GENEVA - The International Labour Organization (ILO) published a discussion paper by Prof Philip Martin which deals with merchants of labour, trafficking and smuggling of migrants. In the view of an all-time high of 86 million in 2000 of the number of migrant workers — persons employed outside their countries of birth or citizenship-, Martin states that if migration is the “most under-researched of the global flows,” the role of private agents is among the most understudied aspects of international labour migration.

There are several institutions that help migrants to move over borders: employers seeking migrants, public employment services that can match local workers with foreign jobs, social networks such as friends and family who are or were abroad and can help migrants cross borders and find jobs, and private recruiters.

 

Few public employment services agencies register potential migrants in their regular operations; instead, those that help to place workers in foreign jobs normally operate separate agencies for that purpose, such as in Mexico, Moldova, and the Philippines. When public employment services agencies operate migrant centers in host countries, they normally play certification and protection rather than a job-matching roles, and in many industrial countries these “migrant operations” are physically separate from mainline employment services.

 

In many industrial countries, instead of recruiting unskilled workers via the public employment services, many employers turn to temporary help firms, especially to find workers to fill seasonal or short-term jobs.

Reports from many countries suggest that fee-charging private agents often engage in activities that are quasi-legal or illegal under national laws and do not conform to ILO conventions and recommendations, such as helping migrants to cross borders in defiance of migration laws, requiring them to sign supplemental contracts abroad that raise the fees they originally agreed to pay for brokerage services, and entrapping migrants seeking higher wage foreign jobs in smuggling and trafficking operations that lead to bondage or slavery. The fees that private agents charge for matching local workers with foreign jobs depends primarily on the wage gap between countries, although factors such as benefits, the nature of the work, and prospects for permanent residence and upward mobility also play roles in migrants’ willingness to pay agent fees.

 

Martin expects recruiting fees to be highest at the beginning of a labour migration flow because, after workers are established abroad, potential migrants should have access to information via social networks and may find alternative routes to travel abroad for employment, including going as tourists to visit relatives and staying to work.

Countries such as the Philippines try to limit recruiting fees to one month’s wages for the typical two-year contract, although the head of the ILO Migration Programme Manolo Abella concludes that “limits on fees [that recruiters] can charge to workers have been widely disregarded, often with the cooperation of employers.” This suggests that, if the wage differential is such that migrants are willing to pay more than one month’s wages, there are likely to be extra payments regardless of the government regulation. Few countries monitor the actual fees paid to recruiters, but a December 1995 survey of male migrants in Kuwait found that 75 per cent of the Sri Lankans used private recruiters to get their jobs, and that they paid fees averaging almost four months of the $200 a month wage. Bangladeshis, half of whom used recruiters, paid the highest recruitment fees and had the lowest monthly earnings — recruitment fees averaged almost a year’s earnings at the average $150 a month wage.

 

The ILO dealt with private recruitment agents with Convention 181 and guidelines in 1997, and these repeated earlier preferences for migrants to move over borders under the auspices of public employment services agencies that do not charge fees.

 

The importance of public employment service grew when labour migration grew in the context of bilateral agreements. Germany was the prototypical guest worker destination, and its employers recruited workers under bilateral agreements that largely conformed to ILO Convention 97 (1949). These bilateral agreements gave a central role to the public employment service, requiring employers to have their local employment service office certify their need for guest workers.

 

By 1975, guest worker recruitment countries were worried about rising irregular migration as well as the incomplete integration of migrants who settled, and Convention 143 called on governments to take steps to minimize illegal migration and to promote the integration of settled migrants, using sanctions on employers who hire unauthorized migrants and international cooperation to reduce the smuggling of migrants. Convention 143 also calls for “equality of treatment” in wages and benefits for employed migrants, regardless of legal status. Most of the labor migrants who arrived in Germany and other Western European countries since 1975 have been irregular, come as asylum seekers in order to stay at least temporarily and work in the underground economy, or arrive under Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) that offer fewer benefits and protections than the 1960s bilateral agreements.

 

Another case in which public employment service is successfully involved in migrant worker recruitment is the Mexico-Canada programme. This programme is governed by an MOU that makes the Mexican Ministry of Labor responsible for recruiting workers in Mexico and negotiating their wages with Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC), the public employment agency.

 

The line between recruiting and smuggling and trafficking can be difficult to draw in practice. Smuggling and trafficking migrants, sometimes estimated to be a $5 to $10 billion annual business based on estimates that at least one million migrants a year pay an average $5,000 to $10,000 each to be taken unlawfully across borders, is often called the “dark side” of globalisation.

 

In today’s world of partially open borders, there is no automatic link between more legal migration channels and less irregular migration. Indeed, in some cases, opening legal channels in a bid to reduce irregular migration could have the opposite result, as when the Moldavian government announced with great fanfare a new agreement opening legal slots for guest workers in Italy. Some of those who would not have considered going before registered, and when they realized that there were 10 registrants for every job, some reportedly went illegally.

 

In conclusion, the ILO paper offers three broad responses to the growth of or merchants of labor in the international migration for employment system:

 

1) step up enforcement to eliminate “bad apples” by requiring them to identify themselves to authorities via registration, ensuring they can meet minimum standards by requiring them to pass tests, and generating some financial security for migrants by having agents post bonds that can be tapped if agents do not fulfill their promises;

2) encourage more legitimate agents to get into the migrant brokerage business so that competition gives migrants options and leads to effective self regulation and ratings that guide migrants toward better agents; and

3) try to increase the role of public employment service agencies in moving workers over borders and working with private agents in the hope that public agencies are most likely to ensure that minimum standards are satisfied in recruitment and deployment.

 

Further information:

 

ILO convention 97 (1949) Migration for Employment Convention