Wrong from the start: The treatment of migrant labour in the EU

This working paper, based on a discourse by Jan Cremers at a major conference in Berlin on labour recruitment and exploitation, discusses forms of labour recruitment and hiring. The reasoning in political debates on the impact of cross-border mobility is that migrant labour decides to move elsewhere on a free choice and own initiative, with economic drivers such as work and (better) income. Based on research on the diversity of recruitment channels and on mechanisms of recruitment through migration and mobility by the recruitment industry, this can be partly questioned. User undertakings in destination countries drive the demand side of the recruitment market. Migrant workers are recruited as agency workers by, or on the instructions of temporary employment agencies from inside or outside the host country, based on a strong demand of potential user undertakings that developed a categorical preference for migrant labour based on issues of cost and obedience in certain sectors.
The paper describes the occurrence and forms of abuses of labour hiring, underlying observations and experiences that demonstrate that a lot goes wrong from the start, and finally the dependency stemming from, among others, debt bondage. In the last paragraph, the author refers to recommendations about ‘ethical’ recruitment, stronger regulations of the access to the recruitment market, and a ban of private agencies in sensitive industries, as formulated by several global and EU labour market institutions.