Publications of the FoundationFair recruitment to the EU: regulation, rights and remedies
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  • Private labour intermediaries — recruitment agencies, temporary work agencies and informal brokers — play a growing role in connecting migrant workers to jobs in the EU, especially where labour migration pathways are restrictive and administrative procedures are complex. This reliance carries serious risks: excessive fees, deceitful changes to employment contracts, document fraud, debt bondage and labour exploitation, and specific challenges to hold anyone accountable for such rights violations. EU law addresses some of this indirectly (e.g. the Temporary Agency Work Directive) but offers no comprehensive framework. Across Europe, a number of promising national practices have emerged — but no one measure is sufficient alone and each comes with limitations that will need to be addressed if regulation is to be genuinely effective. This policy brief points out six promising practices of doing so. Instead of starting from scratch, the challenge now is to refine them to address their limitations, reproduce them EU-wide as a complementary package of measures and invest in implementation and adequate resourcing.