Prague - "I have a dream, to go to Canada or America one day," explains the 40-year-old mother of two in heavily accented English, sitting in a café in Plzeň, the third largest city in the Czech Republic. "I want to improve my economic status."
She says she works about 15 hours a day, six days a week in a bakery in Plzeň. A Mongolian foreign worker who immigrated from the capital city of Ulaan Baator through a workers' agency almost two years ago, she has degrees in dentistry and oral surgery but has had little luck finding work in her field.
She earns between 10,000 to 12,000 crowns a month ($500-$600), an amount which would be twice as much if not for the 50 percent cut the agency takes out of her salary each month. She asks that the name of her agency not be printed, saying that she is worried that she could lose her job and have to return home if the agency received negative publicity.
Terbish is one of about 400,000 foreign workers in the Czech Republic - many of whom occupy low-skilled, manual labor jobs and come from non-European Union countries. They cannot simply move to the Czech Republic for work - non-EU workers need an employer-sponsored visa to have legal status.
These workers gain their jobs through agencies that act as intermediaries to find employment, assist with working permits and visas, and organize arrival into the country. Watchdog groups have long criticized the agencies as unaccountable and exploitive, but it is the ongoing economic crisis that thrusts the agencies into the spotlight as foreign workers lose jobs en masse.
Controlling welfare of foreign workers
Such agencies are not limited to the Czech Republic, and many workers employed through them come from the 27-member European Union, which the Czech Republic joined in 2005.
In post-communist countries such as the Czech Republic, where navigating visa red tape is still formidable, the agencies have supplanted the role of the government and employers in controlling the wages and welfare of foreign workers, critics say.
"These agencies have a great deal of power," said Marie Jelinková, one of the creators of Migration Online at the Multicultural Center in Prague, a project that compares migration policy in Central and Eastern Europe. The Czech government provides little beyond technical information on acquiring work visas, she explained, and the approximately 2,600 agencies in the country have filled the gap.
"Their main purpose is to make money, so they ask for as much as people are willing to pay," said Jelinková, based on the market conditions of the home country. The disparity can be huge - for example, Mongolians usually pay $3,000 to $4,000 to the agencies for the costs of initial job placement and arrival, while the Vietnamese pay anywhere between $10,000 and $30,000.
But Ljubov Rampilova, a representative of the workers' agency Zajan in Prague, argues that the negative image of workers' agencies is unfair. Many migrant workers appreciate that mediators exist, she says, pointing to the difficulties they would otherwise have in the entire process.
"It's a lot of work for us - to find the migrant a job, equip him for work, arrange for arrival and accommodation," she says, pointing out that her agency must also pay health and social insurance for workers, a requirement that is contractually enforced by the government.
No job, no visa - a vicious cycle
The agencies' power derives in part from the tricky situation that arises when a non-EU worker loses his or her job.
Losing a job means losing the purpose of stay required to legally remain in the Czech Republic, and since the process of changing the workplace is very complicated and the Czech government does not provide a lot of assistance, foreign workers rely on the agencies.
When Terbish wanted to quit her job in the car factory she first worked in, her agency found her the job at the bakery and took care of the required legal paperwork. Now, she is worried that she will lose her working visa because legal requirements for stay have changed.
"My visa is a long-term residence visa. This does not agree with what is needed anymore. I don't understand it," she says, illustrating the difficulty workers have in comprehending visa laws. She says her agency has not explained the situation to her.
Sometimes foreign workers in Europe find that after paying thousands of dollars to an agency, it disappears or the job position promised to them is no longer available. In the U.K., for example, The Independent newspaper reported that a Polish man in 2007 paid a large fee to an for accommodation and a job, only to arrive and find that the agency's phone number did not exist - leaving him both jobless and homeless.
Terbish recalls that her agency never provided her with promised accommodation after she had paid for it.
"This agency was very bad. They did not help," she says, a trace of anger in her otherwise soft-spoken voice, describing how she instead had to rely on the assistance of strangers and acquaintances.
50 out of 100
The agencies also typically function as employers, controlling the distribution of wages and taking up to half of the workers' salaries for the duration of their employment.
For Terbish, this means that for every 100 crowns she earns per hour at the bakery, baking bread at a stove, the agency takes 50 crowns. She remembers one month when the agency only paid her for 170 of the 300 total hours she had worked.
As agencies take a piece of the pie, indebted foreign workers end up working the same job for much less than coworkers who, for example, are local Czechs.
"You should get as much as the company gives to its other workers. The meaning of the Czech labor code is not respected and the rights of the employee are violated," says Pavel Cizinsky, a migration lawyer with the Counseling Centre for Citizenship, Civil and Human Rights in Prague.
Work or slavery?
Again, this problem is not limited to the Czech Republic. Controversial agency wage cuts have also been reported in other European countries. In Scotland, for example, press reports have recently emerged of employment agencies paying below the minimum wage and making illegal deductions for workers from eastern Europe.
Such deductions have been a source of ongoing hardship in the life of Terbish.
After paying rent, living expenses, and health insurance and education costs for her 13-year-old daughter Odko, who joined her mother in Plzeň only three months ago, Terbish says she has little to no monthly savings - meaning although she makes more than the $100-$300 a month she averaged in Mongolia, it is to little avail.
Due to the long shifts Terbish works six days a week, Odko only spends time with her mother on Saturday.
"Usually she gets back at two or three in the morning," Odko says.
Trying to survive
The cycle of migrant overwork and disappointment is a familiar tale across Europe.
"When immigrants are in such an insecure position, they end up just trying to survive," said Jelinkova. "The image of European Union is so high - for those people it's a kind of paradise, there is the image that everyone can make it in the EU if they try hard. The irony is that many are in so much debt."
The traditional legal relationship between employers and foreign workers has evaporated as the network of workers' agencies in the Czech Republic has flourished, with the number far exceeding that of Germany's - a country with about 80 million people compared to 10 million in the Czech Republic.
"There are no direct legal relations between the employee and the actual place of employment. The employer is not responsible for anything, whether accidents or accurate provisions of wages," says Cizinsky.
Cizinsky, who represented Le Kim Thanh - a Vietnamese worker who gained media attention this year for going on hunger strike to protest detention and deportation by the Czech police for a minor lapse in his work permit - worries that the agencies will be scape-goated in the financial crisis as responsibility for the plight of laid-off foreign workers is debated.
"Le Kim Thanh's agency treated him very well during his detention, giving him money, even paying for lawyer's fees," said Cizinsky, pointing out that while this may have been done with publicity in mind, the agency ultimately did provide Thanh with a lot of help.
The real problem, he argues, lies in the lack of workers' rights, not a lack of regulation.
"More regulation, more licensing requirements might simply make these agencies charge more," he explained.
Instead, he believes foreign workers should have some entitlements, and the ability to claim or sue directly with their place of work.
Others take a different view.
Lucie Sladková, director of the Prague branch of the International Organization for Migration, remembers a journalist telling her how a representative from a workers' agency had argued that critics were coming from an anti-profit perspective that was a legacy of communism in the former Eastern bloc.
"Well," she says, "those who in the past enslaved people also made a profit. These are not commodities; these are people. I have a certain anger that here in this country we didn't stop the building up of so many networks of agencies, when a certain percentage of their business is totally dirty. "
According to Sladková, the Czech government is beginning to compile a "watchlist" of agencies that are under suspicion, but it will take time to see if there are any results.
The promised land
Terbish says if she were allowed to keep a larger portion of her salary, she could pay for her 15-year-old son to come to the Czech Republic. He has been living with his aunt in Ulaan Baator since she left; Terbish divorced her husband at a young age.
Terbish, who graduated from the Medical University of Mongolia and worked as both an oral surgeon and general trauma surgeon, wants to keep her job at the bakery long enough to gain admission into a Czech university or until she finds some work in the medical field.
Or, if she is unable to find better work or education in the medical field here, she could save enough to return home or try her luck in another country - and perhaps, one day, the United States.
She refuses an offer for lunch, although she has been answering questions since 10 a.m. and will have to start her shift at the bakery immediately afterwards.
Instead, she repeats her earlier request.
"Send me information on how I get to America. Maybe you can help me."
This story was originally published by the Prague Wanderer, a web-zine run by New York University students in Prague, Czech Republic.
Sairah Zaidi is a fourth-year student at Cleveland State University studying political science and international relations. She is from Cleveland, Ohio.
