28/07/2020 Human Rights Groups to Governments: Ensure Justice for Migrant Workers Sent Home Due to COVID-19 Wage theft and minimum wage violations are already malignant problems within destination countries for migrant workers. In the U.S., migrant workers lose $15 billion each year due to minimum wage violations alone. In Australia, where temporary migrant workers make up around 11 percent of the labor force, nearly half earn substantially less than the country's minimum wage.  Over the past several years, Human Rights Watch has reported that many migrant workers in the Middle East have been forced to leave their host countries without being paid wages owed to them. In host countries including Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates, watchdog groups have documented widespread incidents of employers seizing migrant workers' passports in order to withhold their wages or lock them into contracts that essentially amount to forced labor. In some cases, workers must pay recruitment fees for the privilege of securing a job abroad, creating an environment akin to indentured servitude, in which fees are taken from the worker's wages and the worker cannot return home until the debt is paid. The groups endorsing the joint letter warn that, without suf cient oversight from governments, "employers might take advantage of mass repatriation programs to terminate and return workers to whom they have not provided full compensation, wages and bene ts." "Millions will be repatriated to situations of debt bondage as they will be forced to pay off recruitment fees and costs, despite returning empty handed," the letter reads. "Without ensuring that companies and employers are doing their due diligence to protect and ful ll the human rights and labor rights of repatriated migrant workers, states across the migration corridor become complicit in overseeing procedures where millions of workers will be returning without their earned wages or workplace grievances being heard, nor seeing justice in their situation." https://www.triplepundit.com/story/2020/migrant-workers-covid-19/120571 3/7