UK Poverty Post

Who Cares?

The UK has an ageing population – with the number of people over 80 set to double to eight per cent of the population by 2030. Unable to meet the ever-increasing demand for care workers through the British workforce, the care sector has become increasingly reliant upon migrant workers. But the increasing use of migrants has not been matched by a recognition of their experiences and the ways in which employers and agencies will exploit their vulnerabilities to keep costs down and compete with other social care providers.

Who Cares? published today by Oxfam and Kalayaan, the specialist organisation for migrant domestic workers, highlights the exploitation of migrant carers at the hands of unscrupulous agencies. The research revealed workers who were forced to work excessive hours (more than 60 hours per week, and sometimes up to a 100), underpayment of wages, denial of holiday pay and sick pay, and the provision of accommodation by the employer in order to coerce and intimidate the worker into being constantly available for work. Indeed, one worker, Jula (not her real name) from Poland, said that following exploitation from her agency – deductions from her wages and being overcharged on her accommodation – she was forced into such a dire financial situation that within three months, she had been forced to spend the savings which had taken her ten years to put by in Poland.

We have seen these forms of exploitation before. Underpayment of wages, excessive hours, and coercion through links to workers’ accommodation are all forms of exploitation by agencies (or gangmasters) that were common within the agricultural sector now regulated by the Gangmasters Licensing Authority (GLA), set up in 2006 after the Morecambe Bay disaster in which 23 cockle-pickers died because of the negligence of their gangmaster. It should come as no surprise that we are seeing similar exploitation in the care sector as in agriculture: gangmasters tend to operate across several sectors where there is a similar demand for flexible labour, sectors such as agriculture, construction, care and hospitality.

But whilst the GLA has been successful in regulating gangmasters and rooting out exploitation in the agricultural sector, agencies operating in the care sector are currently regulated by the Employment Agency Standards inspectorate (EAS). And EAS’s approach – which relies on workers to report abuse, rather than proactively investigating employers – has been shown to be much less effective than the GLA’s in upholding labour rights and preventing exploitation of workers in the sectors in which it operates.

Which is why Oxfam is calling on the government to extend the remit of the GLA to the care sector (as well as to the construction and hospitality). It won’t solve all abuses of labour rights in the sector: but we believe that it is a vital first step in helping to protect Jula and workers like her who have shared their experiences with Oxfam for this research. With the government’s commitments on the personalisation of care in the Personal Care Bill, the use of agencies to deliver care is only set to rise and we must ensure that this positive initiative does not lead to the exploitation or impoverishment of the  workers who care for older people.

This morning the Guardian covered Oxfam and Kalayaan’s research on this subject