Foreign worker beats Singapore company in court thanks to handwritten log of 1,848 overtime hours

The sum is the most an Employment Claims Tribunal can award, and the worker himself estimated he was owed about S$21,815, CNA reported.

Neither the worker nor the company was named in the ruling, published July 1, as is standard for tribunal cases, which are heard in private.

The man was employed from around December 2023 until Dec. 8, 2025, mainly serving tables at a Bangladeshi restaurant, with no written contract.

Both sides agreed his terms came from the in-principle approval that Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower issues to work-permit holders in place of one, setting a 44-hour week, a basic salary of S$1,500 a month, and overtime at S$11.80 an hour.

He said he actually worked 13 to 15 hours a day, every day of the week. Limiting his claim to April 1 through Dec. 8, 2025, he counted 1,848.8 hours of unpaid overtime.

His evidence was an attendance table showing work from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday to Saturday and 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Sundays.

He had started keeping it in March 2025, when the company replaced its punch-card system with facial recognition and cut off his access to the records, photographing old punch cards and then writing his hours down by hand.

The company denied he had done any overtime and called three witnesses, including a chef who said he himself worked about 11 hours a day but insisted the claimant never stayed past his eight-hour shift. The director called the claim retaliation for the cancellation of the worker’s permit.

Tribunal magistrate Joel Tan was unmoved by the argument that the man’s long silence made his account improbable, according to Mothership.

Migrant workers inhabit “a different labor reality,” Tan said, one where raising complaints on the job risks repatriation, so many stay quiet until they leave.

He found the handwritten table and the photographed punch cards credible, which shifted the burden to the company.

It claimed to keep no records of hours, which he called hard to believe given the punch cards, and produced not a single roster or message to counter a claim covering every day worked across months. The company had the records, he concluded, and simply withheld them.

Tan awarded the S$20,000 maximum plus S$460 in costs.