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This chapter considers the position of migrants in the UK who experience severe labour exploitation. It addresses how — or whether — the emerging ‘modern slavery complex’ can adequately respond to the production and continuation of unfree labour relationships that produce conditions now grouped under the umbrella of ‘modern slavery’. It starts from the point of understanding severe labour exploitation as emerging within a set of multidimensional processes embedded in the operation of labour markets and economies. This includes employer relationships with employees, migrants’ work and migration trajectories, and socio-economic and family status. For migrant workers, the backdrop of hostile immigration policies and politics is an important framer.
The concept and policy of ‘multiculturalism’ are under continuing attack. A broad policy language has replaced ‘race’ and ethnicity agendas. We demonstrate how ‘community cohesion’ and ‘equalities’ became dominant concepts in managing cultural relations in England. Local authority and community perspectives in one northern city reveal good local practice being undermined by national discourses stigmatising British Muslims, creating barriers to integration, resulting in a dual, conflicting process. While community cohesion de-emphasises ‘race’, ethnic and religious differences are highlighted in security and immigration discourses.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence
This ground breaking book presents the first evidence of forced labour among displaced migrants who seek refuge in the UK.
Through a critical engagement with contemporary debates about precarity, unfreedom and socio-legal status, the book explores how asylum and forced labour are linked, and enmeshed in a broader picture of modern slavery produced through globalised working conditions.
Drawing on original evidence generated in fieldwork with refugees and asylum seekers, this is important reading for students and academics in social policy, social geography, sociology, politics, refugee, labour and migration studies, and policy makers and practitioners working to support migrants and tackle forced labour.
This introductory chapter notes the recent heightened profile of the term ‘modern slavery’ in the UK. Various phenomena, practices, and policies have been bundled together under this term, which requires careful analytical and critical attention. It is argued that it is vitally important to understand how the discourse of modern slavery has recently emerged — and the histories that continue to shape present-day discourses — as the terms of engagement shape what are considered appropriate and adequate policy responses. The main goal of the rest of the book is to develop a robust critique of the development of law, policy and practice relating to modern slavery in the UK, in particular, for the benefit of those engaged in some way in anti-slavery work.
Chapter 2 deploys both global and national lenses to ask why vulnerable migrant workers routinely experience labour exploitation. We deepen Chapter 1’s argument that the UK’s neoliberal labour market regime has combined with a damaging asylum and immigration policy to render particular international migrant groups hyper-precarious and deeply susceptible to forced labour exploitation. We review literature evidencing migrant workers’ exploitation at a global level before focusing on the more extreme exploitation characterised as forced labour. Recent UK governments’ attempts to ‘manage’ migration are then explored, before offering a critical discussion of UK asylum legislation highlighting how restrictive policies have played an important role in creating a complex socio-legal differentiation of migrants’ rights that help to facilitate the production of forced labour in this realm.
Chapter 3 focuses on the forced labour experiences of the 30 asylum seekers and refugees we interviewed. The first part introduces the conceptual framework of forced labour as defined by the ILO. It then sets out the empirical context for our research into forced labour and explains how we designed our methodology to address the various practical and ethical challenges we encountered. We then review the types of work, workplaces and sectors our interviewees were engaged in before using the ILO forced labour framework to demonstrate the prevalence and types of forced labour practices across our interviewees. These included formal and informal waged ‘jobs’ in the labour market, transactional-based work exchanged between both friends and total strangers, and unwaged reproductive labour and forced prostitution in private households. Most of these labour experiences involved one or more of the ILO’s 11 indicators of forced labour with the most common being the abuse of vulnerability of compromised socio-legal status and the withholding of wages. We found that those trafficked to the UK were in the most exploitative forms of forced labour including domestic servitude, sexual exploitation and care work.
Chapter 4 explores the significance of socio-legal status in structuring the lives of asylum seekers and refugees resident in the UK. It is argued that the limited or non-existent rights to residence work and welfare that are variously available to migrants at different stages of the asylum process create conditions which help to facilitate severely exploitative work and forced labour. We identify three groups categorised by entry into the UK and into forced labour – asylum seekers on entry, irregular migrants and trafficked migrants. This typology exposes three principle intersections of forced migration and forced labour. The chapter considers the relationship between both irregular and regular migrant status and susceptibility to labour exploitation, relating compromised rights to work, welfare and residence to lived experiences of ‘illegality’, destitution and deportability. We argue that employers make instrumental use of precarious immigration status as tool of coercion and control in exploitative labour relations. Importantly, discussions in the chapter also show how the legacy of constrained socio-legal status and the criminalisation of those asylum seekers and refugees prosecuted for illegal working produce lasting precarity in the lives of many, even when rights to residence, work and welfare are ultimately acquired.
Although the closing down of space for negotiation of work conditions is common to all the labouring situations outlined in Chapters 3 and 4, in Chapter 5 we turn our attention to the ways that workers did resist poor treatment within such unfree labouring environments. Through a presentation of a more agentic picture of forced migrants’ lives – that of the ‘migrant project’ – it describes how workers negotiated, resisted and rejected their exploitation within unfree labour situations, including examples of nascent solidarity in hidden spaces that allowed for informal and fleeting forms of effective organising. We explore how workers exited from unfree labour situations, drawing a distinction between those who ‘ran away’ or escaped from coerced-confined forced labour, workers who ‘walked away’ or changed jobs, and those who were ‘pushed away’ through the job ending or dismissal from insecure work. The final part of this chapter explores the idea of a continuum of unfreedom and its resonance for discussions of hyper-precarity in Chapter 6.
In Chapter 6 we reflectively stand back from these 30 human stories to critically interrogate the very meaning and relevance of forced labour for the precarious migrant labour experience as the conceptual basis for tackling such exploitation. We critique the ILO approach to defining and tackling forced labour and argue that discussing such phenomena in rigid binaries (such as free/forced) is unhelpful. Instead we highlight continuums and processes in migrant labour experiences and in line with recent work (e.g. Skrivankova, 2010) we suggest that a continuum approach built around the concept of ‘unfreedom’ is the best way to ensure that the diversity of migrants’ experiences of forced labour are considered. We further posit the ‘hyper-precarity trap’ as an analytical device to show how racialised and gendered migration, work and welfare regimes, and neoliberalism combine to create the ‘demand and supply’ of migrant forced labourers who are subject to multidimensional insecurity and exploitation. We argue that attempts to portray contemporary ‘slavery’, ‘trafficking’ or ‘forced labour’ as exceptional phenomenon undermines an understanding of how such exploitation emanates from broader structural inequalities.
Chapter 7 concludes with a reiteration of our salient findings across the previous chapters before a consideration of the effects of the global financial and economic crisis for hyper-precarious migrants, where we speculate that workplace conditions, if anything, may be worsening. We then discuss suggested interventions for policy-makers and practitioners that are deemed useful to reduce exploitative and forced labour. We here make the critical point that refugees and asylum seekers are part of a much larger group of vulnerable migrant workers in the UK whose commonplace exploitation within labour markets is mediated and structured by the interplay of broader political, economic, social and gendered processes. As such, we suggest a multi-layered approach to tackling exploitation and forced labour that combines a focus on immigration policy solutions and employer sanctions to build and enhance universal rights for all migrant workers, together with improving asylum seekers and refugees’ mobilisation opportunities and access to information in order to exercise their particular agency and rights.
