Examination of Witnesses (Questions 364
- 379)
TUESDAY 4 DECEMBER 2007
Mr Don Flynn and Ms Denise McDowell
Q364 Lord Vallance of Tummel:
Welcome to you both and thank you very much indeed for spending
some time with us this afternoon, and thank you too for the written
evidence you have provided. Just a few preliminaries, if I may.
You may be old hands at this but if you can speak up and talk
reasonably slowly that helps very much in taking a record of the
proceedings. As these proceedings are being televised perhaps
you could briefly introduce yourselves and then after that if
you would like to say a few introductory remarks, by all means
say them, but if not we will move straight on to the questions.
Ms McDowell: My name is Denise McDowell; I am
the coordinator of Migrant Workers North-West, which has been
set up to lead on support for migrant workers and to engage with
employers to promote better employment practice for migrant workers.
Mr Flynn: I am Don Flynn. I am the Director
of the Migrants' Rights Network, which is a very new project that
has come into existence over the course of the last year, and
it is basically a project which is aimed at assisting migrant
community organisations and organisations working with migrants
to improve their activities through contact, networking and communication
with each other.
Q365 Lord Vallance of Tummel:
Do you want to say anything by way of introduction?
Mr Flynn: We have made our submissions and we
are very happy to respond to questions.
Q366 Lord Vallance of Tummel:
I will start. Could we start asking you about the definition of
exploitation? What do you mean by that and how widespread is it
and what causes it? To curb it, should policy emphasise a reduction
in the number of migrants or better enforcement of minimum employment
standards or some combination of the two?
Ms McDowell: In my experience, the definition
of exploitation is where people are taken advantage of based on
their vulnerability, and in this case, with migrant workers, it
is of their lack of knowledge about the way things happen within
the UK—that includes their rights and entitlement. It is
about taking advantage of the fact that people may not have the
language skills to be able to either understand their rights or
to be able to assert those rights. It is about employers in this
case taking advantage of the fact that people are newly arrived
in the country and not only do they require work but they also
require accommodation, and there is much evidence of the fact
that they do take advantage of that by charging for accommodation
tied to the employment itself. In my experience, it is very widespread.
We see people all the time who come to our offices or that we
see in the workplace who, for one reason or another, we feel,
are being exploited and that is particularly related to the fact
that they are newly arrived within the UK.
Q367 Lord Vallance of Tummel:
So would you say then that exploitation was a temporary phenomenon
and that once migrants arrive and know the ropes and they develop
the language, then they move beyond that?
Ms McDowell: I think if you know the ropes that
helps to address some of that disadvantage and the exploitation,
but because there is a conscious effort on the part of some employers
to ensure that those migrants do not have the opportunity to do
that—they know, for example, that people do not have many
employment rights in their first year of employment and therefore
it is easy to lay somebody off within that first year and know
that they have no redress to the law—employers will consciously
do that in order to take advantage of that situation.
Q368 Lord Turner:
Could I ask a supplementary, which is how far what you call exploitation
is related to the legal status of migrants? The point which has
been made to us in previous evidence is that it is not just a
story of legal migrants and illegal migrants. There is an enormous
gray area of people who come in on a one-visa status which enables
them to work a number of hours networking. But do you think there
is a significant problem of what you call exploitation among those
people who have full legal rights to be here and to work as much
as they want or is it concentrated in people who have little power
because they know that they are themselves breaking the law?
Mr Flynn: I think the definition that we use
is basically derived from the TUC and the policy studies institute
report that was published last year, The Hidden One in Five,
which estimated that there were in the region of 5.3 million workers
earning below one-third of the hourly median wage, and they do
not have trade unions to negotiate their terms and conditions,
and on that basis were considered to be vulnerable to exploitation.
Obviously, not all of those 5.3 million workers were migrant workers
and amongst those who were migrant workers some of them had a
secure immigration status in the sense that they were European
Community nationals for whom their immigration status was not
a high level of concern for them. So I think in the first instance
the sort of vulnerability to exploitation comes from the fact
that there is a sizeable sector of the labour market in which
exploitation is systematic—not just for migrants but for
effectively one-fifth of the working population. Within that,
because of their particular disadvantages and their particular
vulnerabilities, our belief is that migrant workers are over-represented
within that proportion of people.
Q369 Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach:
Exploitation is a very arresting expression, a very powerful word.
Are you saying that exploitation here means that they are paid
less or they have less security of tenure or in some sense there
is even violence in the exploitation? Because, if markets work,
some of these things would be temporary but not permanent.
Mr Flynn: I think that is certainly a subjective
element in the definition of exploitation. The way in which we
use it means when particular advantage is taken of individuals
or groups of individuals' position within the labour market—the
fact that they are working in sectors of the labour market where
the possibility of being able to enjoy the benefits of collective
representations within the labour forces is at a low level. There
is evidence that systematic advantage is taken of that by the
employers.
Q370 Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach:
If you take a case that, for example, they work in a particular
sector where, let us say, there is not collective bargaining,
a domestic resident would be in exactly the same position as the
migrant. So it is not as if it is exploitation of the migrant.
You might say on that basis that it is exploitation but I cannot
see that it is specifically of the migrant.
Mr Flynn: Our point is that there is a substantial
reservoir of workers within the UK labour market who are systematically
exploited as vulnerable workers and the statistic of one in five,
20% of the workforce is often cited as evidence of that. There
are a whole number of reasons why people find themselves within
that particular group of people. One of those reasons is people's
relative vulnerability because of their immigration status. It
is not exclusively about the position of migrant workers, but
being a migrant worker means that you are more prone to risk of
being exploited than perhaps other groups of workers.
Q371 Lord Vallance of Tummel:
Can I bring you back to the second part of my question and that
is the policy responses, and whether there should be better enforcement
of minimum employment standards or whether there should be a reduction
in the number of migrants, or what?
Ms McDowell: The evidence is that the people
who come as migrant workers are able to find work here, and so
I think that the issues about enforcement of minimum employment
standards are not just about enforcement of minimum standards
but actually that there should be more employment rights in place
in order to protect those workers from day one rather than from
after 12 months, which is currently the case.
Q372 Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach:
You list in your very interesting submission to us five elements
of what you call the management of migration and you argue that,
given that the benefits of migration are available to the whole
of society, the costs of migration itself are borne disproportionately
by the migrants. In view of that, given the extent and continuing
amount of migration, I wonder how you reconcile that.
Mr Flynn: I think the mere fact that people
are vulnerable to exploitation is not necessarily a deterrent
to people migrating or to working in these sets of circumstances.
If merely working in poor working conditions was the answer, then
in fact nobody would ever be exploited, by definition. Everybody
would avoid those sectors of the labour market and they would
choose to work in sectors where they did not suffer those disadvantages.
The reasons why people find themselves in that position will mean
looking at the individual characteristics of the migrants—the
backgrounds, what their alternatives are. Migration for a lot
of people entering the labour force at the moment is very much
a survival strategy. Their opportunities to choose better paid
employment, more secure employment is very, very low and in those
circumstances they find themselves in a position where they are
obliged to take whatever is on offer. There are a number of other
factors which migrants bring with them and are often associated
with migrants, which we did go into in our paper, and that is
the cost of migration. Our experience in talking to migrants is
that often, on their initial arrival into the country, they are
burdened from day one with a very considerable debt which arises
from the cost of moving from one country to another and obtaining
the documents which are needed, and this does tend to mean that
people would simply go into the first opportunities for employment
which are created for them and they stay there.
Q373 Lord Turner:
Could you talk a bit about how well informed you think migrants
are about the job opportunities here, the housing opportunities
or, indeed, about their rights. Do we have large numbers of people
coming on unreasonable, false expectations of the wage rate that
they will get or the opportunities that they will get, or do you
think that most of the immigrants, particularly the latest wave,
are relatively well-informed?
Ms McDowell: I do think that it is mixed. I
think that the people who came in 2004 from the A8 countries,
when they arrived their experience was one of being exploited
from day one, they did not have local networks, they did not know
where to get accommodation from, they were not aware of their
employment rights, they did not know their locality or the geography
of where they were. From that some networks have been established
directly, particularly between the UK and Poland, so that some
of those migrants now have connections back home and can have
very direct contact with people coming to the UK to be able to
explain where they can live and they have organised accommodation
for them. They make sure that they are aware of their rights and
have actually made their settlement in the UK much easier than
the first wave. But obviously that is not always the case for
migrants from all different countries and there are still a lot
of people who arrive who have expectations of being able to find
lots of work, who are upset by the lack of welcome that they receive,
about their lack of information that is available to them, and
have said that they wish that they had known before they left
some of the situations in the UK; that the wages here do seem
high but they had not realised that the cost of living is also
high and that also there is a cost there. The embassies or the
consulate perhaps have a role to play in providing some of that
information, or the airports and the places from which people
leave. I know that there are some initiatives in the UK to make
those connections, some including within the trade unions, within
the EU, so that people are better prepared as they arrive. Outside
of the EU it is much more difficult and people are much more reliant
on informal networks and the Internet and what kind of things
they can find there.
Q374 Lord Kingsdown:
What determines the migrants' length of stay in the United Kingdom
and how do you assess the proportion of recent migrants from Eastern
Europe who are likely to stay in the United Kingdom long term
or permanently? We have heard evidence that many immigrants, if
I may call them that, become immigrants before their working days
are over even.
Mr Flynn: I think as a rule of thumb the simple
answer to that question, what determines the migrant's length
of stay in the UK, is the amount of control is that the migrant
has over personal circumstances—whether on arrival in the
country she is able to meet the objectives that she is set for
her particular migration project—and that can take a number
of forms. It can be the desire to raise a sum of money in order
to pay school fees, college fees, tuition fees in the country
of origin; it could be the desire to buy a plot of land or to
put a student through education or to pay for an operation for
a member of family. Very often the initial part of migration is
a distinct project of that sort, and the extent to which the migrant
finds themselves in an employment situation where they are able
to meet those ambitions, then the likelihood is that it will be
a relatively short period of time. There are many other things
that can be added to that list: the desire to improve one's knowledge
of English, because that is generally a saleable quality for most
people when they go back home; and we can add to that indefinitely.
What tends to prolong it is where people find that they are not
in control of their situation and they find themselves encountering
circumstances which they had not predicted, which they had not
anticipated and their need to firstly clear the cost of being
a migrant in the first instance, which is a very considerable
one, and secondly, to go on and make that extra bit of profit
on their migration, is indefinitely postponed. In those circumstances,
you start to find that people's plans to stay in the country for
six months only will get extended to 12 months, to two years,
and so on and so forth. As far as the Eastern European migrants
are concerned, I think the evidence at the moment seems to be
that we are probably closer to the former experience than the
latter; that because of the age group, the demographic profile
of the migrants, because their ambitions are strictly related
to projects which relate to their lives back home—completing
their education or perhaps gaining life experience that will be
useful to them in the jobs market back home—then typically,
my experience certainly talking to young A8 migrants, is that
two years seems to be round about the extent of their ambitions
to be here, and most are probably keeping to that sort of timescale.
Q375 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston:
I am sure you have heard of the London Living Wage Campaign which
has been organised by the trade unions, the Mayor of London and
so on, and indeed has had success in improving the conditions
of the cleaners in this very building of Parliament. What kind
of priority do you put on trying to persuade employers and their
suppliers to improve the wages and conditions for migrant workers,
because this London Living Wage Campaign seems to have had quite
a lot of success with the major financial institutions, certainly
in the City of London?
Mr Flynn: We are staunch supporters of the Living
Wage Campaign and I think one of the noticeable features of that
is that although the people who stand to benefit from its success
are not by all means immigrants, the leading element in it actually
has been migrant workers and in particular I think the Justice
For Cleaners Campaign, that is prominently associated with the
Transport and General Workers Union; its leadership and the bulk
of its membership is very much associated with West African migrants.
We think that this is extremely important. We think that the real
issues to be addressed in terms of managing migration are to ensure
that the benefits of migration actually go to people who make
the investment in migration; that there actually is a flow of
the benefits to people who have come here, they are following
their survival strategies, they are following their career paths
and career plans. And because it is the case that they are very
often disadvantaged in terms of realising those by their own efforts,
then it is necessary to operate within a framework of legislation,
regulations, policies of one sort of another, that make it clear
to employers that when they are employing migrants—or indeed
any other group of migrant workers—then there is a public
interest in seeing that standards are set and they are maintained
and adhered to. So the Living Wage Campaign is a very good example
and something that we would like to see operate much more extensively
across this whole sector.
Q376 Lord Best:
I want to ask something about illegal immigrants, but can I preface
it with this question? The television film Ghosts about
the Chinese cockle pickers, many of whom drowned—hundreds
of thousands of people will have seen this docu-drama. In your
much more expert opinion than the film makers, does that accurately
reflect a picture of inward migration, the gang masters and the
conditions that people face, or is this a little bit of a licence?
Many people will have formed their own views of illegal migration
on the back of that film, but how accurate a view will they have
formed?
Mr Flynn: The first thing to be said is that
that is a completely accurate account of the lives of the cockle
pickers who were caught up with that incident. As you say, it
was a docu-drama and it was very much closely related to the facts
of the case. So, whether it is typical I think we are probably
talking about a spectrum of experiences that migrant workers undergo
and that is, thankfully, probably to one extreme end of it and
we fortunately do not have too many examples of that to talk about.
But that still leaves plenty of opportunities for the people to
be living in pretty miserable circumstances, where they are not
in control of their own lives and they are vulnerable to all sorts
of exploitation, which I think was depicted quite faithfully in
that particular film.
Ms McDowell: What I would add to that is that
the gang masters' licensing authority would say themselves that
they were brought about as a result of that, but because they
only have jurisdiction within that particular part of food production
and processing, those gang masters, those rogue gang masters,
all that they did was close up shop and reappear elsewhere in
other sectors; and from my conversations with people in the fire
and rescue service they firmly believe that there are many workers
working in very dangerous and vulnerable positions and it is only
a matter of time before something else happens on that kind of
scale. Lots of people are living in houses in multiple occupation
in very dangerous circumstances where one fire might well have
the result that the cockle pickers experienced in Morecombe Bay.
Q377 Lord Best:
A lot of that exploitation is because the people are illegal and
therefore do not have rights and know that they do not have rights.
What do you think about the Government's efforts to reduce illegal
employment and what do you think of the impacts and adequacy of
the current enforcement measures against illegally resident migrants
and indeed their employers, the gang masters?
Ms McDowell: From my experience, making employment
illegal is counter-productive because it effectively sets up two
types of employment—a legal employment and an illegal employment.
With the legal employment you have rights, you can assert those
rights, you have expectations about your wages, etcetera, not
just about your pay but also the situation of health and safety,
for example. But the illegal employment means that by its nature
the people who work in that do not have rights, they are open
to exploitation—there are no rules, they can be paid £2
an hour and they can be treated badly and they have no recourse
to the law. Our experience is that in the high profile raids that
we see at the present, very few employers themselves are actually
prosecuted, and the impact of those raids and the prosecutions
that arise from those are felt by those migrant workers themselves.
So it does not actually make a difference to the employer, but
it does make a huge difference to the migrant workers.
Q378 Lord Kingsdown:
Can I ask if this accords with your experience? You talk about
illegal immigrants not having rights as workers, but what about
workers who come in legally, thanks to the operations of a gang
master, from non-European Union countries, who have no right to
work in this country except through that arrangement. If you come
from another European country you can desert the gang master and
go and find another job, but the people who do not come from an
EU country are, as it were, lost—they are slaves almost.
Ms McDowell: Yes.
Q379 Lord Kingsdown:
Is that right?
Ms McDowell: Yes. I think they are slaves. They
do not have another place of safety to go to and so they are at
the whim of those gang masters or those traffickers.
Mr Flynn: It might also be said that in this
particular instance we are not just talking about the conditions
which apply to gang workers, but also the work permit scheme very
often has the same conditions attached to it, whereby employees
are committed to working without a named employer during the course
of their time on the work permit scheme, and given the extensive
range that is covered by the work permit scheme—people working
in care homes, in care professions of one sort of another, where
there is evidence of long working hours, anti-social working hours,
people not being given time off, being paid low wages, etcetera
etcetera, we find very similar circumstances as well where a proportion
of the working conditions that exist in that sector also produces
evidence of a gross exploitation.
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