Damning migrant report delayed

Government fears pre-election backlash

Hsiao-Hung Pai
Thursday February 3, 2005
The Guardian

The publication of a ground-breaking report on forced labour and the exploitation of migrant workers in Britain has been delayed after attempts by the government to hold it back until after the general election.

The Guardian has obtained a copy of the draft report, which is marked "confidential, not for further distribution". Written by independent academics, it explores the relationship between forced labour and deregulated markets under the Labour government.

Forced Labour and Migration to the UK was delivered last August to the International Labour Organisation in Geneva and the TUC in London, which jointly commissioned it in January last year. But six months later it remains unpublished.

It catalogues the coercive techniques used by private employers to force migrants to work for low wages and in poor conditions, from physical and sexual violence to debt bondage and blackmail.

It also gives examples of where the government has paid wages well below the minimum legal wage, following deductions to agencies.

The research focuses on building work, farming, contract cleaning and residential care. Its findings conclude that:

· many foreign migrants were forced to work through violence and intimidation and were prevented from seeking help;

· many have been forced into debt bondage, having taken loans to fund their travel to the UK repayable at exorbitant rates of interest. One woman had borrowed $1,000 (£530) to come here and had not paid the debt off four years later;

· migrants were often working in dangerous conditions, and for excessive hours. Some deaths of migrants at work had been identified;

· nurses brought to Britain to work in the NHS and in private care homes in particular complained of exploitative deductions from their wages. A group of 32 nurses from Asia were paid just £46 a week by an NHS trust after deductions to their agency.

The ILO/TUC publication was supposed to come out during the TUC conference last September. But according to sources in both bodies, pressure from government departments has pushed back its release until after the general election, expected in May.

A senior TUC official said the timing of publication was delayed after an intervention by Whitehall. "ILO was threatened with funding cuts by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) if the report were to be published," the official said.

The official believed the report was being held back until after the election because it would embarrass the government. "Contrary to the idea of a social Europe, Britain's economy is marked by the reality of a deregulated labour market and the super-exploitation of migrant workers," the official said.

The union movement has become increasingly alarmed by the growth of forced labour in Britain. However, there is a heated debate inside unions about whether to sound the alarm before the election.

An ILO official in Geneva familiar with the report said the delay had followed "extensive comments from the British government". There had been "some very sensitive discussions".

Among the most disturbing findings in the research paper is evidence of exploitation of migrants working for government bodies such as the NHS. It cites the case of Conrado, a qualified nurse brought from Asia to Britain by a labour agency to work in a hospital.

He and several others were made to pay £700 to labour agencies, followed by a month's deposit and rent for accommodation.

When they started working for the NHS their monthly pay of £805 was reduced to £198 - £46 a week - after deductions were made at source by the NHS trust and handed to the agency.

The report also cites cases of Indian nurses working for private care homes under contract to the government where each nurse was charged £3,000 for registration.

One group of Indian nurses were told they would have to pay £2,000 to their employer if they wanted to quit the job.

The ILO is the UN body which promotes workers' rights in 177 countries. The British government, led by the DWP, is one of 10 countries with a permanent seat on its governing body. It is understood to have paid £20,000 towards the costs of the forced labour research.

A spokeswoman for the ILO said the working paper had not yet been completed, and no publication date had been set.

The TUC said the paper would be published shortly, but revisions had to be made.

Its authors, Bridget Anderson of Compas, a left-leaning centre on migration policy and society based at Oxford University, and Dr Ben Rogaly, lecturer in human geography at Sussex University and a member of the Sussex Centre for Migration Research, declined to comment.

and

The third way's dirtiest secret

Ministers have tried to cover up their dependence on forced labour

Felicity Lawrence
Thursday February 3, 2005
The Guardian

A year ago this Saturday, 23 Chinese cocklepickers died at Morecambe Bay. A major new report that uncovers the scale of forced labour in Britain and makes recommendations on curbing this new form of slavery might be thought a fitting memorial to those who died. Instead, the government has tried to block its publication until after the election, as our front-page story reveals.

Interviews with migrants record the violence, threats, debt-bondage, dangerous conditions and enforced long hours to which they are exposed. They also lead to the inescapable conclusion that the deregulated economy has created the conditions for this exploitation to flourish under Labour.

The report* was commissioned at the beginning of last year by the International Labour Organisation - the UN body that works with government, unions and industry - and the TUC, and was completed last summer by academics at Oxford and Sussex universities. Yet it is only now seeing the light of day. It will finally be published this week by the TUC, but minus its ILO and Department for Work and Pensions backers. What is a Labour government that champions social justice so frightened of? And why has it taken the unions so long to defy its efforts at censorship?

The original title of the report was Free Market and Forced Labour. For it looks not just at the extent to which coercive employment takes place - and the answer is far more than anyone has acknowledged - but also at the nature of economic demand that drives migration and forced labour. And herein lies the real horror.

It is not just the sex industry that traffics and exploits migrants, but our key sectors - food and agriculture, contract cleaning, hotels and catering, construction and care homes. Moreover, the state uses migrants' forced labour in many cases - when it outsources local authority care to the private sector, when it uses agencies to recruit NHS nurses who end up living on £5 a week, when it uses contract cleaners provided by the cheapest bidder for its offices, or when subcontracted migrant labour is used on private finance initiative construction.

The UK has Europe's most flexible labour force; it lives in fear and squalor, is paid a pittance and is bussed round the country to work in the shadows of the night shift.

If exploitation of migrant labour turns out to be at the core of our competitiveness, as this report suggests, then tackling the problem requires Labour to address the structure of big business and its regulation - to rethink the philosophies inherited from the Tories that advocate subcontracting, outsourcing, competitive tendering, low piece rates, short-term contracts, workforce mobility and a light touch on red tape. But that undermines New Labour's whole narrative - the third way in which economic growth, based on global competitiveness, can be combined with tackling poverty and inequality.

The lives of migrant workers described in this report make a mockery of the government's programme of social justice. Social justice for our own population turns out to depend on the importation of an underclass of foreigners to create our wealth. We compete with countries that have no labour rights by importing their conditions.

There is ammunition for both the anti-immigration far right and pro-regulation old left here, and small wonder Labour would rather postpone the discussion until after an election. The unions have been alarmed about the scale of forced labour for some time as the realisation grows that unless they protect migrants, their own members' conditions cannot be protected. The intense talks between union leaders and ministers to thrash out Labour policy commitments before the election included a discussion of "superexploitation" among migrants. (The word exploitation is no longer thought adequate to describe what is going on.) Reportedly there were even suggestions that a crusade to protect our twilight migrant workforce might restore the government's moral authority lost in Iraq. But unions and ministers alike are afraid to rock the boat on migration for fear of losing votes. So a deal has been done to wait.

But super-exploitation cannot wait. Talk to residents in the agricultural town of Boston, Lincolnshire, where some 50% of the vote in the borough elections was for Ukip or the BNP, and they will tell you that the reason they are drawn to the far right is that no one else is talking about what they see, the violence and crime that organise migrants.

Conspiracies of silence always play into the hands of the far right. If the government really wants a new moral authority, it should come clean on forced labour and its causes now.

*Forced Labour and Migration to the UK, by Bridget Anderson and Ben Rogaly;

· Felicity Lawrence is the Guardian's consumer affairs correspondent and author of Not on the Label (Penguin)