asked to come to the ministry, giving the impression that she was prepared to discuss the matter with the complainant? Is deceit in speech and action an ethical way for civil servants to act? Are government offices meant to be places for resolving problems in good faith and according to the law, or locations for entrapment?

But let's start from the beginning.

* * * * *

The two Xue were members of a larger group of workers -– a figure of 32 was mentioned at some point in the interview -– who were in dispute with their employer, Xuyi Building Engineering Co, a "foreign company registered in Singapore" according the records at the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA). Its registration number is F 065765 K.

Xuyi is a subcontractor at both the Marina Bay and Sentosa casino projects. I am told that Xuyi is a subcontractor for multinational construction company Ssangyong at these sites.

This was not the first time that Xuyi faced unhappy workers. There was at least one earlier batch who had lodged complaints against the company -- a fact that the Ministry of Manpower acknowledged to Xue and his colleagues. More on that batch's story in the box at right.

Xue Hanming spoke on behalf of five other men, whose names are in the photo caption below. Two of them had been seized by the employer's security agents before the interview and handed over to the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA).
L - R:
Tian Su Yun, Yang Zhi Qiang, Xue Hanming, Liu Xiaoping.

Not in photo (detained at ICA):
Xue Chengming, Chen Yuguang




Of these six men, three had been brought to Singapore in late 2007, one in February 2008 and two, including Xue Hanming, in June 2008.

Before coming here, they had signed employment contracts with an agent in China -– whom they later discovered was married to the boss of Singapore Xuyi -– which contained a paragraph on expected remuneration. It is not an altogether clear clause, but it may be common in China. Essentially, it says that the monthly salary will be in the range of "S$1,250 to S$1,500 (subject to satisfactory diligence)". It also specified that if they worked every day of a month, they would get an extra S$1 per day, i.e. S$30 for a 30-day month.
 
ICA officers being charged for corruption are not infrequent. Will we be seeing some from the MOM? Soon?
 
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