Image from the cover of IOM’s report
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM), a United Nations body, recently issued a report A decade of responsible recruitment – Global lessons and the path forward, distilling what has been learnt over the past ten years. It is sobering.
The importance of the topic cannot be overstated: The need to pay for their jobs through recruitment fees (often under various guises) is a critical source of migrant worker vulnerability, setting the stage for subsequent abuses, e.g. salary, contract substitution, etc. We can never fully deal with these other issues without addressing recruitment fees and the indebtedness they bring along.
IOM’s key message resonates with us as it is what we’ve been saying for as long as we can remember: eliminating this cancer requires government commitment and action. IOM’s report adds that it should be sustained action. The practice of charging workers for jobs stems from an eco-system where commercial incentives all point in that direction. Incentives won’t change without clarity about the rules and stringent enforcement, and changing an eco-system necessarily requires action to be sustained over time.
For too long, there has been a lazy belief that the private sector can clean up the mess by themselves. They cannot. Whilst there may be a few apex customers with some leverage over their supply chain and whilst there may be conscientious recruiters and employers, all their good intentions are undercut daily by the need to remain commercially viable against far more numerous competitors who gain a cost advantage by taking money from workers.
Even if an employer does not take money directly from workers – though the fact is that many employers do take a cut of the recruitment fees collected by their recruiters – just by not having to absorb the recruitment cost (passing it onto workers instead) the competitor gains an advantage.
Within the report, an IOM staff member based in Asia described the challenges faced by ethical recruiters seeking to pass on the cost of recruitment to employers rather than to the migrants: “As long as someone is willing to send workers who pay, the responsible agency loses the contract.”
And one shouldn’t forget that that “someone” may not even be another formal recruitment agency, but an informal, unlicensed intermediary operating in the shadow economy who never uses his real name when talking to prospective workers or employers.
Here are excerpts from the Executive Summary, on what works:
What worked
Across regions and programme types, several approaches repeatedly contributed to meaningful improvements when the enabling conditions were present. Government engagement emerged as the most important driver of durable progress. When origin and destination countries invested in regulatory reforms, enforcement capacity, oversight of intermediaries, or the development of standardized contracts, responsible recruitment became more feasible. Multi-year, corridor-based programming consistently outperformed fragmented pilots, as these interventions addressed recruitment and employment as a linked system rather than as isolated points of vulnerability.
Worker-facing systems, such as Migrant Worker Resource Centres, helplines, and community outreach, strengthened protections, improved access to remedy, and generated operational insights that could not be obtained solely through audits or certification. Practical tools co-developed with governments and employers gained wide uptake because they were usable, trusted, and embedded in institutional processes. Sustained engagement by private sector actors, focused on iterative problem-solving rather than one-off training events, supported improvements in recruitment channels, contract transparency, and remediation practices.
(Sentences in bold were made so by TWC2 for highlighting)
However, IOM itself admits that progress has been mixed. “Recruitment fees continue to be widespread, wage theft persists, deception in job offers is common, and grievance mechanisms – whether employer-led, government-administered or third-party – remain inaccessible or distrusted.”
Despite a decade of trying, “Evaluations consistently show that despite technical progress and normative clarity, improvements in workers’ lived experiences have been uneven and often marginal.”
So, this next part of the Executive Summary is important:
What did not work
The evidence is equally clear about the limitations of several widely used approaches. Short project cycles were fundamentally mismatched with the complexity of recruitment systems and rarely resulted in durable change. Market incentives continued to favour fee-based recruitment, limiting the commercial viability of responsible recruitment and undermining voluntary commitments. Certification and audit-led approaches focused solely on recruiter performance – including those piloted through IRIS – did not adequately address broader system-wide challenges and barriers preventing the implementation of responsible recruitment across migration corridors.
In many regions, high informality and the prevalence of unregulated intermediaries constrained the relevance of models designed for structured supply chains.
Grievance and remedy systems (whether state based or operational, in both countries of origin and destination) often existed on paper but either did not function in practice; failed to provide adequate access to remedy; or entailed additional social and/or economic costs for the affected workers. Fragmentation among international actors also contributed to confusion and diluted impact, as governments and employers struggled to navigate overlapping tools and expectations.
(Sentences in bold were made so by TWC2 for highlighting)
In a nutshell,
System-level lessons
Five overarching lessons emerge from the evidence:
In many regions, high informality and the prevalence of unregulated intermediaries constrained the relevance of models designed for structured supply chains.
1. Structural incentives – not technical tools – determine recruitment behaviour.
2. The field overestimated what guidance, training and certification could achieve without enforcement or market transformation.
3. Certification alone does not create demand for responsible recruitment.
4. Sustainable progress requires coordinated government action across origin and destination states.
5. The next frontier is demonstrating tangible improvements in the lives of migrant workers, shifting the focus of responsible recruitment toward outcome-oriented accountability.
(Sentences in bold were made so by TWC2 for highlighting)
Not everybody wants to do good
IOM didn’t say it in their report (and they may in fact disagree with us) but TWC2 has long been mystified by the naïveté behind some of the earlier efforts at recruitment reform. That naïveté can be glimpsed from the report’s own conclusion that “training and awareness-raising activities were among the least effective intervention types….” Inherent in even embarking on that was the assumption that people would surely want to do good, but simply didn’t know how to.
No, not everybody wants to do good. Some people just want to get rich, whatever it takes. And if they have any leverage, e.g. control of job opportunities, they would exploit it. Having come to that conclusion long ago, TWC2 has basically said if there’s no government action, we’ll get nowhere.
Singapore’s construction industry is heavily reliant on migrant labour
Yet, even here, we must beware of another side to that naïveté, which IOM does not address in its report, though we understand that IOM being IOM, there are diplomatic niceties to consider. It is this: Not every government wants to do good either. So, in calling for more corridor-focussed solutions involving “coordinated government action across origin and destination states”, one has to be conscious of the possibility that governments can have very different agendas. Of course, it would be ideal if both origin and destination governments have aligned aims, and are equally effective in carrying out its side of responsibilities, but in the real world, governments are not the same. They have different priorities and different levels of competence and effectiveness.
The Singapore government is well-known for being one that never looks at the world through rose-tinted lenses. While they themselves, again for diplomatic reasons, might never say it, we can: it will probably amount to little more than endless frustration to have to rely on governments in our major source countries to do what is needed. Unfortunately, this perfectly realistic assessment has led to a depressing paralysis within our halls of power: Nothing can be done! It’s out of our hands!
So whilst TWC2 thinks IOM is a bit too optimistic about government cooperation, we also think the Singapore government is too fatalistic about the impossibility of better outcomes. TWC2 has long proposed a concerted move to direct recruitment through a centralised jobs portal, which we explained in the article Very much needed: a centralised jobs portal.
In essence, our proposal represents exactly what IOM has called for: systemic change. People will stick to the old ways of recruiting if new ways are not provided. This is not to undervalue the importance of regulation and enforcement. The old ways are so lucrative for recruiters and employers, the big stick is still needed to ensure there is no relapse.