How to ask my supervisor to pay me?
I realise this is a weird question and I’m very sorry if this is the wrong sub for this, please mods take it down if it doesn’t suit the sub.
I’m a foreigner doing a year long internship in Singapore with a small agency for my final year in university until June (this year).
My internship supervisor has been really kind and supportive with my uni assignments. I work full time, and we also have a contract which states my monthly salary.
However, in December last year my supervisor told the team that the agency is having financial difficulties, and she would speak about it to us individually.
She asked if I would be willing to “pause” my salary for a little while until the agency was performing better. I agreed since they were being so supportive with my assignments, and I really needed to finish my internship.
I haven’t been paid at all this year and have been getting stessed, so I decided to ask my coworker about it. They let me know they’ve been paid steadily all this year ! and I should talk to my supervisor about it.
I’ve never been in this position before and don’t know how to have this conversation with my supervisor? She’s usually very understanding and super professional and I would not like to start any conflict, just resolve this calmly. How should I approach this issue?
Netizens’ comments
- Have you informed your school about this? The school should resolve this with the company and get you paid!
- I’m really hesitant to get my school involved, they’re not very competent tbh which is why I just want to finish this year and graduate ASAP :/ There have been other students who had difficulties with their internships but weren’t really helped by my school, instead they told the students to find another internship and restart the year (which means paying more tuition) so they’re the last resort. I actually have enough savings to last until the end of the internship (just 2 more months) but still I’d like to be paid
- don’t worry about getting fired or retaliated against if you talk to your supervisor about your pay. Not only is it part of your contract, and a basic part of your job expectations, but they’re legally not allowed to do so over your pay(and can get into alot of legal trouble over it).
should the worst case scenario happen, you can go to tadm and file a salary claim for like 10-20$, so you’ll receive your money in the end.
How it works is that you have the right to refuse work and quit immediately with no notice after 7 days of your salary not being paid after your regular pay period iirc.
This means every employee has the right to be paid.
Thus, if you go to them and ask for your salary, they can’t fire you. This will be grounds for a wrongful dismissal, as they dismiss you for exercising your employment right(to get pay, to file a claim with tadm), and they dismiss you to deprive you of your pay. You might even be able to claim discrimination as your coworkers are getting their pay.
You can thereby get compensation and/or reinstatement if they do decide to fire you.
Thus, they can’t fire you, and they can’t not give you your salary. They know the rules, and it’s too troublesome to do all this over one employee too.
Thereby, just go to them and ask for your pay. Tell them you need it or something. Make sure to note that you want to receive your whole salary since december.
Nothing bad will come out of this, because you are legally protected. Also they probably don’t want to lose you too. Your supervisor shouldn’t have bad blood over this too, because they know you havent been paid for 4 months.
So don’t be anxious about causing them to turn against you anyways, because something like this isn’t a big conflict of interest to them(an intern pay compared to full-timer pay is a world of difference, they can definitely afford to pay an intern), and like you said, they’ve been understanding to your situation too.
tldr you won’t be fired, you won’t not get your salary in the end, you won’t cause conflict or bad blood either.
p.s. If you’re still worried, just know that in the grand scheme of your agency, it isn’t as big of an issue to them as it is to you. I would understand a fight may ensue if they couldn’t afford to pay you(like if you were working at a hawker stall), but to something as big as an agency, it’s more like peanuts. Noone fights over peanuts.
That they know they’ll have to pay you eventually is even better for you. It means they don’t want to spoil their relationship with you over this, because they can’t even save a single cent even if they did.
Because they’ll have to pay you eventually, why not just give you back your salary and carry on as per normal, instead of fighting you until the end of your intern and giving it to you then.
Depending on your supervisor’s role, it might not come out of their pockets, but from the owner. This further separates a conflict of interest, because it’s not their money they have to pay you with.