It took 400 unpaid workers before the alarm was sounded in Singapore

In March 2025, advocacy group Transient Workers Count 2 (TWC2) received a text from a migrant worker who had not been paid for a month by his employer, KPA Engineering.

Another worker came forward in May. Another in June. One said he had never once been paid on time since joining the company. More emerged over the following year, and each was advised to file salary claims with the Tripartite Alliance for Dispute Management (TADM).

Then, on June 22, 2026, about 100 workers turned up at the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) seeking help. Within two days, that number had grown to about 400.

By that time, the damage had already been done, and the focus was on how to clean up the aftermath.

Some of the workers have quickly found new jobs, and the authorities say they expect the majority of the rest to be successfully job-matched in the coming weeks.

But this episode should serve as a moment of reckoning. How did so many workers end up going unpaid before the problem came fully into view?

This is not about assigning blame before investigations conclude. Nor is it to suggest that Singapore lacks laws or institutions to protect workers. It has both. The question is whether our labour protection system is better at reacting to wage theft than preventing it.

The first workers who sought help over unpaid wages may have appeared to be isolated cases. In hindsight, they look more like early warning signs. That does not mean intervention would necessarily have been justified at the time. But it does raise a legitimate question: When several workers linked to the same employer begin reporting unpaid wages over an extended period, should that trigger closer scrutiny?

A Straits Times investigation found that KPA Engineering’s financial troubles pre-dated the wage crisis by at least two years. Public records show that HSBC registered a charge against the company over unpaid debts in 2023. That debt was settled, but DBS also registered two charges in 2024, both of which remain on public record.

KPA Engineering director Ramu Palani Velu, a Singapore permanent resident, is also listed as a director of seven companies. Three of them, including KPA Engineering, have workers who have reportedly gone unpaid for months. The existence of the companies having a common director is not, by itself, evidence of wrongdoing.

But financial regulators routinely look for patterns across related entities rather than viewing each case in isolation. Labour regulation may eventually need to adopt a similar mindset, if it has not already begun doing so. The objective is not to presume guilt, but to identify emerging risks before they affect hundreds of people.

When does a warning become a pattern?

Wage theft is not simply a dispute between an employer and an employee. It is a breach of the most basic promise underpinning any labour market: If you do the work, you will be paid. Every month they worked without receiving their salaries, the workers were effectively financing their employer’s business. Unlike banks, they had little practical ability to limit their exposure without risking their livelihoods.

Migrant worker organisations such as TWC2 and Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics (HOME) say many workers delay reporting salary arrears because the risks are enormous. Some have sold land or borrowed tens of thousands of dollars to pay recruitment fees. Many fear losing their jobs before repaying those debts. Others worry that speaking up will mean immediate repatriation or the loss of future employment opportunities.

In practice, the system still depends heavily on the people with the least power to sound the alarm.

MOM has repeatedly encouraged workers to report salary violations early, but if workers consistently feel unable to report until the situation becomes desperate, the question is not simply whether they should speak up sooner, but whether the system gives them enough confidence to do so.

The KPA Engineering case may be remarkable for the number of workers involved, but labour non-governmental organisations say wage theft is far from uncommon.

In 2025, TWC2 helped about 300 workers from three related companies file salary claims with TADM after those firms ran into financial trouble. The organisation says demand for its services has also surged. That same year, it received 26,000 calls and messages – double the previous year’s figure – with about 2,500 relating to salary disputes. HOME, meanwhile, says it deals with wage theft cases daily and handled more than 1,300 salary-related cases at its helpdesk in 2025.

Salary claims among foreign workers rose by nearly a fifth in 2024, according to MOM's Employment Standards Report. The incidence increased from 3.91 to 4.64 claims per 1,000 foreign employees, with the construction sector remaining the biggest contributor because of business failures and financial distress.

It also said that 94 per cent of all employees “fully recovered” their salaries, but its methodology defines full recovery as the amount agreed between the parties during mediation or ordered by the Employment Claims Tribunals (ECT).

TWC2 argues that the statistic obscures the fact that many workers accept negotiated settlements below what they originally claimed because they cannot afford to keep fighting. This then reflects different definitions of what recovery means. Is it recovering everything one is legally entitled to, or everything one is prepared to accept?

Even if a dispute proceeds from TADM to the ECT and the worker obtains an order for payment, recovery is not guaranteed if the employer lacks assets.

From damage control to early detection

How then, do we reduce the need for wage recovery in the first place?

The first step is to detect problems much earlier.

Several countries, including the United Arab Emirates, have introduced wage protection systems in which salaries are paid electronically through an intermediary rather than directly by employers. If wages fail to arrive on payday, the system automatically generates an alert, allowing regulators to intervene before weeks or months of arrears accumulate.

Singapore has already moved in this direction for some groups of migrant workers. Extending electronic salary payments more broadly would not simply make payroll more convenient, it would create a verifiable audit trail and give regulators much earlier visibility when employers repeatedly fail to pay workers on time.

But technology alone cannot solve the problem if workers remain too afraid to report abuse.

One reason many workers stay silent is that changing employers can be difficult and expensive. Losing a job may also mean returning to the very recruitment agents who charged them hefty fees in the first place.

HOME has argued that greater job mobility should form part of the solution. Workers should be able to leave abusive employers more easily and transfer to new jobs without unnecessary barriers.

TWC2 has similarly advocated for a central jobs portal to connect workers directly with employers or licensed employment agencies, reducing dependence on informal middlemen and lowering recruitment costs.

Even with better detection and greater job mobility, some employers will still fail.

Singapore already requires employers of non-Malaysian Work Permit holders to furnish a $5,000 security bond. While the bond is not designed as a wage guarantee, TWC2 says workers whose employers are unable to pay them are sometimes referred either to the Migrant Workers’ Centre – a support group formed by the National Trades Union Congress and the Singapore National Employers Federation – for ex-gratia assistance or to insurers for payouts under the security bond. The criteria for these referrals, however, are not publicly clear.

That raises a broader question: should workers instead be protected through a more formal wage insurance or guarantee scheme?

That is why another proposal deserves serious consideration: mandatory salary insurance, similar to the workplace injury insurance that employers are already required to buy. Employers would remain legally responsible for paying wages and continue to face sanctions if they defaulted. But workers would no longer bear the full financial consequences when an employer becomes insolvent or is otherwise unable to pay them.

None of these measures will be cost-free. But neither is waiting until hundreds of workers have gone months without wages before the alarm is sounded.

Singapore has become highly effective at responding when migrant workers fall into crisis. The KPA Engineering case suggests the next step may not be about writing more rules but ensuring a system that is equally effective at recognising the crisis before it reaches 400 people.