Foreign worker takes company to court for unpaid overtime, wins S$20,000

If he worked overtime hours, he was paid in cash on the same day, she said.

The woman said the company did not make or keep any record of the claimant’s working hours.

The chef testified that he worked about 11 hours a day for six days per week. He acknowledged that he worked overtime every day, but said he was paid in cash for two overtime hours daily.

Although he regularly worked overtime, he maintained that the claimant never did.

The director gave evidence that was largely in line with the statements by the office manager and the chef, but he said the claim was brought purely in retaliation after the company cancelled his work permit.

He claimed this was because the claimant was a troublesome employee who fought with customers on three occasions.

The director also aired grievances about the non-profit organisation assisting the claimant, noted the tribunal magistrate Joel Tan.

Mr Tan said there was something striking about the claimant’s account, which was that he worked 13 to 15 hours a day without rest for an extended duration without raising a formal complaint before the claim.

The company used this point to contend that the claimant’s account was inherently improbable and commenced as a form of retaliation.

MAGISTRATE’S REASONING

Mr Tan said he had initially found this argument appealing. However, he noted that how people respond to any given set of facts will vary across people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, and individual experiences.

On further reflection, Mr Tan said he was not persuaded that there is anything inherently improbable about a worker accepting such conditions for as long as the claimant did and raising such matters only after the end of employment.

“Employees tolerate poor working conditions for all manner of reasons – fear of conflict, hope that things will improve, reluctance to risk a steady income, difficulty with finding alternative employment, or simple resignation that complaining will achieve nothing. None of these are uncommon responses for any employee in Singapore,” he said.

Mr Tan said some of these reasons operate with greater force for foreign workers, who inhabit “a different labour reality” from most employees in Singapore.

“A foreign worker’s right to remain in Singapore is tied to her or his employment. Raising employment issues during the period of employment risks repatriation,” said Mr Tan.

“If she or he came to Singapore carrying recruitment debts, repatriation could mean financial catastrophe. It may also be difficult to seek alternative employment, since foreign workers generally require employer consent to transfer. Hence, a foreign worker with unpaid overtime or lack of rest days may, quite reasonably and rationally, consider that it is better to keep a bird in the hand – in the form of one’s monthly salary – than two birds in the bush – by pressing for overtime pay or rest day pay and risking repatriation.”

Mr Tan said the only documentary evidence relating to the hours worked was the attendance table submitted by the claimant. This was purportedly based on handwritten notes he maintained since March 2025.

Mr Tan found the table to be credible because the claimant was able to give a detailed and internally coherent account of how it had been prepared and why he began to maintain the handwritten notes.

There were also punch cards that Mr Tan found to be credible and authentic contemporaneous records that corroborated the attendance table.

Because this evidence established a case for the claimant, the evidential burden then shifted to the company to show that the man did not work overtime.

Mr Tan said it would not have been difficult for an honest and responsible employer to discharge this burden, since the law requires an employer to make and keep employee records, which include the hours worked each day and the duration of breaks.

While the company claimed that it did not have records of hours worked by its employees, the magistrate found this unconvincing in the face of photographs of the punch cards submitted by the claimant.

He also rejected the company’s claim that the facial recognition system had been used only for employees of a related company at an adjacent restaurant and not its own employees.

Mr Tan found that the company had in fact maintained attendance records but simply refused to disclose or make accessible such records.

He pointed to the weakness of the company’s own evidence, as it claimed that the claimant had not worked any overtime at all.

“Even setting aside the attendance records, when a former employee brings a claim of this magnitude – every day worked, no rest days, overtime hours numbering in the thousands across months – she or he takes on a correspondingly greater risk of being contradicted,” said Mr Tan.

“The broader the claim, the easier it becomes for an employer to find at least one day, or one record that does not fit. In the age of digital communication, such evidence would not be difficult to come by. A message, a roster, a record of any kind showing that the claimant was not at work on a particular day or worked fewer hours than she or he claimed.”

The company produced not a single well-evidenced counter-example, noted Mr Tan.

The company said all communication about working hours was conducted verbally and face-to -face. Mr Tan said this was hard to accept given the company’s own evidence that employees did not have fixed working hours or rest days and were informed of their hours only the day before.

If this were true, it was difficult to see how there could be no trace of any digital communication over the nearly two years of the claimant’s employment to support these assertions, said Mr Tan.

He added that the restaurant only had three employees: A cleaner, the claimant and the chef. The restaurant opened at around 6am to 7am and closed at around 11pm.

“I had considerable difficulty understanding how any meaningful shift system could have been implemented between the claimant and the chef, with no other workers available to relieve the claimant after his purported eight-hour shift ended,” said Mr Tan.

He allowed the claim in full and awarded the claimant S$20,000. He also ordered the company to pay the claimant another S$460 in costs and disbursements.