From what I heard, the company running the Heritage Museum at Haw Par Villa has not been paying its staff for a couple of months now. Employees were either asked to delay banking in the cheques or the cheques bounced when they were banked in after the waiting period.

When you make a big hooha, they accuse you of breaking their rice bowls. Despite the ministers proclaiming we have a first rate civil service, this is the type of problem people are facing on the ground.

It is the Labour Court that the many cases of foreign workers should go to. Why? Then you get the world’s media in or outside the court. Again I am talking from experience. The Singapore media to my case, Sunny Tan versus SICC. They were not allowed inside and after the verdict, in which I was the victor, I was so surprised to see them outside the court. I told them my story and told them it is newsworthy and why it is so and that I was a journalist with Bernama and The Star. Fair go. No bluff. The truth.

Then I rang them and they said they will not be writing to submit to their editors. Why? I know. They were told by their big big superiors not to do so. What they did was to get The Sunday Times to write a plain vanilla eight-paragraph story but in spite of all this the message is very clear and that is I a humble small timer won this case against this Goliath.

So, I know why the garmen wants to keep the foreign workers cases very quiet and there must be in the thousands out of court. They fear the stories will go round and round the world. Very bad PR for Singapore. Muddy Sing.

They really really don’t deserve it.

Dealing with MOM (and MINDEF for that matter), it is rare to see the ministry yield to requests. However, pressures from all sides appear to make them tick the way we want and the way that they are not comfortable. Good, get them out of their usual comfort zone!

As for the police force who is so ever efficient to arrest selectively some protestors who really did nothing wrong according to our constitutions, why are actions not taken against people who are really breaking the law?

Good work, one’s heart gets warmed by these moving stories with a just ending.

Keep up the good work of speaking out for the downtrodden.

If he had done his job properly in enforcing the labour laws and regulations, this matter would not have blown up.

It will be good if a Mandarin account can be written by these Chinese nationals to share with the Chinese literate community on the pitfalls of being a migrant worker.

There is still a dire need to make these companies accountable for the crime and be brought to justice.

This is an excellent example of how the internet is being used as a platform of media freedom to address urgent labour issues in Singapore. While the Chinese Embassy deserves an applause (same goes to to Bangladeshi Embassy for the Tagore Lane workers), it is shocking to read that MOM is displeased to be pressured to do the right thing. What’s the point of having labour laws when all MOM does is mediate and not prosecute? It is high time that repatriation companies must be regulated under an established code of practice.