EXCERPT FROM REPORT CONCLUSION: 

“Many South Asian workers are making a rational economic choice to seek greater economic opportunity through employment in the Gulf-based construction industry. But their recruitment is exploitative because of the high recruitment fees they are compelled to pay. Workers pay, in contravention of the law, for their own recruitment, for additional costs, and for markups to those costs. Many workers from India and Bangladesh pay thousands of dollars in excess of the real cost of recruitment to make the journey into employment in the Gulf region. Excess costs borne by workers arise from a variety of factors, including a high degree of informality and a lack of transparency inherent in the current business model for recruitment. The failure of construction rms to account and pay for the recruitment of low-wage workers as part of routine project costs, due in part to pressure from clients who demand cheaper bid offers, is another major contributing factor to workers’ extreme indebtedness and vulnerability to abuse. Moreover, a culture of permissiveness around visa selling by representatives of Gulf-based construction rms is the initial source of signi cant fee in action. Many recruiters also bear signi cant responsibility for taking advantage of low-skilled workers by in ating fees at almost every step of the recruitment process. Recruiters often turn a blind eye to additional fees collected from workers by their subagents, which are another source of in ation to the costs workers ultimately bear. Tragically, it also is the lowest paid workers who sometimes subsidize higher-skilled workers in the erratic recruitment marketplace. Governments in the Gulf and South Asia also are failing low-wage migrant workers. Many countries around the world require employer sponsorship of migrant workers, but few restrict workers’ economic and physical movement as strictly as in the GCC. While encouraging, recent reforms to the kafala system in countries like Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait are not suf cient, especially in the absence of meaningful enforcement. In India and Bangladesh, governments are not in compliance with international standards for migration in allowing workers to be charged fees. This is particularly egregious in Bangladesh, where the high legal limit on fees contributes to the extremely high fees Bangladesh workers must pay to migrate. In both South Asia and the Gulf, governments are not doing nearly enough to enforce violations of existing laws intended to protect workers, and there are few examples of prosecutions that would discourage the kind of exploitation that is all too common in the current model.”