A recent video of a supervisor at an IT company slapping a young male worker for inadequate performance brought up another case of a 20 year old girl who had been reprimanded, cautioned and fined by her own IT company for late arrival at work and slipshod performance.
Beginning as a project co-coordinator, the young woman ran into problems in the first couple of weeks with late starts. To deal with the issue the Company put forward her start-up time, but warned there would be a docking of one dollar for each minute she was late in future. (Her excuse was of shuttle buses and two changes of train; later when a direct bus was found traffic congestion.)
The young woman accepted her failures and tried to make up for them with shorter lunch breaks and later finishes, but she continued to be fined.
Eventually matters came to a head when she was docked 70% of her $1,500 monthly salary after she had lost a computer file she had been working on without keeping back-up. With the fines for lateness that month she was presented with a pay cheque of $311. On refusal of this the woman wasn't paid at all for two months.
The $311 was especially galling as the young woman had re-done the work on the missing file.
At this point the woman attempted to resign. This was met by the company charging three months' salary for prematurely breaking a 12 month contract.
The company representative in the case defended their actions thus:
1. there was an attempt to correct a poor work attitude in a young employee before bad habits became ingrained
2. "wilful insubordination" was involved in not keeping a back-up of the computer file, as all employees were instructed
3. Company insisted employees pay three months salary for early contract severance because of the dangers of job-hopping after the investment of training.
NB. The Sunday Times, May 26 2013, p. 3.
SPH—Singapore Press Holdings—own each of the newspapers on the island, in all four languages.
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