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Wage Theft and its Consequences on Global Development8
Low-wage migrant workers are particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation; they have little
bargaining power or ability to address injustices.9 Wage theft has been a common grievance among
migrant workers across all sectors for many years, but little action has ever been taken to respond to
their plight, resulting in a normalisation of the issue over time: whilst great attention is given to extreme
forms of rights violations, the large-scale failure to guarantee basic rights in the workplace has until
now remained overlooked both at international and national levels. The implications that wage theft
has on the life of individuals can, nonetheless, lead to dire consequences. Migrant workers, particularly
those in low-wage jobs who have limited education, skills and resources, often migrate out of necessity
for survival. Their migration journey happens not out of passion but rather out of need and hope, to
earn enough to be able to provide food and access to basic services for their families back home and
increase the opportunities for their children to have a better future. Low-wage migrant workers often
invest significantly in their migration journey as well, putting at stake the little they own or incurring
debt to finance their migration opportunity.10
Detracting money from migrant workers through wage theft thus does not only adversely impact an
individual’s ability to earn enough for survival and repay their migration debt; rather, it deprives their
households and communities of origin of needed support to exit poverty and improve their living
conditions. The denial of low-wage migrant workers’ enjoyment of a fair, timely and rightfully owned
remuneration and their frequent inability to report and claim justice for cases of wage thefts,
undermines not only the upholding of individual’s human rights and the respect of minimum labour
standards set forth in international conventions, but also compromises global efforts towards the
achievement of greater development. In this respect, Goal 16 of the 2030 Sustainable Development
Goals Agenda is of crucial importance. Target 16.3 of this goal specifically aims at advancing the rule of
law11 at the national and international levels and providing equal access to justice for all. In other words,
there is a strong link between wage theft, the enjoyment of justice and global development. In the case
of migrant workers in low-paid jobs, the inability to denounce wage theft and receive an effective
remedy to the violations experienced translates to the inability to invest their earned resources in the
communities of origin and contribute to household and local improvement.
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A right to development is recognised by the UN Declaration on the Right to Development, Res.41/128, 04 December 2986
International Labour Organisation, Labour Protection in a transforming world of work, Report VI, 2015
10 Migration costs can be exorbitantly high for migrant workers, resulting in debt bondage, forcing migrant workers to accept
exploitative employment arrangements or compelling them to conditions of forced labour. The cost of migration is being
address by the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals Agenda, under indicator 10.7.1 and touched upon in the Global Compact
for Migration as well. For further information, see for example: World Bank, Yi et al., Labor migration costs – Too high for lowskilled workers, World Bank Blogs, 18 December 2015
11 World Justice Project, Rule of Law Index 2020, 2020
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