FTrash Tekan Employer Till Beng Allowed to Be Paid to Idle in Shop!

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

NOT ALL FOREIGN WORKERS ARE HARDWORKING SOME ARE JUST HERE TO EXPLOIT THE SYSTEM!

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25 Jun 2014 - 12:22am








Dear The Real Singapore,

I got a rather troubling issue which I need your help or anyone who can give me a solution. I'm self-employed and I have a hired staff who is a foreigner that just got her PR status. Immediately once she got her PR status, she informed me that she is already pregnant. Due to the nature of our job, we are constantly exposed to chemicals therefore I advised her to reconsider her employment which is on contract basis as it would affect her pregnancy. She insisted to stay. Out of goodwill, I retained her in employment hoping that she can still help out in the stores through sales.

As months goes by, it seems that her work performance has declined significantly. Customers also feedback about her service attitude as she gets mood swings during work which affects business very much as we are in the retail line. Every month our company would have to top-up close to $2,000 for her headcount as she is could not hit her sales target. And because we cannot terminate a pregnant staff, we have to concede to this re-incurring cost at the expense of the other staffs' hard work. This was much worse than her 'pre-pregnancy' months which we have to still top-up about $1,000 every month.

She would refuse customers half en hour before knock off hour so she leave earlier. And she is even unwilling to help out for non-labor tasks like answering the phone or engaging a walk-in customer in conversation. So now she just sits in the shop and plays her phone while getting a stable monthly salary. Apparently she just wanted to have a "stable" job to enjoy the maternity benefits and exploit the goodwill given to her. She is unwilling to perform which is already shown in her annual sales performance report, knowing that there is nothing the company can do. To make matters worse, she even took a long leave to go back home recently and claimed all her annual leave & off days even before the year ends. BTW, she refused all forms of negotiation when I tried discussing with her for a solution to this problem.

What can I do? I am a self-employed owner of a small business and I no longer has the reserves to 'feed' her like a charity organization. If this goes on, I might have to close my business even before she goes for her confinement just to pay off her maternity benefits. There are laws protecting employees which I understand that are supposed to be fair. But isn't the government also encouraging SMEs and Singaporeans to be entrepreneurs? Why isn't there laws to protect us against unfairness from employees? What can we SME owners do when we get caught in this situation?

We try to take care of our staffs and hire locals, but we end up having some 'black sheep' employees who would take advantage of these laws & benefits to exploit and hold their employers hostage! With all the rising cost of operation especially those that we cannot control (ie. rental, levies, CPF contributions, electricity bills, etc.), we really cannot afford to keep non-performing staffs who leeches on to resources while being protected by the Employment Act.

From,
Ms. Wu
TRS reader

Editor's Note: Any other self-employed can give some word of advice to this fellow TRS reader?


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