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Migrants exploited for cheap labour

Ellie Keen — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Detainees at the Campsfield House immigration prison in Oxfordshire are being “exploited for cheap labour” due to staff cuts, the Oxford and District Trades Union Council has revealed. The rejected asylum seekers, who are locked up for lengthy periods pending their deportation, are being paid £5 for six-hour shifts of cleaning and kitchen work.

A statement by the Oxford and District TUC said: “We maintain our position that Campsfield is a shameful operation and should be closed. As long as it is open, jobs should be properly paid and be done by trained staff. For detainees there should be adequate recreational, educational and other provision… Detainees should receive an adequate financial allowance and not be obliged to act as slave labour for a multinational that makes big profits out of an operation that causes detainees enormous stress, uncertainty, general misery and often mental illness.”

Tracy Ellicott from the Campaign to Close Campsfield told Corporate Watch that detainees are not forced by GEO, the company that runs the prison, to work as such. They are, however, “forced in the sense that they are locked up for 24 hours a day, uncertain of their future and with no money to purchase any essentials they may need.” She added detainees can apply to do certain ‘jobs’ in the centre, such as cleaning, kitchen work and in the library. But none of those she has been visiting was prepared to speak out about this as they are “too scared of retaliation.”

The shifts are 6 hours long and detainees are paid £5 per shift, or 83p an hour. A GEO guard has reportedly said that, according to Home Office rules, they could only pay detainees a maximum of £24 a week. Radio Oxford quoted a statement from the Home Office two weeks ago to the effect that this was all above board and had been agreed with the Home Secretary. A Border and Immigration Agency (BIA) spokesperson said: “All detained persons are provided with an opportunity and encouraged to participate in activities to meet their recreational and intellectual needs. Individuals are entitled to undertake paid activities at rates approved by the Secretary of State.” As usual, GEO declined to comment.

Since taking over the running of Campsfield in June 2006, Global Expertise in Outsourcing (GEO) has cut back on both staffing levels and educational, recreational and other provisions at the centre. Over the past year, GEO has sacked education workers, nursing staff have departed, staff turnover has increased, the welfare officer has left and in September, the chaplain was suspended. GEO’s main business is immigration detention centres and mental health centres throughout the world, especially in USA, UK, South Africa and Australia. It also runs a part of Guantánamo Bay base in Cuba.

Private companies like GEO that run immigration detention centres make huge profits. Seven of the UK’s ten detention centres are run by private companies. The average cost for detaining someone in 2007/08 was £119 per day.

“It is unbelievable that people who have done nothing wrong are not only locked up in prison like criminals, but are also being treated like slaves,” Ms Ellicott said. “GEO is obviously saving money by using their ‘captives’ to perform menial tasks for slave wages.” She added, “of course, they could save a lot more if these centres were closed altogether!”.

The Home Office admitted migrants imprisoned in detention centres are “exempt from the minimum wage” but claimed they are “not forced to work.” A BIA spokesperson insisted: “This is voluntary and we are constantly looking for new opportunities to meet demand for this work.”

However, according to the immigration law, all asylum seekers are prohibited from work and live on state support, which is fixed at 70% of what is deemed to be the bare minimum to live on. The Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 states that “it is contrary to this section to employ an adult subject to immigration control if… he has not been granted leave to enter or remain in the United Kingdom.” The majority of those held in immigration detention centres are rejected asylum seekers (have not been granted leave to enter or remain in the UK) who are waiting to be deported back home.

Labour Must Endorse Living Wage Campaign to Win Back Popular Support

tim — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:59:09 +0000

Cast your mind back nine years to a time when the Labour party had recently stormed to power and a wave of public optimism still swept the nation. We may have been duped but back then Labour did implement some radical reforms. Now, as the poorest members of society are struggling to cope with rising food and utility bills, it is time for the government to revisit one of its most successful policies, the minimum wage.

It is clear that the introduction of the minimum wage improved the circumstances of many workers, and even Conservative critics now back the policy, with the predicted negative impact on businesses never materialising. £5.52 per hour, however, is no longer enough and as the minimum wage has failed to increase in line with inflation its impact has diminished.

Labour should now go further. Introducing a national living wage – which allows anyone in full-time employment to enjoy an acceptable standard of living – would do more than any of the policies being mooted at present to tackle the impact of the ‘credit crunch’ on the poorest workers.

London is already leading the way with its own living wage. Without enforcement, however, the majority of employers have understandably chosen to stick with the national minimum wage. The Living Wage Employer Award hopes to change this. Stephen O’Brien, joint president of London First, described the award as “a new and much anticipated mark of socially responsible business practice”. “A growing number of high profile organisations are now part of the Living Wage Employer Group and London 2012 is set to be the first ever living wage Olympics.”

While the benefits of a living wage for workers and society are obvious – social cohesion, higher living standards, lower crime levels, improvements in health, greater incentive to work – there are also many benefits for employers. A KPMG report stated that since becoming a living wage employer the Royal London Hospital reduced its cleaning staff turnover by 50%. Furthermore, better pay means higher productivity and a happier and more motivated workforce.

Even Mayor of London Boris Johnson, who opposed the national minimum wage, is an advocate of the London living wage and earlier this year increased it to £7.45 per hour. “This is not only morally right but makes good business sense contributing to better recruitment and retention of staff, higher productivity, and a more loyal workforce with high morale,” he said. It is a sad state of affairs when a Tory such as Johnson is the one defending workers’ rights and the Conservatives are claiming to be the party of the poor. They will not fool many but there is, at the moment, no alternative.

London may have been an exceptional case in the past but nationally wages of average earners have remained almost static in recent years and those of the bottom third fell between 2004 and 2007. A national living wage would help to change these damning statistics. If Labour want to tackle poverty they should export the living wage to the rest of the UK. By implementing a national living wage, perhaps with regional variances, they would be able to help those most at need.

Business leaders would plead poverty themselves, as many did prior to the introduction of the minimum wage, but the cost would not have to sit solely with them. By increasing the tax free allowance the government could, in effect, pay much of the cost itself. Public opinion, for a change, would be behind them with a recent Harris poll showing that the majority of people favoured lowering taxes for the poor. The same poll also showed the majority in favour of higher taxes for the richest, but that would surely be asking too much from a government in thrall to the super-rich.

How to decide the level of the living wage would be a contentious issue. However, the results of a recent research project carried out by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation calculated the amount of money required for a ‘socially acceptable standard of living.’ The report concluded that ‘a single adult, working full time, needs to earn £6.88 per hour to reach this weekly standard.’ The study also found that the minimum income standard calculated was higher than the current threshold for relative poverty. The government’s already poor record on tackling poverty, therefore, is even worse than current measures indicate.

Julie Unwin, director of the foundation, said: “This research is designed to encourage debate and to start building a public consensus about what level of income no one should have to live below.” If Labour, whoever their leader is, want to regain the trust of core supporters and improve their chances before the next election they need to be the party leading this debate. Back in their heyday they fought hard to introduce a national minimum wage; they should now do the same for a national living wage.

Fair Wages are a Fantasy

Ellie Keen — Mon, 05 May 2008 21:55:41 +0000

... in the brutal underside of Cowboy Boss Britain

With Labour reeling from the worst electoral drubbing for four decades, you could argue that this week is not a good moment to bring out an exhaustively researched, carefully thought-out report on the blight of insecure, low-paid work in the UK, 18 months in the making. But this Wednesday was set for the date of the launch of the TUC’s Commission on Vulnerable Employment (of which I’ve been a member) many months back, and no one envisaged then that one of the biggest research initiatives of the TUC since 1997 would thump its catalogue of the inadequacies of Labour employment policy on Brown’s desk at such a point of desperate soul-searching. But I would argue that this investigative analysis is exactly what Brown needs if he is to understand what happened last Thursday.

Brown makes much of his commitment to poverty. Even his most grudging critics concede that some headway has been made on child poverty even if it has not been enough. But the headline figures obscure how stubbornly persistent the phenomenon of working poverty has been. Many poor families may now have an earner, but it has not got them out of poverty: the number of poor children living in working households is 1.4 million – exactly the same figure as it was in 1997. Half of all children living in poverty have a parent in work. The advances in child poverty have been among those on benefits, while the number of poor working households with children has actually increased by 200,000. Labour promised it would “make work pay”. It hasn’t.

Low pay is not just a problem of an extreme underclass or of migrants; it is endemic across the country. One in seven of all working households are poor; one fifth of all workers, 5.3 million people, are paid less than £6.67 an hour (two thirds of the median), the worst low-pay rate of any in Europe. It works out at less than a £12,000 salary. In some regions, the proportion of low-paid is well over 25%, while in some constituencies (in Wales, Birmingham, the West Midlands, even the rural West Country) it is comfortably over 40%. For those scratching their heads over the mystery of Labour losing Merthyr Tydfil, perhaps they should look at the pattern of low-paid, insecure work. This is the shocking record of a country after 11 years of Labour rule and economic boom. It explains why the 10p tax debacle caused such resentment: these are the “hard-working families” extolled in Brown’s speeches and yet they are scrabbling to make ends meet. The Brownite rhetoric of “unleashing potential” is a nonsense to those trapped in jobs that consign them to fall ever further behind.

This report challenges another of Brown’s much-used rhetorical flourishes: fairness. He talks of it as a national characteristic, but it’s not one that the 5 million-strong army of low-paid, insecure workers would recognise. This is the section of the labour market where regulations about the minimum wage, holiday pay and employment rights reach only intermittently or not at all. The chance of an employer being inspected on the minimum wage is once every 330 years. Given such odds, an unscrupulous employer takes the risk.

Labour has made much of bringing in the minimum wage and the working time directive (which gave many workers their first rights to paid holiday) but after these advances, the reality is that progress in tackling Britain’s chronic problem with low-paid, insecure work stalled. Increases in the minimum wage are not keeping pace with average earnings, and it is set at a considerably lower rate than in other countries. A combination of political cowardice (Brown didn’t want a fight with the CBI) and indifference – it earns no political capital with middle England – ensured that Labour has repeatedly prevaricated in tackling this brutal underside of Britain’s economic boom. It has fudged crucial issues such as equal treatment for agency workers or the much-needed clarification on worker status, a legal loophole which makes a mockery of employment rights – both were manifesto commitments.

The months of sitting on the commission listening to people’s accounts of their working lives and to those who tried to offer advice when things went wrong provided a glimpse of what an obstacle course it is when you’re poor. It’s not always the lack of material resources that cuts deepest, but the lack of power and the absence of options. When you’re sacked or when you don’t get the sick pay or holiday pay you are owed, how do you fight back? How do you find the employment adviser to help or the courage to stand up to an employer and the sheer guts to take a case to an employment tribunal with no legal aid or a lawyer to help you? The answer is that more often you don’t, you can’t – and that’s how you get trapped in bad jobs.

Poor pay is inextricably bound up with a culture of institutional negligence: no one ensures workers know their rights or how to find out about them; a myriad of enforcement agencies with tiny budgets confuse everyone, and the legal system to arbitrate on abuse is slow and inaccessible. While the government has consulted and dithered, low-paid, insecure work has flourished like some rapacious mould. The face-to-face legal advisers (which the most vulnerable are known to find easier to deal with) have been axed and replaced with cheap websites and telephone helplines (but how do you know about them?). English language lessons have been cut. While millions of pounds are devoted to advertising for benefit fraud, the amount allocated to advertise the national minimum wage was, until a recent increase, a sixth of that spent on a government campaign urging people to use tissues when they sneeze.

Here is a compelling moral purpose on which that famous Brown compass could take its bearings. I haven’t a clue if it will restore his electoral fortunes, and frankly that’s not the point. This is an issue that any Labour government worthy of its name should have sorted out by now and yet it has devoted a fraction of the effort and energy required. If Labour cannot ensure that at the end of a hard week’s work, someone has earned enough to keep themselves and their children out of poverty, then it doesn’t deserve power.

Tony Blair boasted that Britain was the “most lightly regulated labour market in the world”. The OECD puts Britain second only to the US for the lowest levels of employment protection in the developed world. This is Cowboy Boss Britain and it leaves a long trail of anger and resentment – the Citizens Advice Bureau alone deals with over half a million employment problems a year.

The most frustrating aspect of these meetings, though, was with the representatives from the political parties. Labour’s was doggedly complacent; the Conservative’s, all charm, finally admitted he knew nothing; the Liberal Democrat’s didn’t seem to have quite worked out which meeting they were in. It was a deeply depressing demonstration of how detached the political process has become from issues which are absolutely basic to the lives of millions of people.