The International Labour Organization or ILO is launching its fifth annual Global Media Competition to recognize exemplary media coverage of labor migration. This year’s themes are ‘fair recruitment’ and ‘the future of labor migration’.

With this competition, ILO aims to promote quality reporting on labor migration issues. Across the world, migrants face prejudice, intolerance, and stigmatization in their workplaces and communities. Negative public narratives can lead to abuse and exploitation, and challenge social cohesion. Balanced and ethical reporting can play an important role in addressing stereotypes and misconceptions, as well as in highlighting the positive contribution migrant workers make in their origin and destination countries.

The competition further contributes to some of the targets of the recently adopted “Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and the Global Compact for Refugees.” It includes improving working conditions for migrant workers as well as shifting misperceptions of labor migration. It also helps raise awareness on decent work and migration, a topic which features strongly in the United Nations Declaration on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Global Media Competition on Labor Migration Award

The journalists can compete in the Global Media Competition in two categories: Fair recruitment of Migrant Workers; and the future of labor migration. Moreover, four journalists competing in professional category will win the ILO Labor Migration award. Also, ILO awards one student of the Global Media Competition the Labor Migration Award.

The winners will be able to choose between cash (US$1,000 in the professional category and US$300 for the student category) or a paid fellowship to participate in an ITC-Turin course on fair recruitment or labor migration topic in 2020.

ILO Eligibility Criteria for Global Media Competition

Participants of the ILO Global Media Competition can compete in professional as well as student category. However, the participants must abide by the following rules.

• For the professional awards, this contest is open to media professionals and professional journalists above 18 years of age and older. For the student award, this contest is open to current students from journalism schools/universities.
• Entries should fall into one of the following two categories: i) Professional or ii) Student.
• The author should indicate which type of production is being submitted: written press, photo essay, multimedia, video and/or radio. Print and online submissions should not exceed 8,000 words, while radio and video submissions should not exceed 10 minutes.
• A maximum of two entries may be submitted by anyone participant to any of the two categories.

How to enter

In order to enter the competition, participants must complete the online entry form in the ‘professional’ or ‘student’ category. Participants can then submit your piece in the following categories: written press, photo essay, multimedia, video and/or radio. To qualify, entries must have been published between 1 November 2018 and 31 October 2019. A submission in any language is welcome, however, an English, French or Spanish translation must be included if the submitted material or parts of it are in another language.

Deadline

The deadline to make a submission for the ILO Global Media competition is on  31 October 2019 (23:59, Central European Time). The ILO will announce the results of Labor Migration Competition on 18 December 2019.