Dubai: The majority of labourers continue to be coerced into paying a "recruitment fee" or other charge to recruitment agencies, although the practice is illegal, a spot Gulf News survey revealed.

They complain they have to pay the charges, racking up sizeable debts in their home countries along the way, but are too frightened to officially complain due to fear of retribution.

Three Pakistani workers sat in the Labour Ministry, trying to find a way to change sponsors. They had paid Dh8,000 each to agents working in the UAE more than a year's wages in their impoverished village.

Eight months later the men, too frightened to be named, were not paid any wages and were desperate to find other work.

"Otherwise how will I pay off this debt?" one of them asked.

The men, strict Muslims, ruled out suicide a road many other debt-laden workers have taken, but said they lived in despair, with a debt impossible to pay and no way home without paying it.

Recruitment agencies are openly, and illegally, pressuring these men and thousands like them in South Asia, to pay their counterparts thousands of dirhams in their home countries for the privilege of working here, forcing many into a debt trap they find impossible to climb out of.

Charging any recruitment fee to workers is illegal, according to UAE Labour Law.

But recruitment agencies exploit poor Labour Ministry supervision, and gaps in UAE labour law, and none have ever been charged.

A Gulf News reporter posing as a secretary for a construction company contacted 17 recruitment agencies, asking for 20 Indian helpers.

Nine agencies assured the "secretary" that the construction company itself would not need to pay a single dirham towards processing the workers' papers.

Instead, they said they would ask workers to pay a year's equivalent wages, about Dh5,800 for visa transaction fees here and in India, and a commission to the recruitment agencies in both countries.

Some sales executives in these nine agencies also offered to make the workers pay more not only for all transaction fees, but as an add-on "profit" for the company.

Of the remaining eight agencies, a salesman at one offered to charge workers Dh4,500 for visa expenses here, over and above what they would pay in India, and said: "We can take more if you like."

"All companies do this," assured another.

Two agencies offered to charge workers between Dh1,500 and Dh2,000 transaction fees.

"Workers won't agree to pay more," they explained, but both added that down the road, the company could deduct more fees from workers' salaries.

Another two agencies asked workers to only pay home country fees.

One agency charged workers' air tickets "in exceptional cases," a saleswoman said. Only one agency out of 17 actually followed the law and refused to charge workers anything at all.

'We are being forced into this system'

The manager of one recruitment company that offered to charge workers all the transaction fees said construction companies pressured them into charging workers for everything.

"Even respectable companies like ours are being forced into this system because we are losing business from these new companies, even though these exploited workers [who are charged for coming] usually don't have skills and feel very bitter when they come. If they were skilled, they wouldn't pay to come."