Hasan, an Asian engineering student who suddenly found he could not pay Irish university fees of more than €10,000 during the Covid pandemic, thought his luck had changed one evening as he waited in a takeaway on a meal and got chatting to someone who, it turned out, was from the same town back home.
“I’m from a poor family and was completely broke, but I was trying to buy food for myself from the takeaway, and he was there too. We were talking, and because we were from the same place he was very friendly.
“He said: ‘I’m looking for a guy, and if you’re free, if you want to work, I’ll help you to get the work permit’.
“He promised me a lot ... ‘I’ll help you with accommodation, I’ll bring your family here, I’ll set up your visa.’ I thought he was a very good man, but afterwards he treated me very roughly, like he was the boss of my life. For a long time I felt like I was his slave.”
Hasan, not his real name, recently secured a substantial award against the employer, who he does not want named, for a long list of employment legislation breaches, including a requirement that he worked hugely long hours, was paid far below the minimum wage, and did not get the holidays to which he was entitled.
Through most of the roughly two years he worked for the company, he slept in a store room above one of his employer’s premises on a mattress, surrounded by boxes of stock.
He was forced to beg his boss for the equivalent of pocket money while persistently being threatened that his work permit would be cancelled.
‘First he said he needed to see his lawyer about it, then he said his accountant, and then he just started to ignore me’
— Hasan, upon asking his employer for payslips
Eventually, it was. “I didn’t even know he had done it,” Hasan recalls. “I had to do all his work, getting up at six each morning, working until three most nights,” he claims. “I didn’t get a day off.
“But I was begging him to give me my payslips, some proof I worked for him, because the time for my [permit] extension was approaching. First he said he needed to see his lawyer about it, then he said his accountant, and then he just started to ignore me.
“Then one night, I was sitting outside his takeaway in my car” – by which he means the vehicle his employer provided to him to make deliveries – “and I was literally crying. One of other drivers came to me, sat next to me and explained about opening my Revenue account. Before that, I had no idea. So I looked at it and it said my work permit was no longer active. That’s how a found out what he had done.”
Another coworker pointed Hasan in the direction of the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland and he met co-director Bill Abom for the first time a few days later.
Abom says that while Hasan’s case is an extreme one, exploitation of migrant workers in the restaurant sector accounts for about half the employment cases on the organisation’s books at any one time.
In its recently published annual report, the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) said that of 77 successful prosecutions for employment breaches in 2024, about two thirds involved firms operating in the food services sector, with more than 80 per cent of those cases including breaches of the Employment Permits Acts.
Recent decisions issued by the WRC include a number of substantial awards to migrant workers in the sector, with one last month involving a Tandoori chef, Masood Ur Rehman, who was awarded €55,000 against his former employer, Indian restaurant operator Roti Panni Ltd, for a variety of breaches.
The restaurant had closed, however, and nobody from the employer’s side turned up for the WRC hearing. In such cases the award can end up being paid by the State’s Insolvency Payment Scheme.
In another recent case, Xiafeng Gao was seeking nearly €200,000 in back pay and compensation for multiple alleged breaches of his employment rights by the operator of Eskimo Pizza at Main Street, Ballyjamesduff, Co Cavan, between August 1st, 2022, and August 7th, 2024.
[ ‘Employers can be very creative’: exploitation of migrant workers on the riseOpens in new window ]
The WRC was told Mr Xiaofeng came to Ireland in July 2022 after signing a promissory note in China agreeing to pay off a “recruitment fee” of about €30,600 to a businessman, Ming Gao. Such charges are illegal here.
Mr Xiaofeng said he was paid €25 a day, or €150 a week for 73-hour weeks, and was “so afraid” of his employer he simply did what he was told.
Abom says exploitation of a worker by someone from their own country of origin is regularly a feature of cases that come to MRCI, with ethnic restaurants often the setting, but, he stresses, there are plenty of other examples too.
“It is a trend, for sure. I know it’s something that we worry a little bit about, but it’s the truth, it happens in a significant percentage of our cases that are in that zone.
“To be fair, though, we also have mushroom farms where it’s not that way. We have horse farms where it’s not that way. We have domestic workers where it’s not that way. In those cases, it’s Irish nationals [who are the employers], but in this sector, in particular, it is a feature to a high degree.”
‘One breach tends to tar the entire sector, but the number of businesses failing to observe the rules and treat their staff properly is very small’
— Adrian Cummins, Restaurants Association of Ireland
The sorts of abuses MRCI commonly sees, he says, include instances of people being paid through the business, but then being obliged to withdraw cash – sometimes most of their wages – from an ATM and return it to the business owner. Other cases involve people being made to work far in excess of the hours they expected, and not given holiday or other entitlements.
Threats with regard to the cancelling of permits are common, he says, and many workers see the five-year requirement to apply for longer-term residency as a time during which almost anything must simply be endured.
“They just kind of endure exploitation until they hit the five-year mark, and then they move on.”
He says there are probably about 6,000 chefs working in the country on work permits, and suggests several hundred of them are likely being exploited in some way. “And most of those would have paid an illegal recruitment fee.”
He says changes to legislation in the past couple of years have improved the landscape, as migrants with a permit are now able to change employer after nine months, subject to various rules. However, the MRCI has been trying to persuade the Government to run an information campaign about the improved rights because, Abom suggests, most of those affected, simply do not know about them.
Restaurants Association of Ireland chief executive Adrian Cummins says he happy to see wrongdoing in the sector exposed and says anyone being exploited should report the situation to the WRC. He adds that, “in the context of a sector that involves 20,000 food businesses ... pubs, hotels, restaurants, coffee shops – these are very isolated incidents”.
“One breach tends to tar the entire sector, but the number of businesses failing to observe the rules and treat their staff properly is very small.”
Hasan, meanwhile, is now out of the takeaway business and working in security where, he says, he is very happy – although he would like to finish his studies at some point.
He is getting married later this year to a woman from home, and dreams of reuniting with his family in Ireland if he can somehow make it happen. “They sent me here to get a good life. So it’s not easy for me, but I will try my best to bring them here to be with me and my wife.”
