Unregulated recruitment in Cambodia, unprotected work in Malaysia
After Indonesia banned the sending of maids to Malaysia in 2009, Cambodia's recruitment sector expanded rapidly, but the government in Cambodia — one of Asia's poorest countries, where government institutions and rule of law are weak — failed to regulate the booming sector.
With little government oversight, dozens of unscrupulous agencies recruited tens of thousands women from poor rural communities, who were lured with salaries of up to $200 per month and immediate benefits such as bags of rice, mobile phones and cash advances of several hundred dollars — a huge amount in a country where about one-third of the population lives below the national poverty line of $0.60 per day.
Recruits were deceived into signing debt-bondage contracts, while agencies also regularly recruited underage girls, sometimes only 14 years old, by forging fraudulent identity papers.
After signing up, recruits were confined to walled and guarded centers for the duration of pre-departure training programs, which workers were only allowed to leave if they paid between $500 and $1,000, to pay for their loans and the supposed costs of their training and travel preparations.
"Illegal confinement [of recruits] happens in every center," said Tola, from the Community Legal Education Center, which has documented the agencies' illegal practices in dozens of cases.
"The recruiters target only the poor people ... They provide them an attractive amount of money," he said. "That this amount is a loan is only explained to the trainee on the day of departure or when they want to return to their village."
Moeun Vy, a 29-year-old mother of two, recounted how she was recruited by a broker in her village in September and kept at a training center of SKMM agency in Phnom Penh.