Technology for Migrant Worker Engagement

This chapter explores the potential for leveraging increasing digital connectivity to better engage and empower migrant workers. It examines the growth of digital platforms in four domains: providing migrant workers with information on their legal rights and market conditions; empowering migrant workers to rate and review their employers and recruiters; promoting solidarity and collective organizing; and finally, supporting access to justice. Digital technology holds the promise to support the engagement of migrant workers more rapidly, cheaply and at greater scale. But, despite tendencies towards ‘tech-utopianism’, technological interventions are not a panacea and rarely transform the structural drivers of migrant workers’ precarity. The chapter therefore also considers the ethical and practical challenges, risks and trade-offs that these technological interventions bring. Ultimately, it concludes, digital initiatives are most likely to be successful where they are well-integrated into an organization’s broader (typically offline) programs with well-conceived theories of change