 Okay. Let's start this. So, good morning everyone, good evening to others. It is my pleasure to welcome everyone to IOM's live session, Protecting Migrant Workers Across Supply Chains Through Blockchain. My name is Tara and I am so very grateful for the incredible experience and expertise that is reflected by the panelists today. So joining us is William Gois, President of Migrant Forum in Asia, Mi Young Park, Chief of Mission for the International Organization for Migration Vietnam, Shuba Sekar, Director of Human Rights Eurasia and North Africa, the Coca-Cola Company, and Mark Blick, CEO, Diginex Solutions. As those of us here today know, the UN Global Compact is about mobilizing a global movement of sustainable companies and stakeholders to create the world we want. This mission feels even more vital now that a global pandemic and growing social discontent have highlighted so many of the weaknesses in our institutions and systems, leaving many populations, especially minority and migrant populations, struggling for survival. To realize this mission, the Global Compact supports companies to do business responsibly by aligning their strategies and operations with human rights and to take strategic actions to advance broader societal goals with an emphasis on collaboration and innovation. This is what IOM's live session today is all about. Before COVID-19, migrants who make up only 3.4% of the world's population contributed nearly 10% of global GDP. I hope that good that has already come from global current events is that there is greater appreciation for the outsized and vital role that migrant workers play in all essential sectors, from harvesting the food on our plates and producing the communication devices in our hands to the medical professionals currently at the front lines, promoting the rights of migrant workers will contribute directly to achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals from the elimination of poverty, economic growth to achieving sustainable cities and communities and so much more. We must also realize that we cannot achieve recovery from COVID-19 nor global goals without the essential contributions of migrant workers and businesses that respect them. Our speakers today will shed valuable light on how this is possible through listening and responding to the needs of migrant workers, aligning strategies and operations and leveraging collaboration and innovation. So on that note, let's start today's discussion. William, recognizing that migrant forum in Asia is a regional network of non-government organizations, associations, trade unions of migrant workers and individual advocates in Asia who are committed to protect and promote the rights and welfare of migrant workers. Could you please open our discussion by sharing more on the prevalence of migrant workers within and from this region? Thank you for this opportunity. Thank you. Can you hear me now? Yeah? All right, great. Thank you and thank you for this opportunity to be part of this panel as well. Just to start off, we have migrant workers in the region and when we're talking about migrant workers in the region, you have to think of the spread of the region with the largest number around 40 million plus just in the Gulf region alone, 40 million from the region itself. And a large concentration of these migrant workers are in the Gulf countries, the GCC countries. But then you have other corridors as well. You have Japan, South Korea, the East Asian Corp. And then you have the Southeast Asian corridors as well, which is Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei kind of thing. And with this kind of spread and you have the spread of migrant workers from workers in the informal sector right up to workers in the formal sector. So you have that whole diversity spread from domestic workers to pilots and incidentally today's international domestic workers here as well, fine domestic workers here. But and this is where we are in this region. When you look at the numbers, it's enormous. When you look at countries of origin, it's growing. There are new countries of origin coming on board in a much bigger way. And in traditional states like India, you have new states coming on board. So you had, of course, the traditional states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu and things like that. But now you have new states coming much, much from the North, new states coming on board as labor deploying states and largely again to the Gulf countries. You have the strengths of these different countries of origin also in terms of and when I'm saying strength in terms of bargaining power in terms of having policies and regulations for protections of their workers varies from maybe Philippines being at the top with very strong protection measures for its workers. And then you have countries like Bangladesh and Nepal, which have seemed to have weaker bargaining power. And then you have with India the state levels of variance among states where you have a state of Kerala, which has very sophisticated laws and policies and programs. And then every new emerging states from India like Bihar, which will have very not not enough kind of regulation and protection and even mechanisms. So it's not all it's it's it's very, very diverse in that in that regard. You have different processes in the region, which bring together states to learn from each other in this practices, but it's a long way before we actually get some kind of standards and some kind of common thing or common practices that would uphold the rights of migrant workers or protect the rights of migrant workers in the region. Some of these processes are like the Abu Dhabi dialogue, you have the Colombo process, you have the ASEAN forum on labor and migration, you have the Bali process. And not to say there's not enough of these global and regional processes out there for states to kind of learn and bring up their kind of standards for the protection of their workers. But in very many cases at least among countries of origin, we have seen it's largely a race to the bottom of the barrel in terms of how migration is become such a how states have become so dependent on the deployment of migrant workers and largely in the in the low-skill sector, low-skill, low-wage sector, almost like an economy of scale in terms of deployment for emergencies. But I'll stop there briefly. Well, and thank you for that, William. I really appreciate you not just highlighting the prevalence and the sheer scale of movement of workers in this region, from this region to others, but also that you started to talk about systems of protection and mechanisms that are in place to consider this. From the experience of your members, can you tell us a bit more about why these protection measures are necessary? Why in what ways are migrant workers exceptionally vulnerable to exploitation, forced labor, or even trafficking? Look, I think it starts from the very first process itself. I think there's so much of hype in countries of origin. There are schemes like a flying out pay later kind of schemes where people can take loans from from loan sharks, from from agencies, from even from government kind of banks like in Bangladesh, where you can take these loans and then you can begin your process of going overseas kind of thing. Very often workers don't know what they are getting into, so that we've done a lot of work on contract substitution. We've been in the drama on this for years about workers not knowing what is on their contract, a recruiter telling them what is in it, not having the contract in their own language, going abroad, finding that it is not what they had expected, either in wage conditions of work or accommodation. There's always some variance from what was explained to them in the contract or told to them and they are not being seen that I've been seeing the contract and they're having no choice but to take it or come back home and they've already invested too much in that journey to even think of coming back home. So it just begins, so as you and you take as you when you go along that step, then you come into the conditions of work, accommodations, the hours of work and things like that. There's so much that is not known and even have known in the sense of told by the recruiter or by the agent or even in a pre-departure orientation about life in a country, in a destination country, the variance between what you've been told and what you expect and what you actually experience in the country of destination, there's a very, very big variance and this is the biggest challenge because at the end of the day in countries of destination, the support systems that you would necessarily have like let's say trade unions or associations of migrant workers, these in many countries are disallowed or there is no space for that. So in a certain sense, a worker goes out and goes out there on his or her own and then has to go into this whole element of survival kind of thing. So I think this is the biggest challenge we find and it starts with withholding of documents, the threat of withholding of documents. There are already laws that says and companies have put in regulations that say you cannot withhold documents but we have been told that it's a practice that continues even till this very day and that withholding of documents is like hangs over a migrant's head. If you ask for those documents or in any way you request for those documents, employers threaten that you can get undocumented or we put you in an irregular status and to avoid that workers just continue to believing that okay it's safe and nothing is going to happen. So it's that, it's wage theft that happens, a lot of work people, we get this constantly and I will speak later in the second round about wage theft campaign that we have launched kind of thing because this is a very big thing. The number of cases that we get on a daily basis throughout the year on just workers not being paid and not being paid for a month, not being paid for two months, three months, six months to that scale kind of thing and I think it's important to look at those vulnerabilities and then there's the gender dimension of these vulnerabilities as well. You know it's how it's gendered, it's ethnicity, it's nationality, it's a whole cross-section of where you are coming from, what your background is that increases or puts you in situations of vulnerability in the workplace. Great thank you so much William for shedding a bit of light on so many factors that make migrant workers vulnerable from pre-departure through their migration to when they're actually employed at the workplace. If I can turn to you Mia, could you build on what William has been saying about the vulnerabilities of migrant workers but maybe focus a little bit from the experience of IOM on what is it about their mobility? What are some of the root causes or drivers behind this vulnerability? Okay thanks for the invitation Tara. So at IOM under our general labor migration work and our migrant protection work we partnered with various stakeholders and we looked at the entire migration journey so from their home when they're seeking employment during recruitment process on their travel to the destination country at the workplace and then back to the place of origin and each stage of migration process there are risks involved and due to the vulnerabilities just discussed by William we see that migrant workers are more likely to be exploited, their labor rights abused and their human rights violated and what we've identified is that often problems start from the very first step the unethical recruitment practice in the countries of origin so even before they start moving so I'll be echoing what William said but it's very important that there are three main risk areas first is excessive recruitment costs that leave many in debt bondage so recruitment cost is basically fees and costs incurred for workers to secure employment so this could include transportation, visa, medical checkups, orientation, training, accommodation so most of them are legitimate costs but the issues are that first they tend to be excessive and inflated but most importantly second that they're charged to the workers and we've seen cases where the recruitment cost workers had to pay was double the amount of their annual income so many end up being in debt bondage which lead them to be financially incredibly vulnerable. Second is deceptive recruitment practice such as multiple you know triple contracts with different terms and conditions and often in languages that they don't understand and I've seen contracts signed by the same person with two different salary amount and very different and many of migrants do not even get paid the amount they're told some don't get any income at all so these practices lead to workers being really informed, uninformed, confused, exploited with no place to turn to for help or clarification. Third is restriction in movement and this happens during recruitment phase so I'm not talking about restrictions in movement at the destination country which is also serious but this happens at the recruitment phase that their passports and personal documents bank documents are taken at the recruitment so they can't drop out of the recruitment process and look for other options and this ultimately leads to a situation where they're not able to walk away from explorative working or living conditions at the destination country. You know I would say all of us here and those listening and would never pay to secure our own employment we would never sign multiple documents we would never give our passports or bank accounts to our companies and if we're demanded we would think that that's absurd and we would simply not accept it but unfortunately for millions of migrants these are wisely used practices and so often they have no choice but to accept them and some believe that they cannot even question them. In addition as as William said host governments and companies often are not aware of these practices and also because they don't see migrant workers as their priorities for protection there are lack of regulation and even if there are laws and policies they're not very implemented and enforced well and you know this is just at the recruitment phase but maybe most significant because once you start under an explorative condition it's very likely that you will end up working in an explorative situation at the destination country. So just to sum it up the inherent vulnerabilities of being migrants and then the discrimination inequalities and weaknesses in labor migration system makes them exceptionally vulnerable. Thank you Mia. You and William have painted quite a dire picture. There are a lot of vulnerabilities associated with highly complex processes. What can business do to mitigate these risks? So the only way I think for businesses to mitigate these risks is to recognize and understand that it is in their interest to own these issues and take the lead. You know they can approach this from the risk management perspective you know the the reputation of risk the direct financial risk associated with them or maybe from the corporate responsibility perspective that it's a right thing to do it's a moral thing to do. But practically as employers companies want healthy qualified workers those who are hired roughly in a fair and transparent manner those who have clear understanding of your business your expectation the terms and conditions of their work and those who generally want to work for your companies. So to ensure they can recruit such productive workers and also manage their risk a number of things can be done. First companies need to better understand their migrant workers vulnerability and their own industry specific risk. They need to take actions to make their own recruitment practice and their supply chain more transparent so they can see what's happening. I'm not just talking about first year supply chain but the entire second and third year labor supply chain. And they also need to be familiar with regulatory frameworks international standards and good practices and this will help them develop their own specific policies and guidelines. And once they have good data and framework it's very important that they make sure that this is well communicated and that they're actually applied in the management system and ensure due diligence and provide close oversight to the employment practice. Of course setting up grievance and remediation mechanism that actually can be accessed by the migrant workers will be needed. But of course this is a lot you know easier said than done which is why under the Crest Initiative which stands for Corporate Responsibility for Eliminating Slavery and Trafficking Initiative I want to support companies to conduct supply chain mapping develop guidelines. We also have tool kits available for bands employers recruiters to carry out due diligence to conduct ethical recruitment. We also provide training on the subject as well as direct assistance to workers and pre-departure post-orignal orientation and training. And I think all these efforts are even more important during COVID and post-COVID area. The restriction in mobility, high unemployment rates, poor economic situation, naked migrant workers seeking employment even more vulnerable and desperate. You know they may resort more to using unqualified unlicensed agencies use irregular channels to channels run by smugglers or also online virtual fast-track procedure may be encouraged by companies and they need to quickly hire workers and labor expectations and audits may be reduced and all these will further increase risk and we're already seeing an increase in trafficking cross borders in several reasons. So we really believe that it's important than ever that companies take actions to end the current business model that exploits migrant workers. No migrant workers should not pay to secure their employment. Recruitment related cost and fees should be borne by employers and if employers own these costs recruitment agencies will have to ensure that they provide cost efficient cost effective competitive quality service to their clients which are the companies and the workers and ethical recruitment is in the interests of employers and companies it will help with their productivity sustainability and credibility. And the good news is that brands are starting to recognize this and actually are taking actions but of course this cannot be done by business alone and governments civil societies you know unions recruiters and workers and international agencies like IOM we all have a role and it would work better if we work more in partnership and collaboration to make the real meaningful change. Sorry that was a bit long. No but so important and it was helpful that you articulated so many of the principles that are behind ethical and responsible recruitment and I'm delighted that we have one of the brands that you referenced that has made a commitment to ethical and responsible recruitment on this call so if I can ask Shuba you know the Coca-Cola company has made this commitment could you tell us a bit around what were the benefits that Coca-Cola saw behind making a commitment to ethical recruitment and maybe just more about the journey that brought you to this space. Thank you Tara and greetings to everybody from New Delhi India. So you know as pointed out by the other speakers that the migrant foreign migrant workers are at the extreme end of the global inequality spectrum. Many of them are victims of modern day slavery this issue was there before the pandemic and it has become worse you know with the crisis so we started focusing as a company on this area in the Middle East and elsewhere in 2007. So we have an extremely robust you know auditing third-party auditing process and we started picking up issues and this was before you know the just legislation scheme like the California transparency the modern slavery so the kind of understanding you know early days was limited so what we first started doing is really you know getting to the nuts and holes understanding it by virtue of a study when we understood the dimensions of this problem we kind of updated our policies to expressly prohibit forced labor and human trafficking in our supply chain but of course that is policy but we went on you know to take several other steps to bring that policy into practice. One area of course has been pointed out which leads to debt bondage is the recruitment fees at times it takes workers two to three years to pay back those fees so this is one of the major causes as pointed out and so we enhanced our safeguards related to recruitment and ethical practices and these safeguards were built into our you know protocols and policies and you know our auditing you know process. We each here conducted about 2000 audits in you know all our workplaces worldwide you know we've done about 25,000 third party assessments to date but not stopping at that you know because we have a due diligence approach we collaborated and I think this was pointed out by Mia that you know it's extremely important to collaborate because this dimension is huge so we kind of collaborated with four other organizations to launch the leadership group for responsible recruitment for promoting ethical recruitment. This is with IHRB which is the Institute for Human Rights and Business, the ICCR, the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, the IOM and Verity and now as an active member of the consumer goods forum we also publicly committed to the three principles that is no passport retention of the workers, no recruitment fees to be paid by the workers and the third is no contract substitution. So we've kind of you know also hugely focused on capability building because it's not enough for us to understand it's extremely important to build the capability of the supply chain constituents. So through CJF, through other forums and also individually as a company we've kind of you know invested a huge amount on building capability in making you know the constituents understand dimensions of this issue and what is in it for all of us and like pointed out you know as a responsible company which has been there for several several decades you know it's our reputation is extremely important we believe in doing the right thing we take a rights-based approach and you know we have embedded this in our way of doing business so you know we kind of make sure all our partners also understand our values and our commitments. Thank you Shuba and it's wonderful to hear about about how you are trying to articulate your values and realize them through all of these important commitments and I'm going to come back to you in a little bit to hear some more examples of how you are trying to take this work forward but before I do so I'm going to turn to Mark. Mark could you tell us briefly about different solutions and how can you see the potential for technology to overcome challenges that companies may face in trying to implement ethical recruitment practices. Thank you Tara and thank you for hosting this panel and hello to everybody online. For those of you who are not familiar with Diginex Solutions we are a data infrastructure company so what that means is we collect we service and we share data typically amongst the complex ecosystem of stakeholders in a more direct and hopefully impactful way. We have a core focus on social governance indicators and combating forced labor and what we really believe in is transparency and greater immediacy driving meaningful change. I think from a technology perspective first off it's important to view technology as just a tool in terms of getting all the relevant stakeholders working together and providing the right incentives for participation which is typically either around efficiency or security so answering a question of how does this make my life easier or how does this make my life safer and ultimately whilst technology is just a tool what's most important is the practitioner and the practitioner being the hiring manager, the recruitment agency, the government official, the United Nations civil society, the brand or of course the Michael Mbaka and what we're looking to do and have been doing is connect all of these different stakeholder groups together through those three core actions so the collection and surfacing of data enabling the ability to audit and investigate that data and then finally giving a platform through which people can report and publish that information and data to relevant parties and ultimately what we're looking to solve for and I think well Jane can be condensed down to this singular statement is I need to know what I'm looking at is what you're looking at and given this framework we're extremely focused on three or four key things which is creating digital tools to help eliminate the exploitation of vulnerable people involved in the Michael Mbaka ecosystem reducing friction and inefficiencies in the current offline recruitment process and William I noted your points around fly now pay later and loan sharks and education around that and that's something we're very focused on particularly in Bangladesh right now providing a scalability to reaching the last mile issue so it's of course working in at the factory level is important but I think as we've all mentioned here being able to reach far upstream past the township into the past the recruitment agency into the broken level of countries of origin is important in connecting with hundreds of thousands of potentially remote potential remote workers and then ultimately bringing transparency into human labor migration which in turn encourages good behavior great so it sounds like technology specifically blockchain really has the capability of building trust creating or strengthening accessibility increasing efficiency and and like you said scalability so issue but if I can come back to you could you tell us a little bit about Coca-Cola's experience with adopting of new technologies to try to strengthen your efforts in the space of ethical recruitment Shatara while focusing on you know the three principles of ethical recruitment and you know doing our due diligence in our workplaces around the world we kind of came across two aspects one is that the issues arise not in the you know not of course there are some aspects which happen in the workplace in the receiving countries but there's a lot that happens from the villages that start from the sending countries the countries of origin second is that the auditing and due diligence doesn't reach the contracting level so that's several steps I mean as we've mentioned there's a whole you know network of recruitment agents which kind of make a worker you know from his village reach the workplace and therefore we were looking at you know how can we address this issue and we were exploring leveraging technological solutions to drive social impact and supply chain transparency and accountability so last year towards the middle of last year we piloted an initiative using blockchain in the Middle East with our bottling partner Digenex which is our technology you know provider and with guidance from IOM where you know specifically focusing on contract swapping so as I've explained by Mark there is you know there's a registry where you you know put in the documents and it's it provides an extremely secure framework you know which cannot be preferred with now this app with that it has was developed also has various built-in functionalities so you know we also saw whether it could capture information like passport retention what is the kind of fees that the worker has paid where they've come from so there's a whole lot of flexibility that you know a responsible business can work with to ensure that you know they're capturing this information now we you know in this in the bottler facility where we piloted it we went and you know along with Digenex actually got the feedback which was good they found it easy to use because it was in their phones they had the documents that they needed the human resources teams which also are the interface you know for when the worker gets onboarded they found it you know seamless and easy to use in fact you know they were very happy and they actually wanted to kind of upload a lot more contracts than we initially planned you know when we started the pilot how we're going to demonstrate the full potential you know to really enhance the transparency we also needed to onboard the recruitment agencies and the workers in the country of origin which was what we had planned for phase two of our pilot which unfortunately because of COVID had to be delayed but we do intend to you know restarted once the situation allows us to do so that you know will help us get an end-to-end kind of model which we present for scaling up you know we can also put that to other interested partners now thank you so much for sharing more about that I am I really appreciate how it sounds like a highly consultative and participatory process went into into tailoring this tool so that it was right for the workplaces for the workers and for the labor actors by extension so looking forward to hearing more about this from you after phase two but maybe just to go back to Mark at Diginex would you like to add from I know that Diginex has been doing work in this space you know cross sectors across countries would you like to add more from your experience and actually implementing this technology with workers with recruitment actors with employers yeah very much very happy to so I mean first of all thanks to Tuba and Coca Cola for being such wonderful partners on this project and I think we developed fantastic learnings from it and look forward to continuing to engage through E-Min and we started this journey around two and a half years ago I'm looking to create human-centric tools to help prevent or at least combat initially it was around contract substitution as William mentioned to begin with and that document handling component of our work remains very critical and has also now expanded to include other documents such as visas medical certification and evidentiary documentation around fees and salaries we've also begun allowing employers to send documentation for example health and safety policies you need to demonstrate to external parties that people only have received but have acknowledged and read as well as tracking things like training hours something that came up repeatedly is my work is we're not always aware when they were going through a formal training session because it could be baked into things like onboarding session or reaching meetings to be able to track those hours and then again report that either internally for sustainability purposes or externally to the local ministry of labor or whatever it may be so on our additionally on our original project which was working with by Burmese migrant workers on Tyshrimp arms we were looking at five mostly demographic data collection questions and that was that was our theory to begin with you couldn't ask any more than five questions because otherwise people would get bored and not want to participate any further this has now expanded up to 35 different questions covering both demographic and social governance indicators that can be used to identify and combat potential cases of forced labor as well as for both internal and external reporting and we're able to complete this document document verification work and collect responses to these 35 questions in around six minutes primarily through through mobile although we have found that both region and demographics can have a significant impact on on user preferences as we experience with with Schuber and Coca-Cola in the Middle East having collected having provided responses to those questions we're now also enabling ongoing engagement of workers both pre-departure and also post arrival on our ongoing basis so if a worker has responded a specific way to a specific question well of course they have the the ability to remain anonymous if they wish but then if they don't the employer has the ability or the brand has the ability to follow up and request further information or evidentiary documentation or just declare trial responses so this data collection part in addition to the document handling is proving very combating and very powerful in combating potential cases of forced labor or certainly increasing education just awareness of of where operational efficiencies might benefit from a greater level of transparency if we also look at the projects that we have with Utah and IOM and Mia I'm going to raise your Crest acronym and give you IRSAFA which is international recruitment system self-assessment for ethical recruitment we spent whole afternoon coming up with that looking to promote ethical standards amongst recruitment agencies globally in line with the IRS principles of course as Schubert has mentioned is not only the work that we do with corporates but also being able to engage with recruitment agents who have demonstrated their adherence to principles like these and the platform in and of itself is looking to do three things which is allow or enable ongoing engagement with recruitment agents post training and write up to certification so we're able to understand those areas where they need to they need to focus on able to identify ability to identify areas where IOM can lean in for capacity building either on an agency level or on a principal level and then thirdly provide data around recruitment agencies that IOM can use for policy advocacy once ultimately again it's around collecting that information surfacing that information sharing it and publishing it in an appropriate way but also gain transparency in time efficiency and the way that the process is happening. Thank you Mark. I get really excited when I think about the potential for tech I also get a little bit nervous because I think there are some scary bits in terms of you know concerns about data protection and accessibility but but it sounds like that the processes that go into developing these tools are highly considerate of that now I'm happy to say that that we we have time to sort of open up our discussion a little bit more and it looks like oh we do have a question so one question is specifically for Shuba and Mark and the question is how has the collaboration been received and supported by the suppliers and the recruiters in the supply chain so have you are there any lessons learned that could be shared and it would be really helpful to all of us. Yeah so thank you for your question and for the interest in in the work that we are doing as I explained that this you know this what we did was the phase one of the pilot which was basically in our bottling plant in the Middle East we had we were planning to do phase two which is which you know involved getting the you know recruitment agency on board and the workers in the country of origin we couldn't do that as yet we had to pause because of the you know the the pandemic so we haven't yet at this stage taken this pilot to our you know the suppliers and others we wanted to first get just out an end to end model and then you know understand what's going well what can be better and then once we have that model then we wanted to take it to scale which at that point mean that we take it to our other bottlers and to our suppliers so I mean please watch watch the space hopefully we will be able to share some good learnings you know as and when we start this work. We will Mark do you have anything to add from other experiences with adoption from supplier and recruitment partners using new tech solutions. So yes I think certainly when we've learned the hard way that when we introduce these types of projects we we we play down the new tech solution part and it's our learnings our first project I think we've done quite well in identifying how this might be useful for my work and I think we had done quite well in identifying how this might be useful to the head of sustainability in a large corporate brand. I think we have learned over time that key demographic of the operations manager the HR manager the factory manager how this may be useful for them and it's typically around efficiency gains on what might or might not be a paper-based process and how this might mean that they can go home an hour earlier rather than an hour later so we go back to the original pointers looking to solve generally for two things how does this make my life easier or how does this make my life safer and hopefully both and and I think positioning it that way has generally been fairly well received in the projects that we've worked on. Great thank you. I actually wanted to go back to you William because you gave a bit of a teaser earlier about the work that migrant foreign Asia is doing on wage theft would you like to tell us more about that? Well yes just to say that it was about just about 12 days ago we launched an urgent appeal this was launched together with migrant forum in Asia Lawyers Beyond Borders South Asian Trade Union Council Solidarity Center and the Cross Regional Center for Migrants and Reputies. Five organizations came together to launch this because as migrant forum Asia because of the COVID we were receiving a lot of information about workers being laid off and being repatriated and this was and swings between right to return where workers wanting to come back home to deportations of undocumented migrant workers and repatriations of the workers who had lost their jobs and also we were looking at this big flow of workers coming back but in the process many of them complaining of not getting their wages not getting the end-of-service benefits not getting their dues that were due to them and then we started looking at numbers in terms of the repatriation that are happening for example the government of India and the UAE when it started a registration process for all those who wanted to be repatriated 200,000 people signed up on the first day itself kind of thing system practically crashed of course this means not all of them are workers some of them are family members some of them are tourists who were stranded and things like that but still it's a large number of workers within that group we are easily looking at something like a million plus migrant workers from Malaysia to the Gulf who will be repatriated in the next few months that process has begun you know and a large number of these workers are complaining about not getting their wages and not only businesses have taken advantage in some cases of the COVID where they have not been paying workers for months before the COVID and now because of the COVID and the loss of business and things like that are making this as an excuse of sending back workers home kind of thing and the thing is governments will give them a helpline banks will give them helpline and they will start from scratch again we wanted to raise this issue because we believe that the the enormity of the scale of the wage theft in the time of COVID is so high and that's why the urgent appeal calls for an international justice mechanism largely because the existing justice mechanisms the remedy mechanisms that were there in countries of origin in normal times could not cope with the workload and that with the cases that they were getting you know and that was and they were hugely inefficient countries have tried like for example Qatar tried an expedited board procedure UAE tried a mobile kind of clinic in Abu Dhabi kind of mobile code kind of thing in Abu Dhabi this was all before the COVID but a large number of them were not able to address this the volume of cases they get in the normal time and now with with COVID and the repatriations this has grown exponentially and that's why the call has been to look into this to look into the wage theft just because I know the world bank said 20% drop in remittances and and that's big that's more than you know 400 450 million kind of thing but when you look at it it's not only the it's not only the drop in remittances it's this what is owed to workers the potential remittances that could have been a helpline in this time have now been cut off kind of and this is this this is the seriousness of the gravity of the crime kind of thing and that's why we've called and it has gained traction now there are a huge number of international organizations that have endorsed the call international trade union congress has endorsed the call business and human rights center has endorsed call Ecuador the global unions federations PWI and public services international human rights watch a number of you had dialogue and thankfully with IOM as well with ILO with the world bank to see how they could come in we are talking to countries of origin to see how they will take this up and that's and that's the and that's the sad part about it is is that in in this of it has affected everyone yes but to look at the disproportionate vulnerability of migrant workers in this who have always been victims of wage theft how that has grown exponentially I will grow exponentially because of these repatriations in huge numbers the irony of it all is countries of origin who are asking migrant workers to register for repatriation flights are not collecting data on whether you have lost your job whether you have paid your wages whether you have been given your dues they are not even asking that on the forms these forms are online you can check it out on their website embassy website they are online they're not even asking that countries of destination are not doing the due diligence to say okay we are going back do you have any grievances do you have any claims do you have unpaid wages to collect so none of this is being done you know and it's a whole almost like a scam of just sending workers back and that also workers having to pay for their flights kind of thing who have not been paid wages are now being asked to pay for their flights in they are also being asked to pay for the testing in some cases the country like Nepal is asking for its workers to pay for the testing before they come back to Nepal how are workers going to pay for the testing when they haven't paid for their wages you can pay their wages so the situation at this point in terms of vulnerability and desperation is high among workers who are and of course within this situation and this is where forced labor of things will come in is that many workers will also stay back even if they have lost their jobs and not been paid just because because what is the option coming back home you know so they will stay back because some countries have extended the visa limits kind of thing the expiry limits and also some have said they're going to stay back and see if they can get another job or they can get alternative employment or employer and things like that so it's there's a lot of issues within this kind of urgent to feel that we have raised and we are asking for both countries of destination and countries of origin not to let this pass by because this this is not the legacy we want of the covid and how the issues of migrant workers were addressed in a pandemic that in this time you had the highest exponential increase in terms of wage theft in in terms of just the amount of money that is that that will not be paid but just that is due to work thanks now thank you William for raising this really important issue there's a clarifying question for you of the expected returns in the coming months is there a sense already if these are mostly returns of migrant workers whose contracts were completed and not renewed or are they terminations of ongoing employment contracts is there any available data or a sense of this look the data process has only we've only just begun collecting we are only as i'm a collecting cases of workers who have lost their jobs and that already is a high number you know so there are i'm sure countries of origin must be collecting other kind of data with regard to other situations of migrant workers but this already is high the number of people who have lost their jobs and it's not only that it's like for example malaysia recently announced that no more hiring of foreign workers in the wholesale sector so in the fish market and things like that but these were workers who already had jobs and you make an announcement that no more hiring within so all the workers who were in that sector suddenly lost their jobs and these were documented workers you know so it's like workers it's this whole challenge that migrant workers today have and we will see we've only begun to see the i think this whole repatriation process is going to continue for months into up to the end of the year we've only begun to see the first trickles and so far it's already close to a hundred thousand that have come across come back but these numbers are definitely going to going to increase as the repatriation flights become more frequent and as regular flying as as airlines open regular corridors no i think you're absolutely right there's another clarifying question from you william the question is is migrant forum in asia getting reports of reverse remittant flows from communities of origin back to family overseas due to them being stranded or stuck without employment we are we are a lot of our workers a lot of our workers are based in the countries of origin a lot of our members have said about our workers asking for their families money for existence lively and you know just just food and that kind of support asking for testing asking for for the flight to come back home and things like that as mfa only yesterday we made a commitment because workers cannot cannot pay for the testing even before they have before they board the flight and it is compulsory that they should be tested before they vote for the flight so we try to see if we could raise the resources for workers who are in that desperate situation who want to come back home because there's no no no chance of them continuing in the country of destination but who wants the resources just to do that flyer just to do that test to the covid test kind of thing so there is there is a call from workers and we are now trying to raise the resources for that reverse remittances to send to workers who are in that desperate situation a lot of our members during the covid we're already involved in this kind of campaigning kind of thing so it's it's it's it's very much the case it's very much okay thank you um uh i'm noticing the time and so i think i'd like to bring this sort of to the the last section of our discussion today which is where i i would like to ask each of our speakers to sort of what's one key takeaway you would like for for viewers of this session to take away or what's one recommendation to business for how they can strengthen their efforts to be responsible moving forward and and and will you might actually start with you in case there's in case you haven't asked for business related to your current campaign or or anything else i think maya wow one is with regard to the current campaign i think it would be good to see how the business sector endorses the campaign sees this as a legitimate urgent appeal to endorse it would be great like how we are said to look at the supply chains and show many of these companies that are now firing workers would somewhere fall within second tire third tire supply chains it would be important to look at that it would be important to look at subsidiary companies that come up and hire migrant workers that survive around primary companies kind of thing you know like small small and medium businesses that that's set up next to a factory because that factory is there and because they target the the migrant worker population within that factory so i think our business is to come out and see that that that environment for protection of migrant workers for safe working conditions of migrant workers i think this is going to be important the last thing i would like to say is our businesses and this singapore has brought out very clearly in the time of covid it's not only about working conditions singapore was smooth sailing that it had addressed it's a covid cases kind of thing till suddenly they discovered clusters in the accommodations of migrant workers and then they recognize that it's impossible to to do social distancing and the measures that needed for protection against against the virus kind of thing for migrant workers just because they are accommodations would not allow that so it's more than just working spaces it's about even living conditions for migrant workers and businesses even the supply chains have to take accountability for that thank you thank you william for making these really important recommendations and concrete things that business can do i'm going to disrupt the order and go over to mark what would you like your final words to be can't hear you mark thank you dar i think i'm particularly excited about the work that shipper has mentioned earlier on on the end and um transparently of a migrant workers journey the work we've done so far has been either in country of origin or in country of destination without linkage between the two and i think this year once we can all get on things again we look forward to joining up those two and providing that transparency and looking at tools like online training for skills and certificate issuance and checklist for items required as working overseas prior to departure along with things like peer to peer verification of documents among trusted social circle members and creating nonsensitive public records of a person's work history that can be used later in the other opportunities and the work they were doing around those types of features and functions in country of origin and then connecting it through all the way to a factory in the middle east or somewhere in southeast asia where we're doing that fairly rapid social governance data collection around those indicators that i mentioned earlier and the contract verification and fees evidentiary documentation salary receipts and so on and so forth um so working with partners like like shipper and co gulla to join those two ends up and get transparency all the way from from a broker and a township and and more educational initiatives all the way through to the government data governance collection process in um in a factory and of course work agreements is linked to that entire journey excellent i'm glad you got that i'm in a very important point in uh shuba shuba do you have any final remarks uh so uh basically i would like to stress on the importance of use of technology as you know for businesses for due diligence process because i think due diligence is extremely important and one has to constantly keep doing it uh i think the cobit and you know what the world presents uh going forward shows that you know we need to have basket of tools uh one of which is you know using of technology but technology alone can't be a solution right i mean that's only a means uh to be to the end and so uh i would like to i i think once again reiterate what came out earlier the need for you know partnerships for collaborative action to really make it something which is scalable and sustainable and if you look at the ethical recruitment agencies we need to make their business viable right if there is just one or two who are looking at ethical recruitment it's not going to be viable and it's it's going to so it's important for like-minded businesses to come together to build density so that you know the whole recruitment process is also viable for them so we need to look at this whole thing holistically uh really to be able to move the needle thank you shuba i couldn't agree more uh mia final words on behalf of iom so as i was preparing for this uh this session i remember i heard a quote i think it was from a play i didn't read the play but i think it's about workers and migration that said we asked for workers and we got people instead and i thought that really summed up a minor worker situation quite well you know maybe because we see migrant workers only as um imported labor and not as human beings that we unconsciously or consciously we let their very fundamental rights and freedom be ignored and neglected and that we somehow accepted that it's okay so you know how we define an issue and the value we place on it determines how we address it so maybe we should start with recognizing what we're really talking about here this pandemic has seems to have humanized economy that you know behind the food we take uh the products we consume you know the service we use there are people and it's the people who run this economy and run this society so i would say if there is one takeaway so at least let's commit to making sure that no one pays for their income and at least you know we could commit to ethical and responsive recruitment for a start but since i'm the last person if i may make one more right because it kind of reminded me when william was talking about this is the situations that migrant workers were in because migrant workers experience is very complex it requires it it involves multiple states you know multiple stakeholders and people that no one uh take responsibility and say you know it's the company or it's the post country or it's the sending country but we all have a role and we must play our role and we must do it in collaboration and partnership to make the real job i wanted to add that thank you i can't think of better words to go out on so thank you so much everyone for your incredible contributions to this really important discussion and thank you for your ongoing efforts to promote the rights of migrant workers um so yes thank you again everyone thanks to thank you for going today thank you so much and stay safe take care thank you all