S$20,000 awarded to foreign worker after employer refused to pay almost 1,850 hours’ overtime

SINGAPORE: After a worker told an Employment Claims Tribunal that the restaurant he worked for failed to pay the hours of overtime he served, the court ruled in his favour, and the worker has been awarded S$20,000.

The Bangladeshi national, who has not been publicly named, worked as a food processing worker from sometime in December 2023 to December 8, 2025.

According to the judgment from the tribunal presided over by Magistrate Joel Tan, the terms of the worker’s employment were governed by the in-principle approval (IPA) issued by the Ministry of Manpower. It provided that he would work six days a week for a total of 44 hours and receive a salary of S$1,500, with an additional allowance of S$500. Moreover, the overtime rate stated in the IPA is S$11.80 per hour.

The Bangladeshi worker claimed that he worked between 13 and 15 hours a day, excluding breaks, seven days a week.

For the overtime claim he sought, however, he took into consideration the period of his employment between April 1 and Dec 8, 2025, saying that he worked a total of 1,848.8 overtime hours during this time, which meant he was owed S$21,815.84 in overtime pay.

Since the jurisdiction of the tribunal was capped at $20,000 for the case, this is what the worker sought to claim.

However, the employer denied any liability, saying that the worker had not done any overtime work at all.

The magistrate said in his judgment that the worker presented evidence in the form of an attendance table from April 1 to Dec 8, 2025, that was prepared with the help of a non-profit organisation. It showed that he worked every day in this period, mostly from 5:00 am to 9:00 pm from Mondays to Saturdays, and from 7:00 am to 9:00 pm on Sundays.

The magistrate also pointed out that he was working even on all of his rest days.

“There was something striking about the claimant’s account—that he had worked 13 to 15 hours a day, well beyond the 44 hours per week that his IPA stipulated and without rest, for an extended duration, and seemingly without raising a formal complaint prior to this claim,” he wrote, later adding that he found the attendance table that the worker presented to be credible, and noting that the employer had refused to disclose or make accessible the worker’s attendance records.

In addition to the S$20,000 awarded to the worker, the magistrate ordered the employer to pay the worker S$400 in costs and S$60 in disbursements. /TISG

Read also: Migrant worker wins $5.7K after 2-year fight as court rejects employer’s ‘fixed’ overtime payments