No records, no defence: how one employer lost a $20K overtime claim
Tribunal Magistrate Joel Tan awarded a migrant worker $20,000 in unpaid overtime on 1 July 2026, rejecting the employer's denial of any overtime.
The case, JHU v JHV, was heard in Singapore's Employment Claims Tribunals. The claimant was a food processing worker on a work permit, employed from around December 2023 to December 2025 and deployed to a Bangladeshi restaurant run by the respondent. His in-principle approval from the Ministry of Manpower set his hours at 44 a week over six days, with a basic salary of $1,500 plus a $500 allowance and overtime at $11.80 an hour. The company had not issued a written key employment terms document as required under section 95A of the Employment Act.
The worker claimed he had actually worked 13 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week, from 1 April to 8 December 2025, totalling 1,848.8 overtime hours. Capped by the tribunal's $20,000 jurisdictional limit, he claimed that sum rather than the fuller $21,815.84 the hours would otherwise have generated. The company denied liability entirely, its office manager, director and a chef witness maintaining that the worker never worked beyond an eight-hour shift and that staff overtime was paid in cash on the day.
The worker's evidence rested on an attendance table compiled after his employment ended, based on handwritten notes he said he kept from March 2025, and punch card photographs from mid-2024 corroborating a pattern of...
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