PLENA Labor & Recruitment Attestation
Receipts the worker controls, that survive passport confiscation. Built for the 50 million people in modern slavery, the 75 million domestic workers worldwide, and the migrant labor population that pays fraudulent recruiters and signs contracts in languages they cannot read.
Opening problem
The International Labour Organization and the Walk Free Foundation estimate roughly 50 million people are in modern slavery worldwide. Adjacent to that, recruitment fraud — workers in South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia paying fraudulent agents three to seven thousand US dollars for jobs in the Gulf or East Asia that turn out to be exploitative or non-existent — affects tens of millions more. Roughly 75 million people work as domestic workers globally, mostly women, mostly migrant, frequently under the Kafala sponsorship system in the Gulf states that ties their legal status to their employer's cooperation.
The institutional landscape is mature on standards (ILO Convention 189 on domestic workers, ILO Convention 29 and 105 on forced labour, the 2014 Protocol to the Forced Labour Convention, the Dhaka Principles for Migration with Dignity, the IRIS Ethical Recruitment Standard) and increasingly mature on host-country regulation (UK Modern Slavery Act, EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, Australia Modern Slavery Act, Canada's Fighting Against Forced Labour and Child Labour in Supply Chains Act, the US Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, California Transparency in Supply Chains Act). It is essentially empty on receipt-grade infrastructure that the worker controls.
The patterns are familiar. The worker signs a contract in a language they cannot read, in a country they cannot return to easily, with an employer whose cooperation determines their legal status. Their passport is held by the employer. Their phone may be confiscated. Their wages may be withheld. The institutional bodies that exist to protect them — labor inspectorates, embassies, NGOs — can only act on evidence the worker can produce. When the worker cannot produce evidence, the institutional response collapses to the employer's version of events.
PLENA Labor & Recruitment Attestation is built to address this failure — not by rescuing workers, adjudicating labor claims, or replacing the labor inspectorates and embassies that ultimately settle disputes, but by producing the receipt layer the worker holds throughout the recruitment, deployment, and repatriation cycle, in a form that survives confiscation of phones and documents and reads as authoritative to embassies, labor courts, and brand compliance departments.
Five cases PlenaProof covers
For each case, three actors share the work: the worker makes the declarations, named witnesses (community elders, pre-departure orientation officers, source-country labor authorities, embassy labor attachés) attest, and PLENA seals the four-artifact bundle and ships the multilingual handover packet. Every artifact is an existing PLENA receipt format applied to a specific labor or recruitment need — no new platform, no new identity layer.
Pre-Departure Recruitment Attestation
Witnessed declaration of contract terms before the worker leaves the country of origin: agreed wages, working hours, job description, accommodation, deductions, fees paid to the recruiter, identity of the employer, the responsible recruitment agency. Made when consent is still uncoerced — the witnessed declaration captures the deal as it was sold, before the abuse pattern begins.
- Witnessed Contract Declaration. A sealed declaration of the contract terms as the worker understood them, made before departure with biometric verification.
- Sealed Evidence Packet. Contract copy, recruiter receipts, photographs of the agency premises, identification of the agent, all sealed.
- Pre-Departure Capacity Attestation. Confirms the worker understood the terms in their own language, with a named witness from the orientation program or community.
- Multilingual Handover Packet. Deliverable to host-country embassy and labor inspectorate on request, in host-country and origin-country languages.
Wage and Conditions Refresh
Monthly or quarterly receipts of wages actually received versus wages contracted, hours worked, working conditions, and accommodation. The artifact is a sealed periodic declaration the worker controls — not transmitted automatically to any platform, releasable by the worker if and only if circumstances warrant.
- Wage Receipt. Sealed periodic record of wages received versus contracted, hours worked, deductions taken.
- Conditions Declaration. The worker's own account of working and living conditions during the period, with photographs and dated entries.
- Period Yearbook. Annual confirmation of cumulative wages, hours, and conditions, summarized for downstream use.
- Multilingual Handover Packet. Releasable by the worker to a labor inspectorate, embassy, brand compliance department, or trade union.
Document Custody Attestation
Receipt of who holds the worker's passport, work permit, identity documents, and mobile phone, with timestamps and explicit declarations of consent (or lack of consent) to that custody. Critical for Kafala-system populations whose documents are routinely held by employers.
- Custody Declaration. Sealed declaration naming who holds which document, on what date, with or without the worker's consent.
- Sealed Evidence Packet. Photographs of document handover, copies (where the worker still has access), and the receipt the employer or sponsor provided (or refused to provide).
- Refresh Attestation. Periodic re-statement of custody status, with any return-of-document events recorded.
- Multilingual Handover Packet. Sealed deliverable to embassy or labor inspectorate when the worker requests intervention.
Emergency Release Packet
A sealed pre-authored declaration of the worker's circumstances, evidence of abuse or exploitation, and requests for embassy assistance or labor inspectorate intervention — constructed before any crisis arises, releasable on triggering conditions the worker specifies.
- Emergency Declaration. Pre-authored statement of identity, employer, location, and the assistance being requested.
- Sealed Evidence Archive. All prior receipts (recruitment, wage, custody) bundled, plus any incident-specific evidence the worker has added.
- Trigger Conditions. The worker specifies in advance the conditions under which the packet should release — kept under their cryptographic control.
- Multilingual Release Packet. Auto-deliverable to named embassy, labor inspectorate, trade union, or family contact on trigger.
Repatriation and Continuity Receipts
For workers returning to their country of origin, documentation of total earnings, wages withheld, fees paid, conditions experienced, and any unresolved claims. Used by source-country labor authorities and trade unions to pursue post-return claims and to inform other workers about specific employers and recruiters.
- Return Declaration. A sealed exit statement: when the worker returned, under what circumstances, with what unresolved matters.
- Earnings and Withholding Receipt. Total earnings claimed, total received, any amount withheld, with supporting evidence.
- Annual Continuity Yearbook. Updates post-return as claims pursued or resolved.
- Multilingual Handover Packet to source-country labor authority. Drafted to satisfy the source-country authority's intake format.
Institutional version
A parallel set of artifacts for institutions operating in the recruitment, deployment, and brand-compliance chain.
Aggregated attestation of recruitment-corridor integrity, anonymized population-level worker-condition data for brand compliance and regulatory reporting, integration with existing compliance frameworks. Target buyers: ILO Better Work program; IOM Migrant Resource Centres; source-country labor authorities (Philippines POEA, Sri Lanka SLBFE, Indonesia BP2MI, Nepal DoFE, Bangladesh BMET, Ethiopia MoLS); receiving-country labor inspectorates and embassy labor attachés; Modern Slavery Act compliance departments at multinational brands; ethical recruitment auditors; the Issara Institute and Walk Free Foundation; Responsible Business Alliance and Fair Labor Association.
Same complement-not-replace disclaimer. PLENA Labor & Recruitment Attestation does not certify employers, does not adjudicate labor disputes, does not function as immigration documentation, and does not replace consular protection or labor inspection.
The 100-Year Operating Commitment
Adapted for a population whose phone, papers, and direct access to institutions may be taken from them at any point.
PLENA Labor & Recruitment Attestation is built on the assumption that the worker's phone, papers, and direct access to institutions may be taken from them at any point. Where actually implemented and populated, the intended architecture replicates each artifact produced here across multiple independent archives and anchors it cryptographically to public records that do not depend on the continued existence of any single jurisdiction, and verifiable offline by anyone holding the cryptographic keys. Receipts survive passport confiscation, phone seizure, employer retaliation, and loss of legal status in the receiving country. The worker who created the receipt before leaving home retains access to it even when every present-day institution has turned hostile.
Why this differs from existing worker-voice platforms
Several platforms operate in adjacent space — Ulula provides anonymous worker-voice survey tools, Diginex offers ESG reporting platforms with labor-rights modules, Verité publishes standards, the Issara Institute provides direct support. These produce employer-aggregated data, anonymous incident reports, or standards documents. They do not produce individual-held receipts the worker controls.
The differentiation is structural:
Ownership
Receipts held by the worker, not aggregated by a platform or sold to brands.
Persistence
Survives phone confiscation and employer retaliation — the receipt was created before the abuse pattern began.
Pre-departure provenance
The witnessed declaration is made before the abuse pattern begins, when consent is still uncoerced.
Cross-jurisdictional readability
Drafted to be authoritative for both source-country and receiving-country institutions.
Non-conditional release
The worker chooses when and to whom to disclose, not the platform.
Multilingual by design
The contract was in a language the worker may not have read; the receipt is in the language the worker speaks.
PLENA Labor & Recruitment Attestation complements existing worker-voice infrastructure for any worker who uses both. They do different work.
Existing instruments this complements
- ILO Convention 29 (Forced Labour, 1930)
- ILO Convention 105 (Abolition of Forced Labour, 1957)
- ILO Convention 189 (Domestic Workers, 2011)
- ILO 2014 Protocol to the Forced Labour Convention
- Dhaka Principles for Migration with Dignity
- IRIS Ethical Recruitment Standard
- UK Modern Slavery Act 2015
- EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive
- Australia Modern Slavery Act 2018
- Canada Fighting Against Forced Labour and Child Labour in Supply Chains Act
- US Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act
- California Transparency in Supply Chains Act
What this does not do
PLENA Labor & Recruitment Attestation does not rescue workers from exploitation. It does not adjudicate labor claims. It does not transfer wages, hold escrow, or recover withheld earnings. It does not replace consular protection or labor inspection. It does not function as immigration documentation or work authorization. It does not represent the worker in legal proceedings. It does not certify employers or recruitment agencies. It does not constitute legal advice on labor or migration matters.
Languages and the human-reviewer queue
This page launches in PLENA's 8 live languages. The languages most central to migrant labor populations — Bengali (Bangladeshi migration), Nepali (Nepalese workers in the Gulf), Amharic (Ethiopian domestic workers), Sinhala, Khmer, Burmese, Vietnamese, Swahili — are in the human-reviewer queue. Bengali, Nepali, Amharic, Vietnamese, and Swahili are the highest priority. Contact hello@joinplena.com for translator inquiries. See the full Translation Roadmap.
Scholarship and norms
This product is built in conversation with:
- ILO Conventions 29, 105, 189 and the 2014 Protocol
- Walk Free Global Slavery Index (current edition)
- ILO Global Estimates of Modern Slavery
- Verité Fair Hiring Toolkit
- Issara Institute publications on ethical recruitment
- Migrant-Rights.org reports on the Gulf labor market
- The Dhaka Principles for Migration with Dignity
- The PLENA white paper Beyond the Will: Verifiable Succession Infrastructure for the 21st Century
Related PLENA receipt grammar
For institutions in the recruitment, deployment, and brand-compliance chain
ILO Better Work, IOM, source-country labor authorities, embassy labor attachés, Modern Slavery Act compliance departments, ethical recruitment auditors, the Issara Institute, Walk Free Foundation, RBA and FLA: PlenaProof welcomes pilot conversations.