How Technology is Reshaping the Human Rights Landscape: Labor & Migration

Human Rights Research Center
Aug 13
10 min read

August 12, 2025

Farms in Brazil are the source of part of the coffee used by the American coffee chain [Image credit: Lela Beltrão/Repórter Brasil]

My favorite time of day is getting to the office a bit early and sipping on my morning coffee. It’s a daily ritual, a step in my routine where I have a moment to myself.

I realize this all sounds like I’m romanticizing a very typical start to most people’s days– according to the National Coffee Association's (NCA), more than two-thirds of American adults drink coffee every morning, and an estimated 2.3 billion cups are consumed daily worldwide. Brazil alone produces nearly 40% of the world’s coffee. However, while the average morning cup of joe from a Brazilian farm may be brewed dark, the story of how it got to your mug is even darker. In 2023, Reporter Brasil did a deep dive into coffee farms in the Minas Gerais region that supplies major coffee companies like Starbucks. The model of farming used across farms was riddled with labor violations that were obscured in intentional ways to evade consequences with certifiers and labor inspectors. According to Brazil’s national labor monitoring, the high number of reports of worker exploitation in coffee farming placed the industry among the top five worst sectors for labor violations despite being only the fourth in terms of revenue in Brazil. These reports found a number of teens working on physically labor-intensive farms, as well as adult migrant workers not entitled to vacation days, benefits, and often forced to purchase or rent the tools to harvest, with the cost deducted from their already low wages. In addition, workers had to pay for the substandard and overcrowded living accommodations located near or on farms. Lump sum payments distributed at long intervals left workers financially dependent on managers and supervisors for daily expenses, perpetuating a cycle of labor, debt, and exploitation.

Brazil’s coffee industry is unfortunately not alone: migrant workers around the globe often face the most challenging, often dangerous, working circumstances, leaving them especially vulnerable to exploitative circumstances. While the nature of the exploitation may vary between groups and industries, there are identifiable and overlapping themes.

In Thailand, poor young migrant men from Myanmar and Cambodia seek employment in the fishing industry, fleeing “conflict and development-induced displacement; family reunification; social discrimination and political persecution; lack of jobs; demographic changes; and land seizures and landlessness” among other challenges back home. However, they often reported being misled about the nature of the work and being coerced into staying, sometimes under dangerous circumstances (2). Thailand attempted to create a temporary registration system with the “pink card” to both alleviate the backlog of work visas and to better protect workers with a form of identification, but the system has also brought new means to exploit workers. Workers are forced to turn over their pink cards to the head of the boat they’re working on and cards are withheld until inspections are run each day, keeping them tied to a particular boat no matter the working circumstances. This system has also given inspecting officials simple means to check that a boat is in compliance: as long as each person matches their pink card, the boat can continue operating without any in-depth investigation into who the individuals are, the circumstances under which they came, or the conditions in which they work and live.
In the United States, unaccompanied Central American migrants, some as young as 13 years old, have fled their home countries in response to economic hardship, conflict, and environmental disasters. They attend school and work long hours in sectors such as construction, hospitality, food service, and transportation, or even drop out of school to pursue work. According to caseworkers working with these children, “about two-thirds of all unaccompanied migrant children ended up working full time,” most frequently with the intention of sending money back to their families in their home countries. While the number of children living and working harsh hours in unprotected circumstances continues to grow rapidly, the children’s teachers, the companies they work for, and the Department of Health and Human Services responsible for their care continue to look the other way – according to the New York Times, “federal prosecutors have brought only about 30 cases involving forced labor of unaccompanied minors,” despite thousands being reported and investigated.
In the UK and China, undocumented Filipina women face pressures from home to find work overseas. They frequently find work as caregivers or nannies for young children of wealthy families, working long hours for minimum wage, often with no time off. Some women have found psychologically and physically demanding or even threatening circumstances upon migration, including becoming surrogates, instead of the domestic work they had expected. To add to the misleading and/or dangerous working conditions many migrant workers face, one 2019 survey in the UK found that “69% did not have their own room in employers’ houses. Only half had enough food to eat. Three-quarters suffered from verbal or physical abuse. Seven per cent had been sexually assaulted.” In addition, many of them reported strict supervision, including having their passports withheld from them and restrictions on movement without their employer’s supervision.
In Qatar, migrants working for the World Cup in 2022 made international headlines for the exploitative conditions they faced while building infrastructure and maintaining security for the world’s largest sporting event, which brought FIFA more than $7.5 billion in revenue. Workers reported excessive hours, lack of rest days and/or deductions in pay if time off was taken, poor living conditions, and disproportionate penalties for minor ‘misdemeanors’ at work including threats of deportation.

No matter the industry or country, stories from around the world paint a similar picture of migrant workers’ experiences: workers not knowing their rights; faulty grievance mechanisms or complaints that go unaddressed; extremely poor and costly living conditions; low wages paid at infrequent intervals, therefore leaving workers dependent on supervisors for daily expenses; high fees to start work including procuring necessary equipment, vaccinations, travel expenses, etc.; unclear contracts often written in non-native languages and not translated; the withholding of critical documents including contracts, identification papers, and even payment on occasion; intense and excessive working hours with little to no time off; few, if any, benefits; dishonesty about the reality of the working conditions or work opportunities; and an instilled fear of leaving, as workers who flee can face physical or verbal abuse.

However, as modern technology becomes increasingly ingrained in the average person’s life, we begin to see how it can reshape age-old challenges like exploitative practices and extremely poor labor conditions. The advent of digital platforms accessible to most people through their smart devices has paved the way for the creation of tools aimed at solving the various challenges workers may face, as well as those tools that indirectly empower and enable them.

In California, wildfires caused by extreme heat brought attention to the harsh conditions many migrant farmworkers were facing. Teens working on the field alongside their parents took advantage of the situation to show the world, via TikTok, the intense conditions they were forced to work in even during heatwaves. Teens like Gianna Nino and Julian Araujo are raising awareness about the realities their families face not only in terms of labor conditions, but also access to education for the children of farmworkers. This allows them to raise funds through crowd-sourced fundraising means like GoFundMe.
In China, where unionizing and collectivization face severe crackdowns, gig workers (while not all gig workers are migrant workers, many of them tend to be), have set up large group chats of up to hundreds of people on messaging apps like WeChat to exchange safety information to warn fellow workers and organized collectively their efforts to increase their bargaining power, such as mass rejections of low-paying offers. While apps like WeChat were not originally designed for this particular purpose, according to experts, such disruptions to traditional ways of working via collective action have positive ripple effects that benefit laborers.

Across the world, the rise of new technology is opening up a conversation about how it can be leveraged for good: offering migrant workers more transparent and direct ways to voice complaints and concerns about their working conditions, access important documents, answer their questions about rights and access to information, review fellow workers’ employment contract before accepting an offer, raise the visibility of the challenges they face among the general public, and connect with one another to strengthen their collective leveraging capacity (1). Tools include local helplines to seek immediate assistance and answer questions about their work or working conditions, and apps like Apprise Audit that gather worker feedback and send it directly to inspectors or auditors for faster identification of indicators of forced labor (3), smoothing the auditing process and creating a safe, private space for workers to share their experience in authentic ways. There are also apps like Contratados that allow workers to review their recruiters and Impowerus that directly connects migrants seeking legal counsel with pro bono lawyers. For more extensive information on these tools, see here.

While some apps, tools, and platforms have been transformational for migrant laborers and the wide variety of environmental, safety, and financial challenges they can face, these kinds of technology can also be the means by which someone’s conditions worsen or even why someone ends up in exploitative situations in the first place.

In Haiti, one recruiter leveraged TikTok’s direct messaging feature to reach out to workers, and offer them jobs at a meatpacking plant in the United States. However, upon arrival, the migrant workers found extremely poor working conditions and faced threats from the recruiter when they raised their concerns.
In Australia and Germany, among other countries, many companies – think taxi services, food delivery services, and so on – are shifting to using gig workers as their labor force rather than contracted, full-time workers. As mentioned above, while gig workers have leveraged group chats in other locations to connect with and protect one another, and gig-based work accessed through apps can offer a steady stream of employment opportunities for otherwise vulnerable populations in the labor force, some critics argue that a gig-based system of labor is actually highly exploitative in nature, promising a false sense of autonomy, removing the security of having access to benefits, and limiting their bargaining power for fair wages. To add, there is limited career growth and social mobility in these roles, and often precarious financial circumstances that keep workers laboring long and potentially dangerous hours at low wages (4).
In addition, Open Society Foundations has found that there can be downsides to the very technology created to support workers: apps created with the intent of allowing people to voice their complaints can receive an oversaturation of feedback, drowning out individual complaints, and may even create new ways for managers to monitor their own employees.

And while these tools offer the promise of a better future for workers forced into unsafe working conditions, the larger problem of taking advantage of migrant workers in vulnerable circumstances needs to be addressed at its root cause rather than through solutions that only treat the symptoms. The truth is that the system in which these companies operate is exploitative by nature to maximize profit at the expense of the migrant laborers and their rights, as described by The European Centre for Democracy and Human Rights in their article on the Kafala system in the UAE. The Anti-Trafficking Review in their article echoes this sentiment, noting: “Factories are dispersed, and resources for this exercise are limited, especially in the context of fierce global price pressures for many goods and services.” While technology offers improvement in the larger conversation about migrant workers, attitudes about what rights an individual is guaranteed in these circumstances, and the cost for capital gain within economic systems built on inequality must be reevaluated.

Glossary

Bargaining Power - the influence of a collective of individuals, such as laborers, in negotiations to lead to a more favorable outcome for the group. It represents a stronger opportunity to exert influence through the strength of unity, among a union or group of workers for example.
Crowd-Sourced Fundraising or Crowd-funding - a mechanism of raising money through individual connections - often friends, families, and occasionally strangers, typically promoted through social media to support an individual or a specific cause.
Exploitative - to make unfair and/or unethical use of someone, for personal or financial advantage.
Gig Economy - an economic system where the workforce is comprised of part-time freelance/independent contractors, known as Gig Workers, that typically procure these opportunities through a digital platform. In many countries, they are not considered full-time employees and do not access typical benefits associated with a full-time contract.
Human Trafficking - a form of modern slavery that involves the transportation of an individual to serve the intent of some kind of forced labor, often through fraudulent or forced means. It is an international human rights violation and often a domestic human rights violation as well.
Labor Rights - a group of rights, legal and basic human rights, often relating to benefits, income/wages, and working conditions, created with the intent of protecting the worker against certain violations in the workplace.
Migrant/Migrant Worker - a person who moves to another location either within their home country or another country to pursue work - often seasonal and temporary.
Modern Slavery - the physical, financial, or psychological exploitation of an individual for economic or commercial gain. It includes human trafficking, as well as forced labor and marriage, and sexual exploitation.
Supply Chain - the series of processes involved in the creation and distribution of a product or services. To achieve each step in the process often involves multiple suppliers, separated into ‘tiers’ that ultimately contribute to the final result.
Surrogate - A person who carries and delivers a pregnancy for another individual or couple. The surrogate mother is impregnated through in vitro fertilization (IVF) and typically receives compensation.
Undocumented Individual - someone who lacks formal authorization or legal administrative status to reside or work in a country.

Sources

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How Technology is Reshaping the Human Rights Landscape: Labor & Migration

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