Hsiao-Hung Pai | ukwatch.net

Migrants: Britain's hidden labour army

Ellie Keen — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:54:51 +0000

Xiao Fan came to say goodbye. He had decided to return home, to Tianjin in north China. “I can’t live a life like this any longer, hiding myself in the kitchen every day, fearing the next immigration raid. When it’s so hard to earn even a pittance, it leaves you no dignity. What is the point? I’ve had enough.”

He looked at a photo of his son, which he showed me. “When I left home, he was only eight. Now he’s taller than me!” Seven years in Britain have earned him an apartment in his city, which he couldn’t have afforded without coming to work in the dark kitchens here. He has also been able to help his sister with her medical treatment. Healthcare is not for everyone in China today. “I’ve done it for my family. I have no regrets.”

When I waved Xiao Fan farewell at the station and saw how relaxed he finally was, I remember that morning when he called me four years ago. I could hear anxiety in his voice. It was the morning after the sea swept away 23 young lives at Morecambe Bay. “Ah Hui is dead. He’s dead. I can’t believe it. He’s dead.” Ah Hui was his colleague. They spent day and night working together in the dingy kitchen of a south London Chinese takeaway before Ah Hui decided to move to a job at Morecambe Bay to improve his income.

“I didn’t know lives could be lost so easily working in this country,” Xiao Fan said. Xiao Fan imagined himself having the same destiny as Ah Hui – he knew that he too could have been there that night. For me, like Xiao Fan, the tragedies at Morecambe Bay and Dover were not only saddening stories on the TV screen. It was what happened all around me, and it had a personal impact. I saw people losing their friends and colleagues; losing their parents and their only breadwinners. While multinational corporations globalise their exploitation of workers, workers are pushed to risk their lives crossing borders and trying to earn a living for their families. The death of workers for corporate profits is a direct testimony to the barbarism of the system under which we live.

These tragedies motivated me to begin a fact finding journey. I set out to listen to the stories of Chinese migrants and document their working lives. In doing so, I followed many people’s lives, some of them from when they arrived in Britain to when they decided to return home.

I knew that gaining access to a workplace could be very difficult, especially when workers have so much to fear: the possibility of their identity being revealed, of losing their job or being arrested and deported.

The lack of access, in the case of mainstream journalists, can lead them to reinforce prejudices. A team of cockle pickers once told me that a journalist from a local newspaper in Liverpool knocked on their door soon after the Morecambe Bay tragedy. He wanted hot news, but he didn’t know how to interact with them. He left without talking. The next day, the cockle pickers were shocked to hear that their house had been named “House of Horror” in the newspaper headline.

On one occasion I was setting up interviews with the help of a Chinese chef. He said to me, “How can you really know about their lives if you don’t live it yourself? It’s not something you can understand in an interview or two.”

The idea of actually spending a few days with my interviewees also came up in the process. Some people challenged me about the idea of undercover work and subterfuge. But didn’t veteran undercover reporter Gunter Wallraff say that sometimes we need to use deception to expose social deception?

Over the following two years I went undercover in a variety of workplaces – in a food processing factory in Suffolk; a book packaging factory in Birmingham; on a leek farm in Northamptonshire; as a domestic worker in a private household in London; as a dim sum trolley pusher in London’s Chinatown; and as a receptionist in a brothel in Burnley. Living and working alongside the workers, I was then able to make realistic observations about their working life and see the structure and patterns of recruitment and the below-minimum working conditions in the informal economy. It allowed me to witness evidence of systematic abuse of these migrant workers’ rights.

It is precisely the systematic nature of the exploitation that makes it so horrific. Britain maintains the illegality of this hidden workforce, and in doing so benefits from the misery of the informal economy. By denying people’s right to work and keeping them underground, Britain gives the green light to corporate manslaughter, slave wages and forced labour. Zhang Guo-Hua wouldn’t have been worked to death if he had been given the right to work. Lin Yun and Ah Hua wouldn’t have been physically attacked if they were allowed to enter Britain in a legitimate way. Xiao Fen wouldn’t have ended up working in the sex trade if she was permitted to work and not paid a third less than the national minimum wage working in a restaurant kitchen.

In 21st century Britain workers are not entitled to basic protection and cannot be guaranteed minimum standards of working conditions because they are without documents. Currently, there are between 700,000 and 1 million people in Britain who are leading this ghost-like existence. Within the European Union there are 5.5 million undocumented people filling labour shortages without any entitlement to rights.

I wanted to demonstrate what this means through telling the workers’ own stories. They are speaking for themselves. My book, Chinese Whispers, is narrated from their voices. It is them talking about their struggle: their once in a lifetime decision to migrate for work; their journey in Britain; moved on from job to job to fill the need for temporary seasonal labour; the way they cope with daily exploitation, institutional racism, social exclusion and marginalisation in a country that needs them but doesn’t recognise their rights.

Having documented their struggle, I argue that we need to move beyond the current migration debate about numbers and their effects. It’s time to ask: what is Britain doing for the undocumented as workers and as human beings? What should Britain do in order to protect and uphold the rights of workers, regardless of their immigration status?

We need to ask these questions: When immigration controls are weakening the labour movement and dividing Britain’s workforce, what are our unions doing? What do they say and do about immigration controls? Are they taking part in the fight against the recent immigration raids that are putting undocumented workers out of work and making them homeless and destitute? Are our unions doing next to nothing?

We need to argue for the regularisation of workers’ status. But we need to do it critically. What kind of programme are we backing? We should be very suspicious of regularisation programmes whose criteria exclude certain groups of undocumented migrants. We need to question programmes that give employers more power to determine workers’ status and their future working life.

Fundamentally, we need to argue that the right to work across borders is a human right not to be bargained with or compromised.

Chinese Whispers is out this month and published by Fig Tree. It is available from Bookmarks.

Domestic Abuse

Alex Doherty — Sun, 13 May 2007 22:13:49 +0000

Mary’s employers refused to allow her to visit her Sri Lankan home despite her two years of constant service. The family she worked for would not give Mary – their domestic worker – just two weeks off in exchange for her 24-hour live-in labour, providing personal care and housekeeping duties. Instead she was rewarded with starvation, and forced to sleep in the sitting room.

Mary’s persistence finally won her the chance to return home to see her children. When she did so, her employer faked a police call. He accused her of burglary and demanded her return. When Mary discovered that this was fabricated she finally decided to leave. “You must work for us,” were the last words of her employer. Mary ran away.

As Mary struggles on a part-time cleaning job so that she can continue to send money home, two governments on two continents are making two very different laws. Recent statistics from the Sri Lankan government highlight the threat to the wellbeing of children under five years old who are left behind by mothers working abroad for long periods of time, and it is currently legislating to ban these mothers from working abroad. In Britain, where many migrant domestic workers come to earn money to support their children, the government is pushing a new piece of immigration legislation, part of its “Making Migration Work for Britain” strategy. This will reduce domestic worker visas to non-renewable, six-month, business-visitor visas, and make it illegal for them to change employers.

All existing rights, won in 1998 after a decade of campaigning, will be washed away. Low-skilled migrant workers are currently entitled to basic protection under British employment law, such as the National Minimum Wage, statutory holiday pay and a notice period for dismissal. They also have the ability to annually renew their working visas, and are entitled to apply for settlement after five years.

Back in the days of the Tories, domestic workers brought into the country by their employers were of a slave status. Workers who ran away from abusing employers faced deportation.

In the early 1980s the London-based Commission for Filipino Migrant Workers saw a growing number of women domestic workers asking for help with fleeing their employers. The support group Waling Waling (now the United Workers Association) was thus formed, and grew to 3,000 members in the late 1990s. They worked with Kalayaan, a migrant domestic workers’ campaign group formed in 1987, and the Transport and General Workers Union (T&G), to oppose this slave-labour system. The Labour Party promised change.

When it came into power, Labour was pushed to fulfil its promises. The status of migrant domestic workers was restored by immigration legislation in 1998, granting basic rights and regularising the status of a number of migrants who had been made undocumented under the earlier laws.

These changes were aimed at a specific group of workers, but were part of a set of immigration policies which proved to be the harshest in British history. These were followed by “Secure Border, Safe Haven” in 2002 and “Controlling our Borders” in 2005. Pandering to tabloid hysteria over immigration, each piece of New Labour legislation has made it more and more intolerable for those coming into Britain.

Current legislation gives migrant domestic workers a limited amount of protection, but barely a shred of security. This can be seen in the example of Devika, a Sri Lankan brought into Britain by a nursing home manager. Devika lived and worked with a family of four in Borehamwood, where she cooked and cleaned as well as looking after an 87 year old and two young children.

Before Devika started work, her employer told her the wages would be £250 a month. She bargained it to £300 per month, without knowing the wage level in Britain. Her employer and her family would not allow her time off or a room, and would often verbally abuse her. Worse still, they kept her passport from the first day and wrote their name in it without consent. “They invalidated my only ID,” Devika said.

Devika could not take the abuse any more and ran away last February. “It was snowing that day,” she said. “I cooked for them, and waited for everyone to leave the house. I left my letter under a pillow, and said goodbye to the children, which was hard for me because I looked after them for so long.

“I never dreamt of running away. Even when you paid me £300 a month, I said nothing. Even when you allowed me no time off, I didn’t complain,” she wrote in her letter. “But when you shouted at me, I couldn’t take it. Never in my life did anyone humiliate me in that way.”

When Kalayaan asked Devika’s employer to return her passport, they insisted that they had already returned it to the Home Office, which was untrue. Now Devika is undocumented. Her status was changed by her employer, but the need to send money home to support her children remains.

Reena also suffered horrific abuse and humiliation. She was brought to England to work for a well known celebrity in a three-storey country house in Gloucestershire. Her job was cooking for the family, cleaning ten rooms every day, doing the laundry and looking after a three year old boy. She asked for a contract, but her employer refused. “You should trust us,” she said.

The employer asked Reena to sign a confidentiality agreement in English, a language Reena was not experienced in reading. She signed the contract because the employer told her, “This is for you to get a visa to go to Switzerland with us.”

Since then Reena worked from 7am to 11pm, seven days a week. “They all had different menus for their four daily meals, and I cooked different dishes for everyone. Each meal was a big job,” she said. “Often they had huge parties, where I and another Indian worker had to cook for 200 guests.” Dining was a big event in that household, but Reena and her co-worker were rarely fed.

“We often had to eat while working because there was no break. We were yelled at all the time that we couldn’t stop working,” Reena recalls. “My boss raised her hand at me, threatening to hit me many times. She also shouted abuse at us, saying, ‘You Indians are stupid!’” The employer created a hierarchy inside the house where Reena had to cook and make the bed for the English nanny. “The treatment between us and the local nanny was completely different.”

Reena was promised a weekly wage of £270, but was never paid during her five months there. The employer kept her passport to prevent her from leaving the job. But her abusive behaviour forced Reena to make the decision to leave. “That early morning, she was yelling at us again. She said to me, ‘Get our breakfast ready within five minutes.’ I just thought to myself, enough is enough.”

Reena left. She didn’t know where to go, and spent the day in the local Tesco. Luckily, a friend in Swindon offered her a bed for the night. Later she asked again and again for her employer to return her passport, but the request was turned down. Instead she was told, “You are illegal. I’m going to report it to the Home Office.” Despite the fact that Reena was not illegal, this is a common intimidation measure used by employers. This situation continued into Reena’s second job, as a domestic worker at a jeweller’s six-storey house in St John’s Wood.

In her new employment, Reena relied on an apple and a banana for her daily food. She developed chest pain and dizziness at work as a result of starvation and over-working, and she wasn’t allowed to see a doctor. The host sexually harassed and molested her frequently, and his wife owed her wages of £10,000. When Reena asked for her P45, she was told that she was illegal. “Despite all this, I had to stay because I needed my employer’s statement to get my second visa.”

Both Devika’s and Reena’s experiences are widely shared among the 17,000 non-EU domestic workers who enter Britain every year. According to Kalayaan, 86 percent of domestic workers registered with Kalayaan during 2005-06 worked over 16 hours a day, 71 percent have been deprived of food, 32 percent had their passports withheld by their employers and 23 percent have been physically abused.

Demand for migrant labour is highly racialised in domestic work. Mary, Reena and Devika were employed because they are non-EU migrant workers. As Bridget Anderson from the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society at the University of Oxford points out, it is the flexibility, extremely low costs, and the employer’s power to retain, coupled with the necessity to stay in employment, that makes this section of workers so favourable to employers. Few EU workers can compete with these factors. As retention is maintained by workers’ immigration status, immigration legislation determines the degree of employers’ control over workers.

Now the government’s plans to overturn its own reforms will make it impossible for migrant domestic workers to challenge abuse and exploitation. “The six-month business visa means that we won’t be able to use Britain’s employment law to take abusive employers to tribunal, and won’t have enough time to get back our delayed or unpaid wages,” said Reena, now a T&G volunteer.

A form of slavery

Diana Holland, National Organiser for Women, Race and Equalities with the T&G, said the union is actively organising against the new immigration legislation. “We were involved in campaigning for migrant domestic workers’ rights throughout the 1980s and 1990s,” she said. “We celebrated strongly in 1998 when their rights were won. We are now deeply worried that the new proposals will encourage abuse and we are campaigning to bring this to the government’s attention to ensure basic protection for workers.” The union has over 600 members working as migrant domestic workers.

Kate Roberts, Kalayaan’s community support worker, said, “The removal of any option to challenge or leave an abusive or exploitative employer is in direct contravention to the Home Office’s stated policy of protecting victims of trafficking, which includes trafficking for labour exploitation.”

Without the basic freedom to at least leave abusive employers, domestic workers will be forced back to the days of bonded labour relations, effectively a form of slavery. When workers seek to break out of their exploitation by leaving their employers, they will automatically become illegalised. Illegalisation will guarantee that workers are further exploited and marginalised.

“The new law will give employers even more power than they already have, and will be very damaging, not only to our lives, but our children’s lives,” Mary said. Her son and daughter are missing her. They said to her, “Come back home! We don’t need that kind of money.” But Mary knows it is not possible to return home, because she is the only breadwinner.

Hsiao-Hung Pai writes for UK-Chinese publications and the Guardian. Some names have been changed.

Witness Account: Theresa

I came from Mumbai, India. I have two daughters. My family knows nothing of what I have suffered here. I never told them because my daughters needed the money for their education.

I arrived in Britain as a domestic worker to a businessman and his wife. I was told that my salary was £20 per month. But I never received any money. My madam was very cruel. She hit me on my stomach and regularly tried to strangle me.

I worked 18 hours a day and was forced to sleep on the floor without a blanket. She kicked me every morning to wake me up. I had no winter clothes and no shoes and very little food to eat. When I put butter on my toast, madam came and took it from my hands, threw it away and hit me.

One day madam pushed my head into the gas flame. I struggled and freed myself. She got angry and threw me out of the house.

I stood outside the house crying and crying. My neighbour came to my rescue. I told her my story. She advised me to bring my clothes to her house and to meet her on Sunday outside the church. My neighbour met me and took me by car to Kalayaan.

When I reached the centre, people could see my swelling on my head and the nail marks on my neck. I had stayed with my employer for one year because I didn’t know where to go or whom to contact. My employer kept my passport. No case was brought against my employer.

Kalayaan helped me to get a new passport and my visa to stay in Britain. I was able to visit my daughters after eleven long years.

www.kalayaan.co.uk

Morecambe Bay

Alex Doherty — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 00:08:13 +0000

Two years have passed since 23 Chinese workers died at Morecambe Bay. And today the gangmaster Lin Liangren, found guilty of 21 counts of manslaughter, and two of his associates will be sentenced. (David and Tony Eden, the buyers, were acquitted of minor immigration-related charges.) But despite the outcry over the drownings, and the guilty verdicts, migrant workers are still selling their labour on the sands under the same appalling conditions.

The cockle pickers who were there on the night of the tragedy know nothing has changed beyond the conviction of a few at the bottom of the chain. And they strongly believe that labour contractors such as Lin – the gangmasters – are not the only ones who share responsibility for the workers’ deaths.

Long before cockle picking became a job option, at least 70,000 unauthorised Chinese workers were already toiling away in food-processing chains, agriculture, catering and construction across Britain. These were made up of three groups: failed asylum seekers, destitute asylum seekers waiting for Home Office decisions, and migrants who were never known to the immigration authorities. Twenty of the 23 drowned cocklers were impoverished farmers and workers from Fujian province – the home of most Chinese workers who have fallen foul of New Labour’s immigration policy.

With asylum rights curtailed and manual-labour migration discouraged, the workers resorted to cockling. In some cases they were looking for better-paid jobs to send money home; some moved from job to job because of the casual, seasonal nature of work demanded by multinational retailers; others were driven out of urban centres into higher-risk occupations by fear of police raids as a result of their vulnerable immigration status.

Chinese workers were discovered by local gangmasters as “a half-price … more punctual and productive workforce”, in the words of a local businessman, and cockling was developed into a profitable business not by Snakeheads (as often assumed) but by local middlemen supplying large seafood-processing businesses. The middlemen controlled the workload and set production targets for the 30-40 Chinese cocklers in each team, and were referred to as “bosses”. Contrary to the picture painted in much of the media, the Chinese cocklers, first recruited in 2002, were making huge profits for the seafood industry, not the people smugglers. The industry in effect endorsed the working conditions under Chinese gangmasters and played a decisive role in their exploitation.

Lin Liangren told me: “The ultimate responsibility for the Morecambe Bay deaths lies with the top bosses, the English suppliers and their international clients, who put enormous pressure on us to produce.” Delayed payment by industry middlemen led directly to delayed wages by gangmasters. Frequent price cutting by the middlemen pushed gangmasters to impose a harsher regime to produce more, for lower wages.

Lin Guo, a survivor, told the court the cocklers were never told about safety and had to just use common sense to judge what to do when in danger. Workers were never given tide tables, were unaware of local conditions, and weren’t provided with safety equipment. On some nights business representatives worked alongside gangmasters, but the attitude towards health and safety was “that’s really up to them”.

While the Gangmasters Licensing Act (due to come into force next month) was debated in the aftermath of the Morecambe Bay tragedy and a crackdown was carried out against illegal Chinese immigration, gang-labour exploitation continued. Now Polish workers are working under similar conditions to the Chinese. Led by Polish gangmasters, the workers, with no experience at sea, confide that the worst thing about the work is the lack of safety. Nothing has changed.

For them the vicious circle continues: poor working conditions in food-processing factories and dairy farms in the north-west have pushed many into cockling on the Pilling and Fleetwood cockle beds south of Morecambe, newly opened in December despite safety concerns. There is still no system to limit the number working the sands, and no protection against abuse of gang labour.

On Knott End and Pilling Sands, where the bay’s flatness means fast tides, scores of cocklers can still be seen. Many work two exhausting shifts a day, getting paid £10 per 25kg bucket. Workers say they haven’t even been told to dial 999 in case of emergency. Local middlemen supervise the work daily but claim no responsibility for conditions.

The Gangmasters Licensing Act will offer only the most limited protection, and tougher immigration-law enforcement may drive illegal migrant workers into even more dangerous conditions. Unless the government acts to protect all workers, regardless of their immigration status, tragedies like Morecambe Bay seem bound to be repeated .

Lin Liangren blames “bad luck” for the Morecambe Bay tragedy. But Li Jinyun, the widow of one of the victims, believes otherwise: “It’s the working conditions in Britain that killed our loved ones.” Yang Shangjin – a Morecambe Bay cockler who had earlier worked on construction sites in Shanghai – told me he blamed the brutality of capitalism for the tragedy.