With COVID-19 disrupting travel, shutting borders, and redefining what is essential work, Pandemic Borders explores what international migration will look like after the pandemic, in this series titled #MigrantFutures
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a detrimental impact upon the lives of millions of workers worldwide, with numerous sectors having ground to a halt or having been subject to insufficient safety mechanisms. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), during the second quarter of 2020, there was an estimated 17.3% decrease in global working hours, the equivalent of 495 million full-time jobs lost. As employment sectors became impacted by COVID-19, many migrant workers started to be let go while others were forced to accept poorer terms and conditions of employment, including reduced salaries, or face the termination of their work permit and possible deportation. According to a range of civil society actors, some employers are taking advantage of the COVID-19 crisis to unlawfully dismiss their migrant workforce and to withhold the wages and benefits that are owed to them.
The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC), which tracks over 9000 companies in over 180 countries, notes a substantial increase in the number of allegations of labour abuse between April and August 2020 (an increase of 275% on the previous year), with COVID-19 cited as a factor in 95% of all cases. Wage theft is the most commonly reported labour abuse, cited in 81% of reported BHRRC cases during the pandemic, an overall percentage that has remained steady compared to 2019 when wage theft was cited in around 80% of all BHRRC cases. This was echoed by the ILO Regional Office for Arab States noting that the majority of labour complaints they receive concern non- or late payment of wages (stated in July 2020). Migrant workers, particularly those on temporary contracts and the undocumented, are thus disproportionately affected by the virus and the ensuing economic fallout, and a key challenge they are facing has clearly been wage theft, due to sudden repatriation as the result of retrenchment.
Wage theft refers to the unlawful intentional under- or non-payment of an employee’s wages or entitlements by their employer (or recruitment agency) for work carried out. It can take a variety of forms ranging from unauthorised deductions from employee’s wages (“reduced payment”), to the underpayment (or delayed payment) of wages, overtime, termination pay and entitlements such as sick leave and annual leave – or no payment at all.
The theft of dismissed migrant workers’ wages during the pandemic has been made particularly difficult to challenge due to the extensive COVID-19 repatriation programmes. Migrants hired via temporary migration programmes had intended to work for the entire period of their contracts, earn money, send remittances and then return to their home countries, ideally after accruing some savings. However, COVID-19 resulted in many such workers losing their jobs and forced them to return unexpectedly.
Furthermore, millions of migrants will return to situations of debt bondage as money-lenders will demand that they repay their recruitment fees and associated travel costs even though many workers will have no money and no means of getting their unpaid wages from their employers. With COVID-19 having rendered the issue of wages a crisis of huge proportion, especially in the context of migrant workers’ sudden retrenchment and repatriation without being given an opportunity to lodge claims for unpaid wages, this begs the question as to the nature of the global regulatory framework and responses by global governing actors.