Bilateral Labour (Migration) Agreements

The multilateral and regional arrangements that govern labour mobility are biased towards high skilled workers leaving the less skilled ones to domestic legislations of labour receiving countries. While the destination countries design their strategies based on their economic circumstances, the labour sending countries have no say on it. Bilateral Labour Agreements, which are signed with the aim of promoting and regulating the flow of skilled, unskilled or semi-skilled workers, addresses the skill selective bias. While these agreements are mainly used by developed countries to import labour from developing countries, there are also few instances where developing countries use BLAs to facilitate and regulate labour mobility from other developing countries. In Africa, South Africa has been using such agreements to regulate movement of labour force from its neighbouring countries since the 1960s. The agreements cover maters of recruitment, remittance and deferred pay, taxation and documentation, among others. These agreements primarily benefited the mining sector as it was allowed to pursue its own private recruiting which made the sector in complete control of who to recruit and from where. In recent years, the BLAs signed by South Africa, mainly covering the health sector, put the country at both sides of the negotiating table-as labour receiving and sending country. The BLA signed with the United Kingdom relates to the recruitment and employment of South African health professionals in the UK; while the ones signed with Cuba and Tunisia govern the recruitment of health professionals from Cuba and Tunisia to South Africa.