The Equitable Food Initiative is a partnership among businesses and organizations that have come together to develop standards, training processes and a certification to protect farm workers and produce safer, healthier food. This approach creates additional value and quality throughout the food system, benefiting workers, growers, retailers and consumers alike.
In 2012 President Obama issued an executive order that strengthens existing protections against trafficking relating to federal contractors by, among other things, prohibiting contractors and subcontractors from doing business with the federal government, from charging recruitment fees, to prospective employees, using fraudulent or misleading practices during the recruitment process or withholding workers’ passports or identity documents. These provisions address many of the areas of potential abuse in the recruitment process.
The International Recruitment Integrity System (IRIS) is an international voluntary “ethical recruitment” framework that benefits all stakeholders in the labour migration process. IRIS provides a platform for addressing unfair recruitment and bridge international regulatory gaps governing labour recruitment in countries of origin and destination.
This agreement aims to design together active policies of labour mobility research, in order to face shared challenges on this matter. It also seeks to guarantee decent labour conditions for temporary migrant employees from both countries. Furthermore, it tries to create binational database in order to make a fair recruitment that guarantees the rights of migrant workers.
The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) promotes the human and labor rights of migrant workers throughout the labor migration process.
1. Migrant workers employed through bilateral MOUs
On August 29, 2011, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of El Salvador and the Occupational Health and Security Administration of the US Department of Labor signed a memorandum of understanding in Washington, D.C., which recognized the joint commitment of both nations in the labor rights protection of Salvadoran immigrant workers.
On June 19, 2014 a civil society agenda on the inclusion of migrants and migration in the post-2015 development framework was launched by the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC) in partnership with civil society networks Global Coalition on Migration, NGO Committee on Migration New York, and MADE, with the endorsement of over 100 additional organizations.
Regarding the recognition of skills and qualifications, in partnership with the Swedish National Employment Agency, Moldova is consolidating its own National Employment Agency with the use of the latest tools and information technology, such as e-job fairs. An internship portal has recently been launched which motivates young Moldovans to return back home even for short periods of time. Moldova is undergoing projects on supporting migrants’ employment and skills recognition at the regional level.
In 2006, the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration Governing Board has approved a series of resolutions defining policy reforms that seek to improve the lot of household workers, particularly migrant domestic workers coming from abroad. These include upgrading of skills of the workers, orientation course on country-specific culture and language, protective mechanisms at the job sites, obliging employers to shoulder the cost of deploying the domestic helper, and increasing the minimum salary to a level commensurate to their acquired competencies.