From construction to agriculture and manufacturing, labour migration fuels the Asian economy, and a major rights group said interventions are needed to protect migrant workers from vulnerable situations.
In the Philippines, among the world’s top sources of migrant labour, remittances sent home by Filipino workers overseas account for about a tenth of the country’s annual gross domestic product.
New data from the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, a non-profit advocacy group, revealed that migrant workers in the Asia-Pacific region faced unsafe working conditions leading to dozens of deaths and injuries, widespread wage theft and excessive or illegal recruitment fees.
According to the group’s Migrant Workers Allegations Database, 37 per cent of 665 cases of alleged abuses recorded by the organisation in 2024 involved migrant workers headed for work in an Asia-Pacific country – the highest in any region globally.
More than half of the cases involved migrant workers coming from other Asia-Pacific countries who had moved intra-regionally for work.
The most common sectors for abuse were construction and engineering, agriculture and fishing, and manufacturing.
In Singapore, Chinese and Bangladeshi workers experienced occupational health and safety violations leading to deaths in eight cases, according to the Resource Centre.
The International Labour Organisation said there are 10 million international migrants in the Asean region, where most hold temporary jobs or medium-skilled work primarily in the Arab States, South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
Asia is also an important source region for skilled labour, contributing to the economic growth of workers’ countries of origin.
But wage theft, occupational health and safety violations, excessive or illegal recruitment fees and other labour violations pose a danger to migrant workers.
South Korea emerged as the country of destination with the most number of recorded abuses against migrant workers.
According to the Resource Centre, migrant workers who experienced abuse faced barriers to accessing justice or non-judicial remedies.
It urged companies dependent upon migrant labour to provide full, transparent and timely remedies for aggrieved workers in the absence of strong labour protections in both origin and destination countries.
In 2022, countries in the Asia-Pacific region adopted a statement calling for improved labour migration policies, including stronger government frameworks for migrant workers, protection of their wages and extension of social protection and enhanced bilateral labour migration agreements.
Last December, the ILO hosted a conference in Manila with unions, employers, governments and academia from across Asia and the Pacific to develop a new “social contract” that would enable decent work and social protection for all workers.
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