She wanted $20,000, then $4,000 - and ended up with nothing
She was told: take an unfamiliar role, resign, or wait to be fired. She resigned - and later called it forced.
The worker joined the company in January 2024 as a senior social media executive on $4,000 a month. She passed her probation. Then, from March that year, her job grew to include what the company called "creative" functions, folded in as part of a company-wide consolidation. She agreed to take it on, though she said the deal came with a promise - training, mentorship - that, in her telling, never fully materialized.
That promise became the whole case.
By November 2025 she was on a three-month performance improvement plan, judged across four areas - three creative (video production, general production and execution, and photography and styling) and one covering her original content-planning work. She didn't pass it. Her employer's HR head then spelled out the options: consider redeployment into one of two open roles, both pitched as "client-facing" and neither remotely close to her actual job, or resign. Do nothing, and the company would terminate her itself.
She picked resignation. At her own request, the company shortened her notice period so she could start elsewhere sooner, moving her last day forward by a week. She began her new job on 25 May 2026. Barely a month later, she filed a claim for wrongful dismissal - first pricing it at $20,000, on the theory she deserved half a year's salary for the extra creative work, then revising it down to a single month's pay.
Here's where it gets technical, but stick with it: under Singapore's Employment Act, resigning doesn't automatically mean you weren't dismissed. If an employee can show she was forced into it by her employer's conduct, the law treats that as a dismissal anyway. The tribunal agreed that's exactly what happened here. The two redeployment roles were, in its words, "materially different" from anything she'd actually been doing, and nobody had given her any real assurance she'd be supported through the jump. Resign or be fired wasn't much of a choice at all - and legally, that counts as dismissal.
Which is where most people would assume the story ends. It doesn't.
Being dismissed and being wrongfully dismissed are two separate questions, and the tribunal drew a hard line between them. The performance plan itself, it found, was solid - structured, documented, and built on standards she'd agreed to when she took the creative work on back in 2024. A performance review from that same year had already told her, in writing, that she was doing work "beyond what she was hired for, which is creative work." Her December 2025 appraisal wasn't glowing either: "Partially meeting expectations," the second-lowest of five bands, with "some recurring quality issues" and gaps flagged in ownership and attention to detail. Her argument that she'd never been given the promised support fell over too - she'd never once raised it with the HR officer running her plan, and the plan spelled out, area by area, exactly what support was on the table.
The tribunal added one more thing, almost in passing: even if she had won, proving she'd actually lost anything would have been a stretch. She'd been paid through her notice period and walked straight into another job, with no gap in income at all.
Her claim was dismissed. Each side paid its own costs.
What nearly cost the company its case wasn't the performance plan - it was the redeployment offer. Two client-facing roles, pitched as alternatives to a job neither of them resembled, came close to turning a clean dismissal into a forced one.
