A/HRC/42/44/Add.1 1.5 euros. The caporale controls the employee’s daily life with regard to the receipt of a residency permit, social contacts, payment, work time and wages. Caporali reportedly withhold 40 to 50 per cent of a worker’s daily pay. Consequently, workers are constantly indebted, sometimes to the point that they have to borrow money from their relatives in their home countries. 56. Based on this dependency, many workers have no choice but to continue working in exploitative conditions that may amount to forced labour. Many migrant workers are also subject to bonded labour, particularly migrants who were trafficked to Italy by paying fees as high as 4,000 euros, which they need to pay back once they are in the country. Workers in this situation find themselves trapped in a dangerous system from which it is difficult to escape. Some intermediaries also confiscate workers’ documents to increase control over them. Violation of contract provisions, fraudulent practices and corruption 57. Working relationships in the agricultural sector are often semi-legal or illegalinformal. There is, for example, a practice of employers declaring labour which is not actually carried out in order to claim social security benefits and some employers declare fewer work days than those actually completed by workers. 58. Despite the regular status of migrants living in the Gioia Tauro plain in Calabria, for example, fewer than 3 out of 10 had a work contract.20 Even those who do have an employment contract and legal residency status are often not protected from exploitation. 59. The fraudulent practices reported included not properly recording the hours and days worked as an employer’s way of evading the payment of social security benefits. That has strong detrimental consequences for the workers affected, as they have to work for at least 51 days before they can renew an employment contract. In addition, a worker is at risk of losing not only his or her contract but also his or her stay permit. A minimum amount needs to be reflected on the payslip for the recipient to be eligible to have his or her stay permit renewed. If that is not forthcoming, migrants may pay 500–600 euros or even up to 1,000 euros for a fictitious payslip issued by the employer. In response and to keep their job, workers declare receipt of full pay cheques and then need to reimburse the balance to the caporale when in fact they are entitled to a full pay cheque. Even with a contract, workers often do not have access to unemployment benefits. 60. Social security payments may also be hijacked by someone else under the pretext of fake employment, for example if a farm owner and his or her relatives register as workers. Under such circumstances, some have claimed social contributions for work that was carried out by migrant workers. Registering bogus workers who benefit from social security payments undermines existing policies and institutions. 61. Such practices show that migrant workers are exposed to severe forms of blackmail, based on corruption and on a parallel, criminal system that systematically exploits the vulnerability of migrants and their inability to seek justice by filing complaints against the perpetrators. Indecent, hazardous living conditions 62. The living conditions of migrant workers employed in agriculture are generally dire. Many live in abandoned buildings or tents, some of them set up by local authorities. Others live in informal settlements which have become permanent over the past 20 years. 63. The lack of access to decent housing and the fact that some migrants live in informal settlements is based on a number of factors. Firstly, the large number of migrants and their housing needs continue to be addressed by the governmental authorities as an emergency and, as a consequence, the municipality in charge will put up a tented camp instead of putting in place more long-term structures. In March 2019, some 2,000 migrants were 20 10 See Doctors for Human Rights. “The wretched of the earth. A report on the working and living conditions of the agricultural labourers in the Piana di Gioia Tauro region” (May 2018).