Tajik Migrants Tricked by Dishonest Recruiters

When Jamshed Karimov responded to an advert in a Tajik newspaper last April, he expected to end up in Russia working for a company packing agricultural products.

“A representative of the agency described excellent conditions. Food and accommodation were to be provided by the employer and in addition, the money offered was good,” said Karimov, who paid the company, Bunyod-2013, a fee of 80 US dollars.

Karimov joined a group of men travelling to Moscow, and they were met at the airport by a man who drove them to a village, showed them a shed-like building where they were to sleep, and took away their passports, claiming he needed to register them with the authorities. They were ordered to start digging his fields.

When Karimov and the others protested and said they wanted to leave, the farmer refused to hand over their documents until they returned the money he had paid the recruitment agency. They had to fork out more than 200 dollars each.

Karimov decided to come back to Tajikistan. Once he had paid for his tickets and expenses, the pointless trip had cost him more than 1,500 dollars, a substantial sum in a country where the average monthly salary is about 180 dollars.

In Tajikistan, where more than a million people travel abroad for work a year – most going to Russia – there are unscrupulous recruitment agencies that exploit the unwary. Sometimes the promised job fails to materialise, or the contract falls far short of legal requirements. Cases of abuse have been documented by organisations like Human Rights Watch, which in a 2009 investigation criticised inadequate regulation and minimal government oversight.

Nora Abdullaeva, labour migration programme coordinator with the Human Rights Centre in Tajikistan, agreed that recruitment firms often let down their clients, noting that they got away with it because the victims of scams rarely took cases to court.

“First, there is a low level of public trust in the legal system because of corruption, the long time that it takes for courts to consider cases, and the quality of legal services. Secondly, there is the low level of legal literacy and the inability to afford court cases,” Abdullaeva said.

Even when cases reach court, plaintiffs are rarely successful as it can be hard to gather evidence that stands up in court.

“Both investigators and the court aren’t always able to prove that a recruiting firm is responsible for violating a labour migrant’s rights,” Abdullaeva said.

That was Karimov’s experience. After Bunyod-2013 refused to compensate him, he tried to bring a legal action against it. After this proved unsuccessful, he decided not to appeal.

“Why would I do that? It would be just a waste of time,” he said.

In 2012, NGOs in Tajikistan submitted an alternative report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Labour Migrants on the way the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families is being implemented.

One of the firms named in the report was sued by a group of migrants who said they had been lured to Russia with promises of well-paid jobs. They said they were then forced to work for no pay for three months, and were only able to return home when the International Organisation for Migration stepped in. In 2009, their case was thrown out of court for lack of evidence.

Another instance examined in the report concerned 180 labour migrants who claimed to have been deceived by a different recruitment agency. They published a letter of complaint about the firm in a Tajik newspaper, but their case never reached court.

The report also noted shortcomings in a yet-to-be-passed bill designed to regulate private employment agencies better. The current draft does not provide “effective guarantees and mechanisms” to protect people who use these agencies,” the report read.

The UN committee agreed that the draft law contained “significant gaps”.

Although drafting began in 2011, the bill is far from complete. The Human Rights Centre’s head, Nurmahmad Khalilov, was a member of the working group drafting the bill, but he told IWPR that not enough progress had been made to make it into a law.

LIMITED OVERSIGHT BY THE STATE

IWPR contacted Bunyod-2013 to ask the owner, Hayrinisso Mardonova, why a contract had not been drawn up between Karimov and his prospective employer. By law, recruitment agencies need to provide proof that the agency, the worker and the employer have entered into legal agreements with each other before the client goes abroad.

In Karimov’s case, the sole contract was between him and the agency.

Mardonova acknowledged that none of the men she sent on that work trip to Russia had pre-arranged contracts, but insisted her company had done nothing wrong.

“If they had waited, their contracts with the employer in Russia would have been prepared within 15 days,” she said.

Asked whether her firm had entered into a contract with the Russian employer, she refused to answer, citing commercial confidentiality. She said she answered only to Tajikistan’s migration service on such matters.

The migration service is responsible for ensuring that recruitment firms operate in accordance with the law, and it has powers to suspend or revoke the licences of the 41 companies registered to operate. In the case of Bunyod-2013, the service should have been aware of previous complaints against Mardonova and taken action accordingly when she set the company up.

Two years ago, Manuchehr Maqsudov, now a reporter for Emruz radio, met Mardonova when she was director of another recruitment agency called Imon.

Maqsudov told IWPR that although he paid more than 100 dollars to the company, it did not keep its side of the bargain.

Initially, he was offered a job at a furniture factory in Russia for 1,000 dollars a month. By the time he bought his plane ticket, he was told that the post was filled but he was offered another role at the same place. However, on arrival, Maqsudov discovered that the highest wage offered by the factory was less than half the amount Imon had advertised.

When he called Imon to complain, he said, “Mardonova replied that ‘if you don’t like it, you should find a job yourself”.

After he returned to Tajikistan, he tried to contact Imon in order to bring legal proceedings, but the agency had moved and he was unable to track it down.

IWPR managed to locate Imon and interviewed its owner Ikrom Sharipov, who said he fired Mardonova in 2012. Eight clients had reported her to the police after paying money but failing to get jobs, he said.

Sharipov said that in February 2014 a formal enquiry was launched into these cases, and he showed IWPR an interior ministry letter sent to the migration service informing it that the police were investigating Mardonova’s activities.

Mardonova denied misappropriating money from these eight people and told IWPR that she was not aware of any investigation. She added that she had left the company of her own volition.

IWPR asked the migration service why someone who was under investigation for alleged irregularities had been given a licence to set up another company. A representative said he was unaware of the letter sent by the interior ministry.

IWPR sent three further written requests enquiring how often such agencies were inspected and seeking further comment on what seems to be a lack of oversight. The migration service did not respond.

Muhayo Nozimova and Farangis Nabieva are IWPR-trained journalists in Tajikistan.