A growing number of global brands and retailers are adopting ethical recruitment policies stipulating, among other things, that all costs and fees related to labour recruitment are paid by the employer and not by the workers being recruited. Employer Pays Policies (EPP) are important in protecting workers from persistent and sometimes exorbitant debt that can take months or even years to clear – especially when illegal and “under the table” fees are so easily burdened on workers by informal brokers in less regulated environments.

Employer Pays Policies have been the center of discussion for fora such as the Leadership Group for Responsible Recruitment, Responsible Labor Initiative (RLI), Consumer Goods Forum (CGF), Fair Labor Association (FLA), and American Apparel and Footwear Association (AAFA) for several years now. These commitments are important both as signposts for the direction that business and industry is heading, and to advance ethical supply practices. The pace of moving from commitments and policy to more concrete action within supply chains needs to accelerate and has been called for from these discussions. Too many workers in the supply chains of these brands and retailers still see limited impact on the ground, and improved supplier and recruitment agency systems yet to be transformed. There is a smaller community of more progressive businesses that are already operationalizing, or are ready to operationalize their Employer Pays policies, and this community is indeed growing. Organizations such as Verité and Impactt have been working with many of these companies on the practical aspects of recruitment fees repayment for several years now.

Issara Institute, founded in 2014, has been working on advancing more ethical recruitment practices within supply chains since its founding, including work on aspects of ethical recruitment such as more transparent, ethical terms of engagement, more ethical and professionalized conduct on the part of employers and recruitment agencies toward each other and toward workers, and monitoring and verifying true labour recruitment conditions through worker voice. Two seminal investigations in 2018 outlined a feasible financial model for ethical recruitment in Southeast Asia (and technical approach for creating such models), and emerging signals of behaviour and systems change on the part of recruiters, suppliers, and jobseekers from the implementation of Issara’s worker voice-driven ethical recruitment programming.

Repayment of Recruitment Fees to Workers: 4 Emerging Best Practices, 2021 DOWNLOAD

post

page

attachment

revision

nav_menu_item

custom_css

customize_changeset

oembed_cache

user_request

wp_block

wp_template

wp_template_part

wp_global_styles

wp_navigation

wp_font_family

wp_font_face

acf-taxonomy

acf-post-type

acf-field-group

acf-field

ai1ec_event

exactmetrics_note

Regional study on defining recruitment fees and related costs: The Americas
Publications

This regional, comparative study aims to summarize the situation in the Americas, by identifying regional and national policies and legislation on defining recruitment fees and related costs and regulation of Public Employment Services (PES) and Pri...Read More

What works: Lessons learned in survivor inclusion
Guidance

The participation of modern slavery survivors in program development, implementation, and evaluation is crucial to anti-slavery efforts. Working with survivor activists to shape programs based on their lived experience results in developing and...Read More

Quality Standards for Reporting Lines for Child Sexual Exploitation in Travel and Tourism
GuidancePublications

These quality standards are a practical tool for the staff managing these reporting websites or wishing to create one. They cover several aspects, in particular: The checking of the background and the references of employeesThe processing of repo...Read More

Assessment of the effects of annual drought and floods on child labour (hazardous and non-hazardous) and child welfare in Sri Lanka
Publications

The study aims at understanding some of the disaster-related issues and location-specific, local dynamics that impact on the communities, village households, householder livelihoods and daily survival difficulties, which directly affects the well-...Read More