Impoverished migrant workers, forced to pay thousands of pounds in illegal recruitment fees, housed in miserable housing and unable to leave their jobs voluntarily. Is this Qatar? UAE? Saudi Arabia? No, this is Britain after Brexit.
The revelations that Nepalese workers have been forced to pay extortionate fees to Nepal agents for their work on a British farm supplying some of our leading supermarkets are just the latest in a series of shocking reports. Such cases reveal how the United Kingdom is adopting practices common in the Persian Gulf, a region with a horrific record of labor abuse.
Serious labor shortages after Brexit and the pandemic have forced the government to look beyond Europe. His seasonal worker scheme, which offers short-term visas for agricultural work, is now gaining ground in more than 50 countries, including Barbados, Tajikistan and Nigeria, as well as Nepal. The scheme starts with about 2,500 workers in 2019 and can hire up to 40,000 this year.
But the testimonies of migrant workers hired under the scheme sound as unpleasant as those I have heard countless times in the Persian Gulf.
A Ukrainian woman employed on a British farm said she was forced to bear the cost of hiring herself and was tricked into signing a contract she did not fully understand. When the workers protested, they were punished by a week’s dismissal.
A government review of the scheme’s pilot year, published late last year, found that workers had been subjected to “unacceptable” conditions, including racist violence, accommodation without running water and contracts that were not in their language.
The scheme requires workers to pay for their own flights and visas, in violation of the International Labor Organization’s guidelines, which state that the employer must pay all fees and related employment costs. Add to these payments the illegal recruitment fees that some workers claim were charged, and it is clear that many of them arrive in this country deep in debt.
The cost of a visa, flights and fees made by a Nepalese worker was almost a third of what she earned during her six months on a farm. And just like in the Persian Gulf, there is no indication that any of the Nepalese migrant workers who have been forced to pay to find jobs on farms in the United Kingdom will be compensated.
The parallels with working conditions in the Persian Gulf extend beyond the agricultural sector. A recent report from the University of Nottingham’s Rights Laboratory found that non-European migrant fishermen working on UK-flagged fishing vessels received an average of £ 3.50 per hour (after their hiring debt was reported). The majority say they work at least 16 hours a shift, and more than a third say they “suffer regular physical violence.”
The most criticized labor practice in the Persian Gulf is the kafala system, according to which workers cannot leave their jobs without the permission of the employer, which leaves them open to rough exploitation.
Similar practices can be found in the United Kingdom. In March, The Guardian revealed that some foreign nurses working for NHS trusts and private care homes have been forced to pay thousands of pounds if they want to leave or change jobs before the end of their contracts, a condition that one an expert in the fight against slavery likened to debt slavery.
To be clear, the scale and severity of labor abuse in the United Kingdom is still significantly lower than in the Persian Gulf. In particular, wages are far better in the United Kingdom, where most migrant workers enjoy at least a minimum wage of £ 9.50 an hour; in Qatar, for example, the minimum wage is equivalent to just £ 1 per hour plus food and a dormitory bed.
Migrant workers like Nepalese on our farms are willing to pay – legally and illegally – for the opportunity to earn a salary in the UK, but in this way they are effectively subsidizing the price of food in our supermarkets and healthcare in our hospitals.
Recruiting foreign workers can benefit both workers and the United Kingdom, but only if the government introduces appropriate guarantees and funding. So far he has done neither. In the meantime, if you want to predict working conditions for migrant workers in the UK in the coming years, look at Doha and Dubai.
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