“Migrant workers should not have to bear the cost of their recruitment, any more than highly paid professionals do,” say the researchers behind the new report End injustice in migrant worker recruitment fees.
The report by Poon Yee Suan, Jiang Haolie, Elham Arabi and Caroline Tan sets out practical and achievable policy recommendations to reduce these costs, both in Singapore and in the countries of origin of the workers.
“Some would be more effective than others and they are not substitutes for the implementation of a zero fees policy,” the authors say, but the measures they investigated and propose “answer effectively any suggestion that it is simply not possible to reduce the high costs that many migrant workers are currently compelled to bear.”
The report contains detailed analyses on necessary measures on four fronts:
- Eliminating inefficiencies from middlemen,
- Boosting transparency and information symmetry,
- Improving job mobility and security of residency,
- State accountability, recognition and moral commitments.
The report (in PDF, 628kb) can be downloaded by clicking the icon at right.