... notable events : When companies collapse

My very first job was as a site engineer on a construction site building mid-range government housing under the Singapore Housing Development Board (HDB) scheme. The site was Woodlands N2 C10 in the northern part of Singapore. As a new engineer fresh out of school, everything was new and novel. The year was 1995 and the economy was booming.

Work was tough. Foremen wouldn't listen. Workers treated you condescendingly. Skilled labour changed designs at will. Client engineers bullied you. Clerk-of-works gave you hell. Administrative staff gave you the runaround. Everyone bullied you. But it was all part of the game. As the youngest and greenest guy at the site office, you watched, waited and learned. The site engineer was technically the 3rd man in the site hirerachy but all that counted for naught when you didn't have a single ounce of experience under your belt. It didn't help that within 3 months I was also taking on the added hat of Assistant Project Manager ie. number 2 man on site.

I arrived to work early every morning, well before 7am and didn't get home till at least 10pm. The work week was officially 8:30am to 6:00pm from Mondays to Saturdays with alternate Sunday's off but more often than not, concreting works or inspection schedules would drive working hours well beyond the official times and on occasion going even beyond the 6 1/2 day work week. It was tiring work climbing through rubble and construction material and I soon realised that just walking was a challenge as one had to look carefully at every step in case of rusty nails, unsecure footing, loose planks, ankle-twisting rubble, all the while keeping in mind that your head was likely to hit scaffolding, beams, construction machinery, formwork and all sorts of interesting stuff that would take out an eye if vigilance even dropped a notch. It didn't help that stuff could fall from upper floorw and drop onto your head, and stories of disgruntle workers kicking reinforcement bars downward as spears circulating the worksites didn't help liven the mood. No hardhat could possibly hope to stop an impaling spear of 460 yieldstrength steel hurling downward at your very melon-like head.

Half way through the year, the adjacent site, N2 C11 which was also under the same contracting company I worked for started running into major problems and delays. A string of resignations soon forced me to take on yet another hat as the project engineer for that site too. I now not only needed to climb through one site, but two. It was hard work and my skin was soon dark brown from long exposure to the sun and the sticky filth of sweat-stained work clothes a constant mind-numbing irritant that no amount of washing up seemed to be able to remove.

Because site work was hard on a person, the monetary benefits were good. We had a regular lunch allowance, car allowance, unlimited petrol creditcard and very often even got dinner allowances on top of our regular salaries which were already higher than the salaries of office-based engineers. Money was easily saved because of the higher pays but also because I hardly had time beyond a cold dinner and at most an hour of tv before going to bed so as to rise early the next day for work. The single alternate Sunday off was the only time I actually had to do something non-work related, but I was often too tired after a continuous 13 day working stretch to even think of getting out of the house.

But it was fun. It felt good to get out and do physical work, never couped up in an office for hours on end, to drive around entertaining clients, to have an entertainment budget, to be treated to dinners by sub-contractors, to play chess or computer games with the HDB engineers who hide in your site office to avoid going back to their own offices, to drive all over Singapore for meetings or to simply yell your lungs out at lazy workers who insist that they know better ways of constructing things than you, the engineer.

The problems at N2 C11 soon grew to epic proportions. All sorts of theories began to surface, some wilder than others. The HDB clerk-of-works had been offended and he was purposely making us suffer, gods were angry since the site prayer table was wrongly sited in front of the rubbish bin, the company was losing money from taking on one project too many and the corner-cutting was hurting this site, a power struggle was happening in the company's HQ in Hongkong and the Singapore operations was being abandoned, HDB policies were killing contractors with too stiffling requirements and slow progress payments, the company maintained too high an expense with expensive offices in the downtown financial district and was therefore running into cashflow problems... whatever the real reason, one thing was for sure, the company was in trouble and N2 C11 was just the symptom of a greater rot in the system.

Things went from bad to worse. Our salaries and allowances were increasingly becoming delayed. I tried to take on more than my job scope, making frequent trips to the main office at Phillip Street downtown to beg the company's design engineer for design work so that I would be able to learn not only the work of a site engineer but also that of a design engineer. I started doing design for temporary supports, temporary frames, counter proposals for beams and slabs, redesigns of permanent works due to site constraints, redesigns of works to save constructions costs, all the while copying examples and getting help from the company's resident Professional Engineer and his design engineer. I was preparing for the worse and I didn't want to be stuck as a mere site engineer, the prospects of which were limited to a contractor's career path. I wanted to be able to get into consulting and for that I needed design experience. I grabbed everything I could get my hands on, even redesigns from other consultants were photocopied for future reference, whether or not I would ever use them in the course of my work.

Then a shocking turn of events occured. The company announced that one of the minor shareholders had bought over the whole Singapore operations and renamed the company. We were now under a new owner. This at the time was a very puzzling turn of events. I worried for my future and entertained thoughts of changing companies. The lure of switching to the lesser paying job of a design engineer in a consulting firm was looking increasingly attractive. I also didn't want to be trapped by the seduction of higher site salaries and eventually lose my chance of ever switching. Covertly I applied for design work and attended job interviews, but always the issue of pay stayed my hand. Despite my now almost 1 year of site experience, I was no better than a fresh graduate engineer in a design office as they considered me new to design, my efforts in learning notwithstanding.

Things on site began to look stranger and stranger. Sub-consultants stop deliveries and material suppliers demanded cash up front for deliveries. N2 C11 saw a slew of Hongkong expatriats who had supposedly followed the new owner across and they came to be based on site with grand sounding titles like Senior Construction Engineer, Senior Project Manager, etc. They were all very highly paid with nothing to do. For two relatively medium-sized construction sites of only 7 and 9 15 storey residential and carparking blocks each, we were lopsidedly top heavy in upper management. Many of us puzzled over this and feared for the worse. Work moved in fits and starts, sometimes very rushed, while at other times simply non-existent and we would spend time chatting and playing games in the site office. It was surreal.

Debts rose, and subcontractors and suppliers alike withheld services, which exacerbated the cashflow problem, delaying the much needed progress payments from the HDB because of the slow progress on site. Very soon, work trickled down to merely critical path items, the site Project Manager and myself, working out ways to stretch our dwindling resources while maximising work progress so as to clock progress milestones. This was done purely to enable progress claims for money. Both the sites were at about 90% complete but we just couldn't push that final lap. Everything soon grounded to a halt. It was obvious that the company was in serious trouble despite the many promising memos still being issued from the head office.

We soon had absolutely nothing to do on site. We wrote and rewrote reports, read newspapers end to end and just wasted our time playig poker or chatting the hours away. Out of shear boredom, we took to shooting flies with rubberbands and we actually got quite good at it, hitting one out of every 3. I even took to racing down the almost completed multistorey carparks on my rollerblades, charging down the ramps from the roof to the ground floor in ever faster spirals. We played roller hockey on the flat open roofs with icehockey sticks, and did everything but work, for there was none. This lasted for 2 months while our salaries and allowances continued to be paid. I doggedly stayed on, hoping for the best, and as it was nearing the year end, hoping for the regular bonuses to be paid.

When the money for petrol to keep the electricity generators for our lights and airconditioning finally ran out plunging our offices into darkness, I knew then that the company no longer had any chance of recovery. My final $650 cheque for car allowance bounced, confirming that I had already overstayed on a sinking ship. Even my government mandated central provident fund (CPF) hadn't received payments from the company for 3 months, and I only found out about it when I received a warning letter that my account was now long over due for payments.

I started reapplying for another job with a vengeance as the inevitable occured, the company went into Judicial Management with the new owner bankrupt. Within a week, I had a few job offers but all with a much reduced salary. Gritting my teeth, I took the most promising offer eventhough they offered almost $800 less than what I was currently drawing in salaries and allowances. I bid farewell to my unlimited petrolcard with a heavy heart and bid my colleagues farewell. The Project Manager bid me to stay another month, saying that they still expected things to turn around, but I knew he was only hoping against hope and that the company was for all intents and purposes, dead. I was one of the first to leave. Waving goodbye in the darkened office that day, I left my colleagues still at their desks twidling their thumbs and staring at the ceiling.

Chatting with my ex-colleagues later after I had left, I found out that the new owner who had bought over the dying company only to go bankrupt, was now back in Hongkong together with all the rest of the highly paid Hongkong expatriats, working again for the original parent company. We speculated that it had all been an elaborate scam, to rescue funds from a money-losing company. The Hongkong company, a famous contractor in Hongkong, had attempted to setup a branch in Singapore only to run into cashflow problems possibly due to their lack of experience with local conditions and governmental restrictions. In order to pull back as much of their funds and capital as possible, they engineered the sale of the company to one of their junior shareholders who was to become the scapegoat. He took on the company, buying it from the parent for a larger sum than it was worth and inherited all the company's debt. He then hired the Hongkong expatriates at high salaries to continue to drain the company's coffers. In this way, the Hongkong parent became the largest debtor and had the biggest claim to the company's assets when it finally went under Judicial Management. The owner, having been declared bankrupt in Singapore, promptly returned to Hongkong where he rejoined the parent company having done them a tremendous service. All the Hongkong expatriates too returned, after taking as much of the spare cash they could in the form of salaries back to Hongkong. If this were true, it was beautifully concocted and orchestrated.

It proved however, to be a blessing in disguise. The construction career path is seductive for it's high pay and bonuses, but it is one that is limited in scope. The closure of my company gave me the push required to accept the lower starting pay of the design engineer and hence, my entry into the boarder prospects of a consulting engineer. Without the benefit of both site engineering experience and design engineering experience, I would not have qualified for registration to the Board of Engineers as a Professional Engineer 6 years later. There is still an outstanding claim of mine, for about $5000+ in unpaid salaries, allowances and CPF contributions but my last contact with the Judicial Managers left little doubt that there would be nothing left over after the secured debtors, the banks, the lawyers and the accountants had been paid. We as employees, were in their terms, unsecured debtors and as such were not even entitled to the scraps. We were quite literally, left with nothing.