Two different approaches that fail to protect Brazilian or British agricultural workers

Vitor Filgueiras

Brazil and the United Kingdom are very different regarding the levels of working conditions achieved historically, but both have faced the same strategies to undermine public regulation lately. The failure of different approaches provides clues about the solutions for similar problems.

Many cases of labour exploitation have been uncovered, including slave-like conditions, in both countries. These exploitative conditions are typically found in the agricultural sector, and most of them are associated with outsourcing/subcontracting arrangements.

In Brazil, almost 90% (44) of the 50 largest cases of slave-like conditions uncovered by public institutions between 2010 and 2014 involved workers hired by main companies through intermediaries. These cases cover different regions, company sizes, and intermediaries’ appearance, ranging from gatos (‘cats’, as labour suppliers are called in the Brazilian rural area) to formal contractors. In the UK, labour exploitation and regulation of labour in rural areas are strongly linked to outsourcing, which is predominantly arranged through so-called gangmasters. Between 2013 and 2015, 900 victims of labour exploitation were assisted by the Gangmasters’ Licensing Authority (GLA) (GLA CEO 2015).

The Insufficient protection of Vietnamese domestic workers in Saudi Arabia

Ly Trinh Khanh

Recently the Vietnamese media has reported many cases of Vietnamese female domestic workers being maltreated in Saudi Arabia. They were required to work between 16 and 20 hours without breaks in a day. Ms. Ha Thi Thu Trang, a 36 years old domestic worker from Thai Nguyen province, reported that some of her friends were either provided insufficient food by the employers or had to eat the food left over from the tables of the employers’ families. Other female domestic workers were sexually abused, such as Ms. Oanh from Nghe An and Ms. K. from Ho Chi Minh City. The domestic workers reported that they were treated like slaves, being forced to work until exhausted (Dai, 2015). 

However the labour sending companies require workers who want to terminate the employment contract before the expiry date to pay a compensation of approximately VN$60 million (around US$2770) (Dai, 2015). It is reported that 30 Vietnamese domestic workers who were rescued from their employers’ maltreatment are residing in the labour camps in Saudi Arabia to wait to return home. Some of them have been waiting for more than one year without the intervention of the Vietnamese authority bodies (PVH, 2016).