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Issuing payslips ‘will not add to employers’ costs’

SINGAPORE — Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), a migrant workers’ rights group, has spoken out against the Government’s decision to hold off requiring employers to issue payslips.

SINGAPORE — Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), a migrant workers’ rights group, has spoken out against the Government’s decision to hold off requiring employers to issue payslips.

Making payslips mandatory was to have been among the features of the revised Employment Act which was passed last week. Acting Manpower Minister Tan Chuan-Jin, in explaining why the change was not effected then, said small and medium enterprises had given feedback that doing so would raise their administrative costs.

The move to make payslips mandatory will instead be phased in to allow companies time to adjust, he said.

In a statement yesterday, TWC2 chided such employers for their “spurious claims” and said the minister should not have given weight to such an argument.

“Employers have to calculate salaries anyway, including overtime each month for each employee; it is not as if this exercise does not have to be done at present. Issuing a payslip is simply an act of giving the employee a copy of the calculation,” it said.

“Moreover, this can be outsourced for as little as a few dollars per employee per month, representing less than 0.5 per cent of a typical work-permit employee’s total cost, if a company does not wish to keep a payroll clerk on its own payroll.”

It added: “The only employers who may find their costs increase would be those who are not currently making the effort to calculate salaries at all.”

TWC2 urged the ministry to specify a time frame to make issuing payslips compulsory — something Labour Member of Parliament Zainal Sapari had called for during the debate in Parliament — or compel work-permit hirers to do so, for a start.

This is because salary underpayment is a “common complaint” among foreign workers here, it said, citing an ongoing survey it is conducting, where one-quarter to one-third of respondents said they might not have been correctly paid in the previous month.

This means that as many as a quarter of a million workers here are affected, since there are about 750,000 non-domestic work-permit holders in Singapore, TWC2 added.

Echoing Mr Zainal’s comment that refusing to issue payslips is how irresponsible employers “cover their tracks” when they underpay or flout the law, TWC2 said inaction would “(allow) unethical business(es) to continue to exploit the most vulnerable of the workers”.

Requiring employers to issue payslips was something many supported during the ministry’s public consultations between last November and January this year. Last month, penalties were also enhanced for employers who do not pay, underpay or are late in contributing to their workers’ Central Provident Fund (CPF) accounts, following a rise in the number of such cases and the sums involved.

In May this year, the CPF Board revealed that it recovered some S$293 million worth of CPF arrears, including late payments, for more than 200,000 workers last year.

In contrast, 10,000 workers from 3,700 companies were owed about S$9.5 million in arrears in 2011. Nearly three-quarters of these companies had underpaid, while the remainder did not make contributions to their employees’ CPF accounts.

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