Two million UK workers are ‘trapped in a continual round of low-paid and insecure work where mistreatment is the norm’ according to the findings of the TUC’s Commission on Vulnerable Employment.
The Commission’s report, available free on-line at www.vulnerableworkers.org.uk, found that migrants in the UK were particularly vulnerable to exploitation due to the nature of their work and their status as workers with less rights and protections than British workers.
The day the report came out, the Gangmasters Licensing Authority banned one agency from operating, after upholding allegations of forced labour and “abhorrent” conditions for its mainly Polish workforce.
Migrant workers face specific restrictions, with some groups of migrant workers limited in the welfare benefits that they are allowed to claim, Romanians and Bulgarians facing restrictions on their rights to work, and asylum seekers not entitled to work at all. There is also widespread research evidence documenting illegal abuse of the limited rights that these workers do have.
Immigration regulations are found to force many migrant workers into vulnerable employment. The report calls for a review of the immigration system regulations relating to low-paid migrant workers, with specific consideration given to areas where their impact leads to a higher risk of exploitation.
Recommendations of the Commission specific to migrants include:
Changes in immigration law to reduce the vulnerability of migrant workers who raise complaints to losing their jobs and thus facing destitution (access to welfare benefits)
Vulnerable workers should be helped to move into better jobs, through more training – including ESOL for migrant workers – and a more flexible benefits system.
Media coverage:
In Exploited workers: Seen, but rarely heard, The Guardian comments that in Britain, as in India or Mexico, the invisible engine for cheap goods and services is an underpaid, exploited workforce, and that at the heart of this scandal lies the imbalance of power between worker and employer.
And blogging on the Guardian website, Brendan Barber says that “the government rightly emphasises the role of work in escaping poverty and social exclusion”… but adds that “vulnerable employment does not allow workers to escape from poverty” , and calls for politician action to end the situation that forces a choice between the “hopelessness of the dole queue or the misery of dead-end lives trapped in insecure, low-paid, low-skilled jobs”
Filed under: economy, research, rights, trade union | Tagged: exploitation, immigration, migrant, migrant rights, workers rights
