Thousands of workers from overseas are encountering problems with pay, conditions and other forms of exploitation, according to the Migrant Rights Centre of Ireland, which says the number of employment cases it is dealing with is back to pre-crash levels.
Last year the centre saw cases involving people being obliged to work more than twice as many hours as specified in their contracts without additional payment, some receiving as little as €4.50 an hour. Others who contacted the centre reported having to pay fees, banned under legislation, of up to €40,000 to employers for assistance with work permits.
The number of reports of such abuses being made to the centre has doubled since 2022, a trend it says is closely linked to a sharp rise in the number of general permits issued to workers in lower-paid areas of employment. It assists hundreds of people affected by workplace exploitation each year, but can only pursue a small proportion of these legally due to resource constraints.
The centre said it received 37 complaints of severe labour exploitation last year, including at least five involving a trafficking element. The hospitality and agriculture industries account for about half the complaints received, with jobs in the care sector accounting for a growing number.
Offending employers in restaurants are often members of the same communities as staff they recruit from their countries of origin. Offenders in sectors such as agriculture are more likely to be Irish, it says.
[ Irish food industry found lacking in workers’ rights for migrants, ESRI findsOpens in new window ]
The numbers the centre is dealing with are likely to be “just the tip of the iceberg”, according to co-director Bill Abom.
“We were out recently at a large agricultural facility where three guys had come forward to raise issues,” he says. “They had 50 permits and I can guarantee you the other 40 are still on those poor pay conditions, being cheated out of minimum wage.
“The difference is that because permits are associated with immigration, they’re of the view that, ‘Okay, I’m not receiving what I should be receiving but I’ll stick it out for five years until I can get my Stamp Four’ – which is basically your residency – ‘and then I can leave, maybe do something about it, or just move on.’
“A lot of people make that decision.”
The centre is representing about 25 complainants before the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC). It helped workers to secure awards totalling more than €300,000 over the course of last year, including some high-profile successes last year, such as the widely reported cases taken on behalf of restaurant workers Suman Bhurtel and Sharanjeet Kaur.
Bhurtel, from Nepal, was a chef employed by Chicken Castle trading as Club Chicken on Main Street, Castleisland, Co Kerry. He was found not to have been paid Sunday or other premiums, not to have got days off or holidays to which he was entitled, and to have at one stage worked 48 days in a row, all for a salary of €30,000. He was awarded €23,130 for various breaches of legislation.
Kaur, an Indian national, was recruited from Malaysia in 2020 by Bombay Bhappa Ltd, trading as Bombay House in Skerries, Co Dublin, for what was billed as “a life-changing experience for her and her children”. She ended up working excessively long hours at while living in accommodation she had to share with one female and five male co-workers.
She had been required to pay €17,000 in advance before travelling to Ireland, money borrowed by her father, but told the hearing of being sexually harassed by co-workers and underpaid by her employer, who initially gave her €200 a week but then increased it to €500 while requiring her to return €290 in cash. The WRC found Ms Kaur’s effective hourly rate to be €4.46 an hour until she was fired just over a year after arriving. She was awarded €143,268 last April but, like Bhurtel, has yet to see any of the money,
Enforcement of WRC awards can be a significant issue with action in the courts potentially required once any appeals procedures are exhausted.
The commission itself seeks to help claimants secure payment and in 2023 it pursued the enforcement of 97 awards. In 22 cases, the employers paid up before the case got to court, while two were convicted of failing to comply with a District Court order. However, in 38 cases no money could be recovered because the respondents could not be contacted, had gone out of business or demonstrated an inability to pay.
Abom says the Kaur and Bhurtel cases highlight many of the issues that a growing numbers of migrants are reporting to the centre. He says the fact employers are in many cases simply required to pay back money, subject to WRC time limits, hardly serves as a deterrent.
“In cases like Sharanjeet’s, there was an equality claim for harassment, and that was a significant portion of the award. But if you actually look at the back wages part of it, she really only got what she should have got anyway, right? So I think employers do make calculations and say, ‘Well, what’s the worst thing that can happen?’”
Among the more distressing issues for complainants is the charging of advance fees – ranging from €2,000 up to €40,000 last year – by employers or middle men to get the job in the first place. More than 90 per cent of migrants reporting instances of labour exploitation to the centre say they have had to pay a fee of this nature.
“They might cloak it under things like training or processing fees but you don’t have a choice and it’s significant, we’re talking €40,000 in certain cases, and that becomes a factor in people staying in exploitive situations because they don’t have an option,” says Abom.
He welcomes changes to legislation around permits that shortened the time a worker needed to stay with their first employer after arriving in Ireland to nine months, but said the current mechanisms around switching are imperfect and still allow unscrupulous employers to exert undue power over those working for them.
The organisation would like to see the period required to be worked by general permit holders before they become entitled to apply for a Stamp Four reduced from five years to two.
In the meantime, says Sylwia Nowakowska, one of the two MRCI staff who represent claimants at the WRC, the abuses continue.
She cites one recent case in which two workers complained about having to work 85 hours a week instead of 39. Their employer, having taken their phones and deleted a series of incriminating WhatsApp messages, simply fired them, leaving them without work or an income but also undocumented.
In the care sector, she says, she sees many cases where staff are paid only for the hours they are with patients but spend as much time travelling between those people’s homes. “They leave home at 7am and get home at 8pm but the employer is not paying for all that time, perhaps five or six hours of it.
“In a lot of cases you have to dig deeper to find out what’s really going on because, I mean, employers can be very creative when it comes to exploiting their workers.”
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