Migrants - not necessarily but potentially - are victims of exploitation, notably in undemocratic States.
Exploitation is a serious, recurrent and deliberate disregard of key principles of national or international law.
Why can migrants be exploited easily? They can be exploited easily because the State, which is sovereign in international law, can draw a line between nationals and foreigners. The State can treat migrants worse than nationals.
Migrants can be exploited easily by employers because employers can count on foreign workers being ignorant, albeit only for lack of knowledge of the language. Employers can also count on migrants being defenceless because migrants find it difficult to organize themselves or bargain collectively.
What are the issues if States are sovereign and employers engage in profit-maximising behaviour?
The first issue is States rights vs. human rights. Somewhere the arbitrariness of the State has to stop!
The second issue is discrimination among workers on grounds unrelated to the work they perform.
It has taken nations and the international community many years to strike a balance between States rights and human rights, permissible grounds of discrimination and impermissible ones.
In international law, elements of that balance were initially incorporated in the ILO's Migration for Employment Convention of 1949 and the supplementary ILO Convention on Migrant Workers of 1975. The balance between States rights and human rights, permissible and impermissible discrimination was most recently embodied in the 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families.
It is very much to the honour of the Philippines that this country, among too few, has ratified the 1990 Convention. Thereby the Philippines signalled its acceptance of the balance I have mentioned, and distinguished itself as a modern democratic State.
It is regrettable that the older democratic States of western Europe, northern America and Oceania have not yet taken the step to ratify the 1990 Convention. By not doing that they are calling in question the very balance that they took the lead to elaborate.
One must continue to push for the ratification of the 1990 Convention. There is no better Convention, and there is no alternative. The only alternative I can perceive is more State arbitrariness and more discrimination by employers. That is not the way ahead!
I am certain that migrants will suffer from today's currency-cum-stock market crisis. Asian migrants will also suffer from the nationalization of the labour force that is the proclaimed aim of several Middle Eastern countries, notably Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. On top of that comes the uncertain evolution of Hong Kong, China.
The crisis, like the efforts at nationalization , will have a different impact on directly productive activities and on domestic workers. Directly productive activities such as construction, maintenance of public utilities, small-scale manufacturing, etc., will be affected by redundancies. In countries not respecting the balance between States rights and human rights, permissible and impermissible grounds of discrimination, migrant workers will be asked - or forced administratively - to leave in droves. Their poor home countries will be saddled, in even greater numbers than before, with mouths to feed and bodies to clothe, to house and to provide employment for.
Indirectly productive activities, such as those of domestic workers, will be less affected by the current crisis. But they will not be totally immune from it because they are simultaneously indispensable and a status symbol.
But whatever the exact numbers or proportions may be, it is clear that return movements of migrants will grow.
Their home countries, therefore, would do well to dust off some ideas that have been around for years and to do something serious and sustained about the reintegration and re-employment of their citizens who flock back from abroad.
For further information, please contact the South-East Asia and the Pacific Multidisciplinary Advisory Team (SEAPAT) at
Tel: + 63.2.815.2354 or + 63.2.819.3614 and Fax: + 63.2.812.6143
E-mail:
seapat@ilo.org
Copyright ©1998 International Labour Organization
(ILO)
Disclaimer |
webinfo@ilo.org
Created by SF. Approved by WRB. Last updated on 31 August 1999.