Double crossing agents: Migrants, visas, jobs and false promises
Simon Harding
“You are from England? Can I talk to you for a minute?”, asked one of the trainers at my local gym, a big guy in his late twenties with arms the size of my legs and a long black lion's mane of hair. “I have to go abroad”, he said, “Delhi is so...I need to earn more...”, he tailed off. “I have a job offer from England and I want to know if it's...”, he hesitated, “..if it's good or if it is not...reality, you know”. He sat down on the bench next to me. I was recovering after a hard and sweaty hour on the weights and mopped my forehead with a towel whilst he explained his predicament above the thumping music. Sharaf had received an email from an agent in the UK offering him work in a London branch of the well-known fast food chain. Nothing unusual about that, I thought. I explained that it would be very difficult and expensive to get a visa and a work permit, but not necessarily impossible. “How much does the job pay?”, I asked, confident that what probably looked like a princely sum to Indian eyes may not go very far in London. “They say GBP8,000 per month”, he said. I near fell off the bench. “Per year?”, I asked in disbelief. “No, it says month”, he answered and I believed him: he spoke good enough English to be able to decipher a letter. I took a deep breath and prepared to make Sharaf's decision for him. Something was wrong, I explained, maybe there's been a mistake, but this offer was definitely not, as he'd put it, “reality”. Poor chap, I thought, as he thanked me and trudged over to the other side the gym where a rather rotund lady was struggling with a cross trainer machine, ‘that's destroyed his dreams.’ But our brief chat may have saved him from disaster.
On Boxing Day 2009, Habib Hussein, dressed in his grubby work overalls, sneaked onto an Air India flight from Medina to Delhi and locked himself in the toilets. Hussein, 26, has a wife and two children in Moradabad, India. With a third child on the way, he desperately needed to increase his Rs. 150 per day (GBP2) wage. So when an recruitment agency offered him a job as a security guard in Medina, which would net him Rs.13,000 per month (GBP175), he sold his family's land in order to pay the agency fees of Rs.110,000 (GBP1,485) and left his young family. These fees left Habib and his family with no land and just a few thousand rupees. But on Rs.13,000 a month he felt confident that he could repay quickly recoup his outlay whilst sending a tidy sum home to his family. But once he landed in Medina, things started to go wrong. His passport was confiscated. The security job never materialised and Hussein was put to work cleaning gutters and toilets at Medina airport for little more than one meal a day and primitive lodgings without water, electricity or adequate sanitation. Unable to send money to his family and working as practically bonded labour, stowing away on the Air India flight was the only way out of a dream, which had become nightmare.
Hussein has since been reunited with his family. But there is no happy ending as yet for 22 year old Rakesh Singh. Samreen International, a Mumbai-based recruitment agency, promised him work driving a crane in Saudi Arabia for a healthy wage. Several months later and Rakesh is doing hard manual labour at a brick kiln somewhere in Saudi Arabia for a paltry wage; similar work and wages to those in his native rural Maharashtra.
Earning big money abroad is the dream of many Indian workers. Migration offers social mobility to the middle and lower-middle classes who want to live the lifestyles sold to them on TV and glossy magazines. Many people have friends, uncles or cousins who have made it big, or appear to have been successful, in the US, UK and Canada and want the same for themselves. To the poor, it provides the means to survive and maybe put their children through school in areas ravaged by unemployment, natural disasters and ever decreasing landholdings. For the rich and better educated, the US and UK are the most prestigious destinations. For poorer workers from the vast belt of farmland which stretches across the Gangetic plain, the Gulf states offer the prospect of unskilled manual labour for a decent wage. In recent years between 40-45% of the population of Dubai has been Indian, or more precisely, migrant construction workers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. There are around 4m Indian workers in the Gulf states alone who send home $5 billion annually.
The demand for overseas jobs has seen the rise of recruitment agencies who match workers to jobs and arrange visas and flights. Migrant workers are reliant on agencies because many to not have the correct documents needed to obtain visas and flights, whilst almost all have no knowledge of overseas job markets, average wages, working conditions and application procedures. In rural areas education is poor and illiteracy is high, which leaves potential migrant workers totally dependent on agents to smooth their passage overseas.
Such an imbalance in knowledge leaves ample scope for exploitation. “Many of these workers are illiterate and very naive”, says Hasmi Gameni, of Human Right Watch, “it's the first time many of them have left their villages and they do not understand the contracts they are signing. It's only when they get on the ground (abroad) and start working that they realise the financial imbalances they are working with”.
Visas, flights and work contracts do not come cheap. To set up a Indian labourer in the Gulf, like Habib Hussein, agencies demand between Rs.50,000-Rs.150,000 (GBP675-2,025). A Bihari farmworker would be happy to bring home Rs.3,000 a month (GBP40). Whilst they may be a little “naive”, potential migrant workers know that they will have to earn higher wages abroad to even have a hope of making up the agency fees. The recruitment agents reassure them with promises of good, clean, semi-skilled jobs and wages which they could only dream of in Bihar or Uttar Pradesh. In short, workers are asked to pay up front and told they'll soon be earning big money abroad, which will dwarf the agent's fees.
But these promises count for nothing. As in the cases of Habib and Rakesh, their expectations are seldom met: semi-skilled jobs turn into dirty, dangerous unskilled drudgery; wages are often comparable to rural India and the accommodation provided in the Gulf is often little more than tin shacks which become furnaces in the afternoon sun, which can touch 50C. They struggle to survive themselves, let alone send money to their families in India, who have neither land nor savings. Without their passports, there is no escape: in 2006 109 Indian workers committed suicide in the UAE alone.
Over the past few year, according to India's largest trade union, the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), increasing numbers of migrant workers are being duped by unscrupulous agents, including many better off workers, like my gym instructor friend, whilst hoping to head to the UK, US and Canada. The AITUC is lobbying the Indian government to crack down on dishonest recruitment agencies, like those who duped Habib, Rakesh and made Sharaf the highly suspect offer. The union says that only attested and 'trusted' agencies should be allowed to send Indians abroad. However, this year's Pravasi Bharatiya Divas in Delhi, the Indian Government's annual conference aimed at the including India's diaspora in national life and the main forum for the issue, focused on attracting FDI from Non-Resident Indians (NRI) and Persons of Indian Origin (PIO), restricting migrant worker rights and exploitation to a few mentions.
Without concerted action Indian workers will continue to be fleeced by deceitful agencies. The agents profit from fees. Foreign economies benefit from cheap labour. But the workers themselves suffer: sold false promises, conned into giving up their family's assets, miles from home and unable to feed their families. Whilst they fuel economic growth abroad, their families are driven into poverty, hunger and despair at home.
It may have been an honest mistake, a typing error or a jumbled 'cut and paste', there's no way of knowing for sure. Luckily for Sharaf, he was streetwise enough to ask questions about his lucrative offer. Fortunately for him, there happened to be a UK resident in his gym during his shift. But most are not in such a fortuitous position.