The risks to migrant workers using informal and unregulated labour migration channels are well documented: forced labour, including labour trafficking; debt bondage primarily due to high recruitment fees; child labour; excessive work hours; underpayment and withholding of wages; denial of social benefits; and unchecked health and safety hazards are all among the risks migrant workers face.
Regulation and explicit, enforced protections are widely recognized as critical to mitigating such abuses. Reforms have been urged by industry and NGO initiatives, and government actors have taken steps to make the formal, so-called Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) channel, more responsive, efficient, and effective.
Yet despite these well-documented risks and efforts to curtail recruitment abuses, informal recruitment channels continue to thrive; a remarkably high number of workers are still using informal means to enter and work in Thailand.
The focus of this paper is to explain why this is occurring.
Corporations have increasingly turned to voluntary, multi-stakeholder governance programs to monitor workers’ rights and standards in global supply chains. This article argues that the emphasis of these programs varies significantly depending on s...Read More
This study looks at the different forms that child marriage takes in South Asia and further looks at how these variations in child marriage practices are linked to other harmful practices. The study acknowledges that child marriage takes place in v...Read More
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Written by Amber McKeen, Child Abuse Prevention Trainer at the Stephanie V. Blank Center for Safe and Healthy Children. This publication provides a definition of the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC), or sex trafficking; lists t...Read More
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