Managing Expatriate Employment Contracts with Blockchain

Abstract

Expatriates, or migrant workers, are employees who work outside their home country and reside in a foreign country for the purpose of work. They are often subject to job fraud, employment contract violations, and poor working conditions. These calamities are mainly due to language barriers, limited legal protection, and feeling inferior in their host countries. Many reports have indicated that minimum working and living standards for expatriates are not as adequately enforced as those for domestic employees. These issues may be elevated with the presence of an employment contract framework, which would enable better enforcement and wider visibility for both workers and employers. Thus, we propose a blockchain-powered framework to represent expatriate employment contracts as digital assets managed by smart contracts. It enables employers to create contracts to which employees agree in a decentralized, tamper-proof, transparent, and traceable manner. This framework facilitates auditability, tracking, and enhanced visibility of expatriate employment contracts and job history verification for both workers and employers. We provide a prototype implementation using the Hyperledger Fabric platform and analyze the framework qualitatively from scalability, efficiency, security, and privacy perspectives.