"For over a decade, scholars have documented forced labour among low-wage migrant workers in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries such as Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Saudi Arabia (Blaydes, 2023; Fernando and Lodermeier, 2022; Iskander, 2021; Parreñas, 2021). A broad understanding within this literature is that among the root causes of this phenomenon in the GCC are abuses perpetrated during workers' recruitment from their home countries, such as extortionate fees, misinformation, and coercion. Recruitment is conducted by intermediary firms in workers' home countries, known as ‘recruiters' or ‘recruitment firms'. Eighty per cent of low-wage migrant workers in the GCC migrate through these channels (Mendoza, 2012).
Yet, despite the proliferation of this method, the scholarship on forced labour in the GCC contains few studies on recruitment and even fewer that include interviews with the recruiters themselves (Gardner, 2012; Kern and Müller-Böker, 2015). This gap in the literature is particularly notable since scholars of forced labour have renewed their focus on recruitment as a driver of forced labour of migrant workers globally (Crane et al., 2021; Crane and LeBaron, 2018), including as a structural feature of contemporary global capitalism (Crane and LeBaron, 2018; Mantouvalou, 2023; Shamir, 2012) and with colonial origins (Buckley et al., 2023; Iskander, 2021; Wright, 2021). Within this scholarship, a growing number of studies suggest that the recruitment of low-wage migrant workers should be understood as a ‘human supply chain', a concept developed by Jennifer Gordon as an analogy to product global value chains (GVCs) (Gordon, 2017; Buckley et al., 2023; Farbenblum and Nolan, 2020; LeBaron, 2020; Pittman, 2018; Hernández-León, 2021; Milkman, 2020).
According to this framing, employers are seen as lead firms at the top of the human supply chain, mirroring the portrayal of lead firms at the top of product supply chains within the GVC literature (Gordon, 2017). Empirical studies have shown that many product supply chains are, in fact, lead firm- or buyer-driven – meaning that the lead firm holds the greatest bargaining power, as well as the greatest ability to influence the terms of its contracts with suppliers (Gereffi, 2018)."

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