A JERSEY business is leading the fight against global modern slavery by championing the ethical recruitment of migrant workers in places like Dubai and Qatar.
FSI Worldwide was co-founded in 2006 by Islander and former army major Tristan Forster and has pioneered the ethical recruitment and fair labour management of blue-collar migrant workers,
It operates in Nepal, India, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda, the Middle East and the UK but the Jersey arm remains at the heart of the business. FSI has also developed an online platform called FairLink, which tracks and monitors the journey of a worker to ensure they are being fairly paid and treated.
Unfortunately, not all agencies or firms apply ethics to their employment practices: stories of restrictive sponsorship, wage theft, the taking of passports, poor health and safety practices, sexual assault and other forms of what has been termed ‘modern slavery’ are rife, as any quick online search will reveal.
However, Mr Forster told the JEP that FSI was successfully swimming against this malevolent current.
He said: “It might seem obvious that if you invest in your people, you will get better outcomes but, sadly, that does not always appear clear to employers. When FSI recruits, we own the recruitment licences and have our own trained people on the ground because it is only by retaining control can you achieve ethical recruitment.
“In many places, there are not huge opportunities to get jobs, particularly for those who are less educated, so there is a real desperation to travel overseas.
“There are more than 170 million migrant workers, of whom about 122 million are blue-collar migrants. That number is constantly increasing and there is churn as well, when people come back from overseas and redeploy.
“They obviously work all over the world, but we have chosen to focus on the Gulf region. In the UAE, for example, 80% of the population are migrant workers who have come to build and run the economy.”
He added: “They work in security, construction, hospitality, retail, facilities management … almost everywhere you go, from hotels and airports to office blocks and banks, you will see blue collar migrant workers, basically running everything.
“They have varying levels of education, skills and training but the largest number are entry-level workers, who are perhaps going overseas for the first time, with a dream of earning some decent cash, lifting their family out of poverty, and hopefully picking up some good skills which they can one day bring home.”
Mr Forster said that blue-collar migrant workers faced several challenges in realising their dream of working overseas.
He said: “The first is the fact that the current widely used model involves fees and getting into debt. That typically involves paying a large amount of money to an agent at the village level, and then more money to a licenced recruitment company in the capital city.
“Many of them do not have the $3,000 that is required in order for them to be linked up with this job overseas, so they can get into very considerable debt, or they can sell land or borrow from their wider family. Many of them get into debt with the very manpower companies who are sending them overseas, who can charge 40% plus interest. And your uneducated migrant worker will not necessarily understand about compound interest.”
He added: “The second stage of the exploitation is what they are promised, in terms of the contract and how much they will be earning, is often vastly inflated, and when they get there, they suddenly realise that the debt they are in is going to take a lot longer to service because they are not being paid as much, or there are deductions placed against them while they are in employment.
“Also, their accommodation might be a very low standard, and with the money not going to their families as planned, it can be a huge strain on their mental and physical health.
“Families might be asking ‘where is all the money going?’ and, of course, it is going to the agents and the middlemen, and all the other people feeding into this situation.
“Often they are in an environment where the visa and work permit structure around them is unbalanced in terms of the power: they can have their passports taken off them, and even though the Kafala system in the Middle East is being rolled back, they can still feel trapped.
“The basic model – sadly still in place today – is about how can multiple different stakeholders exploit an individual’s desperation to their own benefit.”
Mr Forster saw this first-hand and decided to do something about it.
An Old Victorian, he followed his father into the military, spending 12 years as a Gurkha and Parachute Regiment officer, serving all over the world including Bosnia, Sierra Leone and Northern Ireland.
He then worked in private security in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He said: “I have always had a strong protective instinct and even when I was a kid, so I would break up fights. I was lucky to be in the military at a time where we were doing peace support operations, which was all about initially using your strength to stop people fighting, then getting them to the negotiation table and helping them rebuild their security and economies.
“When I was guarding politicians and business leaders in Iraq, a met a lot of Nepalese who had been recruited, and they were paying $10,000 to get their jobs. That is when I started on the journey to ethical recruitment.”
Mr Forster co-founded FSI with several associates, including his Jersey-based brother Nick, and Natalie Wykes, who also lives in the Island.
Explaining its novel approach, he said: “FSI turns that oppressive model on its head: we get paid by an employer who cares about how their workers should be recruited and managed and we ensure and police the whole of the migration and employment journey to make sure that they’re being empowered rather than subjugated and exploited.
“We have a clear code of conduct that all our staff sign up to when reaching out to potential recruits at the village level. We also do due diligence on any employer which signs up to our code to make sure that people will be paid what they were promised on time, that the accommodation is of a decent standard etc.
“We also remain in contact with the workers throughout their period of employment, so if they ever feel that there is a power imbalance and that something is not fair, or they have welfare issues back home, we can help them address that by engaging their employer.”
Mr Forster said that while unethical recruitment might appear cheaper for employers in the short-term, it was a path to avoid for many reasons.
He said: “The reason that ethical recruitment has taken so long to gain the momentum that we are seeing today is because there is a mentality that workers who are trapped in some sort of debt bondage are somehow more productive because they’re trapped, and that is why it gets called ‘modern day slavery’.
“It is also because there are a lot of very unpleasant characters who are stakeholders in this global business model and making a huge amount of money from the unethical model and sharing that, sadly, with people in positions of influence, be they in government, immigration, or working for the HR departments of some of the big companies who are employing these people.
“So, there’s been this kind of feeding frenzy, and clearly people are reluctant to give up on that business model until they absolutely have to.”
But Mr Forster said that FSI was leading the charge away from these practices.
He said: “We have a team of 47 full-time staff around the world and an amazing network of trusted associates and partner organisations that we have worked with over last 20 years who together help get out the good message of ethical recruitment to the villages.
“We have probably helped more than 10,000 people, and then if you multiply that to include their wider family, that is 50,000 people benefiting since we’ve been going.”
He added: “What is super-exciting now is with our scaling up of that business and, more importantly, the development of the FairLink platform, I can see us quickly being able to help 10,000 people a month.”
FairLink is a digital platform which an employer, employee and recruiters can all use to help guide them through the whole process of ethical recruitment, to make sure all stakeholders are acting in the correct manner.
Mr Forster said: “FairLink educates them first and checks at each step of the journey that they are being treated correctly. It also tracks progress and will raise a red flag if something is not done properly.
“We have some of the biggest brands in the world engaging with us now, on the FSI side to physically recruitment and on the FairLink side to track everything. They will have a dashboard which evidences every step of a migrant worker’s journey and sounds alerts, initiates investigations and then proposes remediation when problems are found.”
Mr Forster said that, until recently, business growth had been relatively organic but now, with a new global focus on ethical recruitment, there had been a surge in demand.
FSI is now looking to raise expansion capital but the concerted focus is seeking investors in FairLink.
He said: “We very quickly have managed to raise £1m to build the platform, most of that money coming from Jersey investors. We will seek more funding in future at higher valuations, but it remains a wonderful business story for Jersey, not only because we are pioneering something exciting technologically but also because it has so much social impact.”
The veteran added that Jersey, with its rapidly growing and evolving post-Brexit migrant workforce, also needed to focus on ethical recruitment.
Earlier this year, Chief Minister Lyndon Farnham confirmed plans to bring forward dedicated modern slavery legislation for Jersey, which would focus on preventing exploitation, improving support and protection for victims, and ensuring the authorities have clear powers, safeguards and accountability to tackle modern slavery effectively.
Mr Forster said: “There are some great people now in government in Jersey who are really looking at the challenge of migrant workers coming to the Island and FSI is just starting to support people with finding jobs here.
“I think FairLink can also really help locally. It does not disintermediate recruiters but supports them and I think it could do a huge amount to not only help provide protection for workers but also for Jersey too.
“What I’ve wanted to do for some years – and there are some other fantastic people involved in this ongoing discussion – is to see if we could make Jersey a pioneer of fair labour and ethical recruitment practices.”
