Abstract
For Central American migrant women in Mexico, informal recruitment processes contribute to systemic gaps in employment and access to rights in ways that exceed that of their male counterparts. This brief summarizes the current state of recruitment practices for Central American migrant women, focusing on four key sectors including agriculture and animal husbandry, domestic work, sex work and street vending, and focuses on migrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, placing specific emphasis on Guatemala. The report finds that informality is a widespread feature of recruitment and employment practices for women migrant workers specifically, including procedures to obtain migration documents, access to social security, and workplace conditions, even in sectors that are characterized by a higher degree of formality, such as the agricultural sector. The report finds that often this informality is the result of a failure of implementation of migration and labour laws rather than the laws themselves.This brief summarizes key findings from research undertaken by the ILO Global Action to Improve the Recruitment Framework of Labour Migration (REFRAME) project in 2018 (unpublished), with recent data included where available. The brief concludes with specific recommendations on how to improve conditions for this population to support the activities of the REFRAME project and the ILO Decent Work Agenda.
