Merchants of Labor: Agents of the Evolving Migration Infrastructure

The special focus of this paper are the merchants of labour, the public and private agents who move workers over borders. The ILO Convention 97 (1949) recommended that migrants move over borders with the help of public employment service agencies in sending and receiving countries, with bilateral agreements regulating wages and other conditions affecting work. This model dominated in the 1950s and 1960s in Europe and North America, but was not the norm when Asian workers began moving to the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s. Private agents have come to dominate recruitment and deployment in many labour-sending nations, raising concerns that range from the equity of lower-wage migrants often paying the highest fees to the fact that private agents may have interests that are different from those of employer, migrants and governments. Most governments have adopted policies to get private merchants of labour to identify themselves by obtaining licenses, regulating the fees that they can charge, and educating migrants to ensure that recruitment regulations are obeyed. The success of this management framework is uneven, as is apparent in the case studies examined in this working paper.