Global Care Labour Markets and Ethical Recruitment

The health and care systems of high-income countries have become increasingly reliant on international migration and recruitment to sustain their workforce. This includes the long-standing international recruitment of doctors and nurses, and more recently, of care workers, through their integration in labour migration systems. While the role of migrant care labour has been well documented in the literature, there has been more limited attention to the ‘brokers’ of these workers, including private recruitment agencies. At the same time, the governance of international recruitment in health and care systems has been underexplored (Yeates & Pillinger 2019). At the international level, this includes the WHO Global Code of Practice for the Recruitment of Health Personnel, which sets out the principles to which states should adhere to promote ‘ethical recruitment’, alongside codes at the national level that position recruiters as responsible for upholding ethical recruitment standards. This paper develops understanding of ethical recruitment in global care labour markets in practice. It draws on the findings of research on the integration of care workers in labour migration systems, and specifically the international recruitment of care workers to the UK since 2022, involving qualitative interviews with recruiters and other actors directly involved in care worker recruitment between the UK and some of the principal countries of origin of care workers in South and South East Asia, West Africa and Southern Africa. I consider how (un)ethical recruitment is understood, navigated, enforced or resisted in practice by these actors, and the implications for the regulation of international recruitment in care labour markets.