Migrant workers continue to face major barriers in accessing compensation for workplace injury and death, even where legal protections formally exist. While many labour systems recognise employer liability for work-related injury and death, effective access to compensation remains highly uneven in practice. The central problem is not simply the absence of legal protection, but the way protection systems are designed and administered. In practice, access to compensation is often mediated by employers, filtered through private insurance, and constrained by fragmented administrative processes that workers and their families are poorly positioned to navigate.

Migrant workers continue to face major barriers in accessing compensation for workplace injury and death, even where legal protections formally exist. While many labour systems recognise employer liability for work-related injury and death, effective access to compensation remains highly uneven in practice. The central problem is not simply the absence of legal protection, but the way protection systems are designed and administered. In practice, access to compensation is often mediated by employers, filtered through private insurance, and constrained by fragmented administrative processes that workers and their families are poorly positioned to navigate.

This creates a structural contradiction. Migrant workers are indispensable to labour markets characterised by high occupational risk, yet the systems meant to protect them continue to rely on employer discretion, weak reporting incentives, and narrow claims processes. Workers may be legally entitled to compensation, but in practice that entitlement is often delayed, denied, or never realised. Injuries go unreported, claims are not initiated, compensation is delayed or contested, and families abroad face substantial barriers in accessing death benefits.

The problem is therefore not best understood as a narrow implementation gap. It is a structural policy failure. Systems built primarily around employer liability and private claims administration routinely produce exclusion, especially for migrant workers in subcontracted, outsourced, small enterprise, domestic, mobile, and other non-standard forms of employment.

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