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Singapore. Employers who fail to pay unskilled foreign workers or house them in adequate conditions can expect to be jailed, an appeal judge warned yesterday.

Judge of Appeal V. K. Rajah did not mince his words when he explained why he dismissed an employer’s appeal to have his jail sentence reduced to a fine.

“Employers who persistently fail to discharge their legal responsibilities towards foreign workers will ordinarily have custodial sentences imposed on them,” he said.

This could apply even for a single serious offence, he said, pointing out that unskilled foreigners were “especially vulnerable,” given their lack of a financial safety net.

Lee Chiang Theng was convicted last year of hiring foreigners without work permits, housing them in substandard accommodation and not paying them.

He was fined $36,000 for the housing and permit offences and sentenced to four weeks’ jail over the unpaid wages.

Lee, 58, who supplies labor for ship repairs, paid the fines but argued at an appeal hearing last month for a fine in lieu of prison.

Justice Rajah not only refused, he said the jail term ought to have been heavier, given that 73 workers were involved.

He also said the $4,000 per fine for each of the seven work permit offences was “on the low side and ought to have been calibrated higher.”

The judge said Lee’s actions were “undoubtedly severely deleterious” to the workers’ welfare, even leading to one man’s death from chicken pox. “Most pernicious is the fact that his breaches resulted in his foreign workers living in unsafe conditions in which a life was lost.”

He also took issue with the $4,000 fine imposed on Lee for each of the two accommodation offences. He said that if prosecutors had appealed before him, he would have increased the penalty to jail. This would “be commensurate with the severity of the harm caused and the level of general deterrence.”

Lee, the sole director of Goldrich Venture and Gates Offshore, housed the two employees in an overpopulated, unapproved unit which contained 1,182 foreign workers from 19 companies, said the judge. “The standards of accommodation were entirely unacceptable when measured by any civilized standards.”

The court’s warning to employers comes in the wake of similar sentiments expressed in Parliament in recent years.

Then Manpower Minister Gan Kim Yong said last year that they had a legal responsibility that “cannot be shirked or excused... and is even more significant when the foreign workers are of particular vulnerability, that is, they are unskilled with little bargaining power.”

Justice Rajah said “a cavalier failure by an employer to appreciate the serious responsibilities concerning these workers’ welfare can have profoundly unpleasant consequences.”

He said this was exemplified in the lead-up to Lee’s case before the court, in which 60 aggrieved foreign workers assembled en masse outside the Manpower Ministry to air their grievances over being unpaid.

The judge said it was “even more disturbing” that workers recruited by Lee had been housed in unapproved and overcrowded accommodation with unsatisfactory sanitary facilities.

Justice Rajah made plain that the jail term given by the district court “should not be viewed as the benchmark for similar offending conduct,” adding: “The totality of Lee’s offending conduct was entirely unacceptable.”

Reprinted courtesy of Straits Times Indonesia. To subscribe to Straits Times Indonesia and/or the Jakarta Globe call 021 2553 5055.