A question abt employment

Dear Uncle Agony,

I would like to seek your advice about some employment issue. Of course by the time I wrote this to you, I have already settled it. However, I felt that as employees in Singapore, especially fresh graduates, we really need some kind of legal protection.

It happend early this month when I resigned. According to the contract, I only need to serve 21 days' notice period and both my employer and me agreed that the last day I will be working here should be June 30th. An approval letter and exit form issued shortly, highlighting the last day as mentioned above.


Yesterday, maybe because I was late for about 10 minutes in the morning, I was told by the HR that they would like my last day to be brought forward to June 21th as the boss wanted to save costs and they thought there wasn't too much for me to hand over. She mentioned that this was on a goodwill basis, and they won't force me to leave. Since my new employment will start on July 1st which has been fixed already and also I want my CPF contribution to be continuous, I disagreed and told them I thought we should stick to the contract.

Late in the afternoon, I was told to meet HR again when she informed me that boss insisted asking me to leave by yesterday. She said I could also insist staying there as well, however, they would only pay me until yesterday. Upon receiving the cheque, I could take whatever legal actions I like and I was told by HR that this was not the first time the boss forced employee to leave earlier than it was stated in the approval letter.

At that moment, I really felt that it seemed like there was nothing I could do to protect my rights and the only thing I could do was to get back my paycheck and go away as the boss was not afraid of being sued. Of course, I dun't really want to waste my time and money suing my boss, but is it really the case that facing this kind of unfair treatment, we as employees can do nothing against them except for suing them?


Looking forward to hearing your advice. Thank you very much for your time.

Best regards,

HH