An explosive New York Times investigative piece about human trafficking in the maritime industry has identified a 27-year-old Singapore company for allegedly tricking seamen from poor countries into debt and life-threatening working conditions by promising them big salaries.
According to the report, Step Up Marine Enterprise (formerly Step Up Employment Agency) in Chinatown was initially providing domestic workers, but in 1995 changed its focus to supplying fishermen to overseas clients like Taiwanese tuna ships.
Citing court records, NYT identifies the agency’s owners as husband and wife Victor and Mary Lim. The signage for Step Up was dismantled this year and their son, Bryan, now uses the space for 123 Employment Agency, a company that declared $1-million annual revenues in recent years.
Step Up, says the report, “has a well-documented record of trouble, according to an examination of court records, police reports and case filed in Singapore and the Philippines. In episodes dating back two decades, the company has been tied to trafficking, severe physical abuse, neglect, deceptive recruitment and failure to pay hundreds of seafarers in India, Indonesia, Mauritius, the Philippines and Tanzania.”
In the Philippines, instead of working with government-licensed companies, the Lim couple asked Filipino maids in Singapore to recruit from their hometowns. The men would be promised high wages and asked to pay thousands of dollars in processing fees and for a plane ticket to Singapore. Once they arrive here, they are told that there has been a misunderstanding about their salary (they will be paid less), are locked up in a sealed two-bedroom Chinatown apartment that “reeked of urine and seat” and routinely sexually abused by the apartment’s Filipino manager.
If they do get deployed, “the men endured 20-hour workdays and brutal beatings, only to return home unpaid and deeply in debt from thousands of dollars in upfront costs.”
And yet Step Up has not been found guilty of any wrongdoing because it has merely been a conduit between Filipino seamen searching for jobs and ship companies looking for labourers. According to The Online Citizen, the Ministry of Manpower “investigated the agency in 2011 but found that it handled only administrative work for overseas clients and that it ‘cannot take actions based on bad HR practices’.”
The NYT report tried to get comments from the Lim couple and their son but they declined. The Philippine government has also allegedly been lukewarm about assisting in the cases of the duped seamen because they did not register as an overseas Filipino worker prior to leaving the country. “The illegal manning agencies are invisible to us,” one government employee told NYT.
Victims and relatives demand more from their government. A brother of a 31-year-old, who had died in 2011 supposedly in his sleep but whose body was found covered in cuts and bruises, missing his pancreas and one eye still wants justice. “The real culprits who should be in jail are in Singapore and at sea,” he said.
Photo: Regina Abuyuan
