Tackling Forced Labor And Human Trafficking Globally

Tackling Forced Labor And Human Trafficking Globally Presented by: ILO Nepal Date: London, Thursday, 27 April 2023, 14:00 to 18:00 BST Historical Context Of Policies On Labor Recruitment - International labor standards have changed from ILO's Unemployment Convention No. 2 of 1919 mandating 'a system of free public employment agencies under the control of a central authority' to the ILO's Private Recruitment and Employment's Convention No. 181 of 1997 formalizing the role of private recruitment agencies and finally to a system of private recruitment agencies operating according to the non- binding General Principles and Operational Guidelines for Fair Recruitment of 2016. Recruitment has shifted from a public dominated sphere of responsibility dealt through employment policies and regulation, to a private dominated sphere left to the market. - An important reason why public attention persists around recruitment is due to concerns about vulnerable populations such as 'migrant women'. Such concerns tend to be increasingly influenced by anti trafficking narratives which frame the issue as a criminal justice matter rather than a labor matter (WIF Glossary, June 2021). What Are Conventional Programs To Improves Recruitment Of Migrant Workers? - Conventional approaches are influenced by the non-binding standards and antitrafficking concerns. These are some of the most common interventions: • 1. Promotion of fair recruitment policies to undermine unscrupulous labor recruiters and exploitative employment practices. These policies include the promotion of non-binding codes of conduct, formalisation of recruitment actors and zero-cost recruitment for workers among others. • 2. Training on fair and ethical recruitment for labor recruiters: Capacitybuilding for recruitment agencies and employers to ensure that they commit to and practice ethical standards of recruitment codified in non-binding codes of conduct. • 3. Assessment and certification of ethical recruitment practices: Assessing migrant recruitment practices in specific companies and providing recommendations and/or certification. These practices are sometimes complemented with rating of recruitment agencies. The assumption is that the aggregation of each improved practice will lead to better overall recruitment outcomes. What Were Some Other Practices Tested By To Improve Recruitment Of Migrant Workers? - 1. Providing policy advice on fair recruitment as part of decent-work outcomes - 2. Dialogue on improving recruitment practices with intermediaries and other parties - 3. Pathway or sector-wide assessments of recruitment practices - 4. Testing of better recruitment practices Part III. Law Events Recruitment Lessons Learned On How Supply And Demand For Jobs Affects Recruitment - Lesson 1 • Scarcity of decent work options on a significant scale may lead to more labor intermediation and poor recruitment outcomes. • This means that ad-hoc efforts to improve recruitment practices along specific corridors are far from sufficient as they fail to address both the demand for and the scarcity of decent work at a significant scale. - Lesson 2 • While recruitment fees can be exploit Law Events faulting the labor intermediary who charges the fees is not sufficient. Recruitment fees are not only linked to the demand and supply of workers, but also to the demand and supply of decent jobs. Addressing the scarce supply of decent jobs is more important. • While workers do not like exploitative fees, in practice, most migrant workers prefer to buy the support of a trusted agent on whom they can apply social pressure to find less abusive employers, facilitate negotiations, negotiate exiting difficult employment relationships, overcome the red tape of bureaucratic migration or work- permit requirements, facilitate release from detention following the employer's failure to renew work permits, or navigate other policies restricting their mobility. - Lesson 3 • Assessing and testing better recruitment practices and policy measures tends to focus on the potential for success of individual cases and specific "boutique" practices, and yet they seldom change the wider market dynamics that frame the context in which those recruitment practices take place. • Many fair and ethical recruitment initiatives of international organizations or enterprises are based on specific recruitment processes organized in connection with a few individual employers and their representatives. - Lesson 5 • Labor outsourcing and subcontracting tended to blur the responsibilities of employee labor intermediaries and governments to ensure fair recruitment and decent work.  Such policies have increasingly enabled: o 1. Private employers at different levels of supply chains to delink themselves from the direct responsibility of recruiting and contracting; o 2. Labor intermediaries to delink themselves from the working conditions that are offered to workers by employers or other intermediaries; o 3. The setting of working conditions - by default or design - in a bubble that is kept somewhat isolated from state regulation, depending on the local legal and market context. o 4. This has been further complicated by the sidelining of public employment offices in favor of private employment and recruitment agencies, even though the functions and motives of the former are different from the latter. - Lesson 6 • Efforts to ensure that labor recruiters share responsibility for labor recruitment outcomes should not concurrently offload the principal employer's responsibility to provide for decent work. • The fluidity and segmentation of labor supply chains is such that none of the key stakeholders -for example, workers, labor recruiters, regulators and employers - can guarantee a fair migration outcome for any worker on their own. - Lesson 9 • The discourse on "unscrupulous middlemen" tends to invariably stigmatize informal labor intermediaries. Such discourse can indirectly prevent workers from relying on informal labor intermediaries or other fellow workers in accessing employment and seeking support to exit an abusive labor migration situation. • Labor intermediaries are invariably referred to as "unscrupulous middlemen", especially when they operate informally. The profit motive of their work is referred to justify such claims. While there are indeed some abusive recruiters, not all recruiters are the same. Profit motives are inherent to all market players, not only to labor recruiters. - Lesson 10 • Training programs on fair and ethical recruitment for private and public recruiters tend to assume that recruiters are in control and responsible for the recruitment outcomes of migrant workers they engage with. • That is often not the case, especially in sectors known to involve precarious working and living conditions. Undergoing such training programs can falsely legitimize recruiters who participate in them and can enable them to be advertised in a way that misleads workers wishing to migrate. - Lesson 11 • Whenever prevailing working conditions are notoriously poor, promoting fair recruitment can be counter-productive in some contexts and can even amount to institutionalizing human trafficking. • In sectors such as domestic and garment work, where working and living conditions tend to be poor, recruitment outcomes are messy. The promotion of fair recruitment runs the risk of institutionalizing recruitment into poor working conditions. - Lesson 15 • The assumptions behind policies and programs seeking to improve recruitment practices should be carefully reviewed. • The program found that conventional interventions tended to assume that all labor recruiters, often referred to as middlemen, are usually traffickers who dupe workers and employers, and hence recruiters have to be eliminated or tightly scrutinized, while workers and employers need to be educated to know how to manage them. Such assumptions are inaccurate and highly misleading.