Sorry, not sure if this goes into this section of the forum so I apologize if I'm not supposed to post this here.
I heard this from an acquaintance who works in a blue-collared work industry. He told me that there are a lot of expats over there who come here (most, if not all, from India) regularly to work for three month periods, doing manual labors. He asked some of them and found out that some of them are in fact, well-educated (with degrees from India universities) and all they want is to have "Singapore expatriate" in their resume so that it'll look nicer.
Here's the summarized points that I heard from him:
1. These poor guys earn merely $5 per hour, doing from 8:00 AM to 11:00 PM daily with no rest days and no 1.5* for OT, so they earn 2.1k max if we consider 30 days per month.
2. Their duties detail some extremely tough manual labor, and sometimes they would knock off at 9:00 PM or so instead because they can't take it. They scrimp and save, and have no lodging so they sleep over at the factories for 3 months. Basically, very bad and cruel conditions.
3. The main point I want to ask about. When asked, they said their agents take $4000 from them at the end of the three months. That's at least 63% of their salaries deducted from them, and that's considering if any of them is actually able to work 8-11 daily for 7 days a week. Is this legal? It sounds way too ridiculous to be legal at all. Legal or not, something needs to be done about it because the agents are fattening their pockets while these poor souls work to death.