Foreign worker in S'pore says he wasn't paid for 1,848 overtime hours, takes company to court & wins S$20,000

A foreign worker in Singapore has won a lawsuit against his former employer over unpaid overtime after a tribunal found that he had worked between 13 and 15 hours a day, every day of the week, for months.

Although the company denied liability and claimed the worker had not worked any overtime at all, the tribunal ruled in the worker's favour and awarded him S$20,000.

The company was also ordered to pay S$400 in legal costs and S$60 in disbursements.

Worker's claims

According to a judgement published on Jul. 1, the claimant is a Bangladeshi national who was employed by an unnamed company from December 2023 to Dec. 8, 2025.

He worked at a Bangladeshi restaurant operated by the company.

Although the employer did not provide a written record of the key employment terms, both parties agreed that the employment was governed by the Ministry of Manpower's in-principle approval (IPA).

Under the IPA, the claimant was expected to work 44 hours per week, six days a week.

He received a basic monthly salary of S$1,500, and a fixed monthly allowance of S$500.

The IPA also stipulated an overtime rate of S$11.80 an hour.

The claimant, however, said he regularly worked between 13 and 15 hours a day, excluding breaks, seven days a week throughout his employment.

For his claim, he sought overtime pay only for the period between Apr. 1 and Dec. 8, 2025.

During that period, he said he accumulated 1,848.8 hours of overtime, amounting to S$21,815.84 in unpaid wages.

Evidence provided

The claimant produced an attendance table covering Apr. 1 to Dec. 8, 2025, prepared with assistance from a non-profit organisation.

The records showed that he worked every day during the period, generally from 5am to 9pm on Mondays to Saturdays, and from 7am to 9pm on Sundays.

When asked why he had only begun keeping records from March 2025, the claimant explained that the company had switched from a punch-card attendance system to a facial recognition system around that time.

Under the previous system, he was occasionally able to obtain completed punch cards from his supervisor and photographed them for his own records.

However, under the new system, he no longer had access to attendance records and began recording his daily clock-in and clock-out times by hand.

In response, the company called three witnesses: its office manager, its director and a chef who worked at the same restaurant.

All three said the claimant never worked overtime.

The office manager said the claimant never worked beyond the contractual 44-hour work week and would leave after completing his eight-hour shift, with the chef taking over his duties.

She added that employees would be paid in cash the same day if they worked overtime.

She also said the company did not make or keep any records of the claimant's working hours.

The chef testified that he himself worked about 11 hours a day, six days a week, and was paid in cash for two hours of overtime daily.

Despite regularly working overtime himself, he maintained that the claimant never did.

The director largely echoed the evidence given by the office manager and the chef, but argued that the claim was brought in retaliation after the company cancelled the claimant's work permit.

He described the claimant as "a troublesome employee" who had fought with customers on three occasions, and also criticised the non-profit organisation assisting him.

Findings

Tribunal magistrate Joel Tan said one aspect of the claimant's account initially stood out — that he had allegedly worked 13 to 15 hours a day for an extended period without making a formal complaint until after his employment ended.

The company used this point to contend that the claimant's account was inherently improbable and motivated by retaliation

Tan said he had initially found the argument persuasive.

However, upon further reflection, he concluded that an adjudicator should be cautious about judging how someone from a very different social, cultural and economic background might respond to difficult working conditions.

"Employees tolerate poor working conditions for all manner of reasons — fear of conflict, hope that things will improve, reluctance to risk a steady income, difficulty with finding alternative employment, or simple resignation that complaining will achieve nothing."

None of these are uncommon responses for any employee in Singapore, he said, adding that such considerations are often even more significant for foreign workers.

"A foreign worker with unpaid overtime or lack of rest days may, quite reasonably and rationally, consider that it is better to keep a bird in the hand — in the form of one’s monthly salary — than two birds in the bush — by pressing for overtime pay or rest day pay and risking repatriation."

Tan said the only documentary evidence relating to the hours worked was the attendance table submitted by the claimant.

He found the table credible, noting that the claimant gave a detailed and internally consistent explanation of how the records were prepared and why he began to keep handwritten notes.

The photographs of the punch cards were also found to be "authentic contemporaneous records" that supported the attendance table.

Though the company claimed it did not keep records of employees' working hours, Tan found this difficult to accept in light of the photographs of the punch-cards.

He also rejected the company's assertion that the facial recognition system was used only for employees of a related company operating an adjacent restaurant.

Instead, Tan found that the company had maintained attendance records but had simply refused to disclose them.

He was also critical of the company's position that the claimant had not worked any overtime at all.

"Even setting aside the attendance records, when a former employee brings a claim of this magnitude — every day worked, no rest days, overtime hours numbering in the thousands across months — she or he takes on a correspondingly greater risk of being contradicted," he said.

"The broader the claim, the easier it becomes for an employer to find at least one day, or one record that does not fit. In the age of digital communication, such evidence would not be difficult to come by. A message, a roster, a record of any kind showing that the claimant was not at work on a particular day or worked fewer hours than she or he claimed."

Yet, the company failed to produce a single well-supported example contradicting the claimant's account, saying employees' schedules were communicated verbally and face-to-face.

Tan said this was difficult to reconcile with the company's own evidence that workers had no fixed working hours or rest days and were informed of their schedules only a day in advance.

If that were true, he said, it was hard to believe there would be no digital communication over nearly two years of employment supporting the company's version of events.

Tan further noted that the restaurant had only three employees: a cleaner, the claimant and the chef.

With the restaurant operating from about 6am or 7am until around 11pm daily, he said he had "considerable difficulty" understanding how an effective shift system could have existed if the claimant had indeed stopped work after only eight hours.

The tribunal ultimately allowed the claim in full and awarded the claimant S$20,000, together with S$460 in costs and disbursements.