Exploitation of legal gaps leads to ‘forced labour’ in Jordan — report

AMMAN — Despite efforts to improve Jordanian laws and policies pertaining to labour and workers’ rights, some gaps in these laws are being used to practise “forced labour” in the Kingdom, said a report released on Saturday.

In the report, titled “Forced Labour in Jordan”, the Phenix Centre for Economic and Informatics Studies recommended including a definition of “forced labour” in the Labour Law in line with international conventions.

The International Labour Organisation’s Forced Labour Convention Number 29 for the year 1930 defines forced labour as “all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily”.

According to the Phenix Centre report developed in cooperation with Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, there should be amendments to the national law to ensure that practising “forced labour” is criminalised. The report also recommended amending Article 58 of the law concerning weekly working hours and including excluded jobs within the provisions of the law.

Article 58 of the Labour Law stipulates that:“The provisions of articles pertaining to the working hours provided for in this law shall not be valid towards the persons who assume the functions of general supervision or ad-ministration in any establishment and who work in some cases outside the Establishment or whose jobs require travelling or mobility within the Kingdom or abroad.”

According to the report, confiscating passports of workers should be criminalised instead of being considered a “violation”. This practice, it said, pro-vides an environment conducive to forced labour. “There are many practices that can be classified as forced labour in Jordan,” said Ahmad Awad, director of the Phoenix Centre. Some of these practices, he added, are the recur-rent delay of wages and paying workers less than the minimum wage.

In addition, Awad noted that some employers force employees to pay the “full social security subscription, without contributing to it”. Other practices include forcing workers to work overtime without paying them for the extra work they do. The report also added that migrant workers are the most vulnerable for such practices.

Thus, it recommended amending regulations related to recruiting mi-grant workers to give them more independence and the possibility of changing their workplace. According to the ILO website, although forced labour is universally condemned, the organisation’s estimates show that 20.9 million people around the world are still subjected to it.

Of the total number of victims of forced labour, 18.7 million (90 per cent) are exploited in the private economy, by individuals or enterprises, and the remaining 2.2 million (10 per cent) are in state- imposed forms of forced labour.

Among those exploited by private individuals or enterprises, 4.5 million (22 per cent) are victims of forced sexual exploitation and 14.2 million (68 per cent) of forced labour exploitation.

Forced labour in the private economy generates $150 billion in illegal prof-its per year; two-thirds of the estimated total (or $99 billion) comes from commercial sexual exploitation, while another $51 billion results from forced economic exploitation, including domestic work, agriculture and other economic activities.