Fair recruitment to the EU: regulation, rights and remedies

Private labour intermediaries — recruitment agencies, temporary work agencies and informal brokers — play a growing role in connecting migrant workers to jobs in the EU, especially where labour migration pathways are restrictive and administrative procedures are complex. This reliance carries serious risks: excessive fees, deceitful changes to employment contracts, document fraud, debt bondage and labour exploitation, and challenges to hold anyone accountable for such rights violations. EU law addresses some risks indirectly but offers no comprehensive framework. 

Six recommendations for fair recruitment

However, across Europe, a number of promising national practices have emerged to help ensure fair recruitment and to regulate private labour intermediaries effectively. No one measure is sufficient alone and each comes with limitations that will need to be addressed if regulation is to be genuinely effective.

In this policy brief for FES and PICUM, Letizia Palumbo, points out six recommendations to do so: 

1. Providing rights and remedies for recruitment-related abuses, including payment of fees and related costs, and guaranteeing access to justice regardless of migration status and without risks of immigration enforcement; 

2. Providing residence and work permits to victims of fraud, deceptive recruitment practices or fees, and labour exploitation;

3. Ensuring workers receive the information and support they need, including through strengthening cooperation between labour inspectorates, unions and NGOs; 

4. Reinforcing liability and accountability along supply chains with accessible and effective procedures and remedies; 

5. Ensuring licensing schemes have sufficient resources for effective verification, monitoring and worker remedies; 

6. Deepening cooperation between countries of origin and destination to promote fair recruitment. 

Regulation must include protections and remedies for migrant workers

Rather than starting from scratch, the challenge now is to refine the identified promising national practices to address their limitations, reproduce them EU-wide as a complementary package of measures and invest in implementation and adequate resourcing. Crucially, regulation must include protections and remedies for migrant workers to be effective.

Read more about the promising practices for regulating private labour intermediaries in our policy brief below. For more information, please contact Tobias.Beylat(at)fes.de.