We must up our game on vulnerable employment

By Leslie Manasseh

Vulnerable employment is about poverty and powerlessness. It’s about the home worker who is paid £45 to make up 1800 Christmas crackers; the hotel worker paid less than £2 to clean each room; the domestic worker whose passport is kept by their employer and who has to sleep in the living area; the migrant agricultural worker whose employers deduct so much for transport, accommodation and clothing that they are left with just a few pounds to survive on each day. I could recount many more examples from the people I met during my year as a member of the TUC’s Commission on Vulnerable Employment. Stories of hopelessness, despair and anger such as the security guards in the North West whose employers simply refused to pay them their wages. At least one guard took and won an employment tribunal case only to find that the employer did not bother to defend the case and ignored the ruling. Contemplating a further dispiriting and costly journey through the legal system was just too much to bear.

For the estimated two million people in vulnerable employment, life is about drudgery, poverty, poor health and social exclusion.

As shocking as so many of their stories were, I was even more disturbed to discover how extensive the problem is. Vulnerable employment is everywhere – from the shady world of the “here one day gone the next” employment agency to the door step of even the most reputable employers via complex and length supply chains. Vulnerable employment tends to be concentrated in certain sectors of the economy which include, for example, warehousing, packing and distribution. Where employers outsource such work, they risk exploiting and perpetuating the worst kind of employment practices. The result is extreme poverty and insecurity for workers who do not have contracts of employment, work through agencies or have reduced rights because of their immigration status The tragedy of the Morecambe Bay cockle pickers was the tip of an iceberg; there are literally millions of workers whose plight is a hidden scandal.

This scandal is likely to increase. As the recession bites, those working in the sweatshop undergrowth of the economy are likely suffer soonest and most. In sectors such as care, cleaning, construction and hospitality, employers routinely break the law on the minimum wage, working hours, health and safety and other employment rights.

Vulnerable employment is the result of many factors. The law is not strong enough to prevent mistreatment and employers use gaps to deprive people of their rights. Vulnerable workers have too little knowledge of their rights or access to advice and fear and powerlessness too often silence them. Enforcement agencies suffer from a lack of resource and a lack of coordination, and present no decisive threat to bad employers.

Stronger laws and better regulation are needed. Just as the banking sector has used the freedom from regulation to bring the global economy to its knees, so have the worst kind of employers used the same freedom to keep workers on their knees. We will have to live with the damage wrought by neo liberal economics based on light touch regulation and blind faith in the markets for many years to come. But we have yet to uncover its full extent.

Ultimately this is an issue of political will. While the government has taken some steps – for example setting up the Gangmasters Licensing Authority (GLA) – its commitment can appear lukewarm. Hence, despite its effectiveness, the GLA has a limited mandate – it does not cover some of the worst sectors, such as catering, hospitality and construction. HMRC has just over 100 Minimum Wage Inspectors and the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate has 30 inspectors for the whole country. It’s no wonder that employers have no great fear of enforcement. The government’s continuing reluctance to use the £125 billion year spent on public procurement to drive up labour standards is a longstanding stain on their credentials as a champion of fairness at work.

Unions need to raise their game as well. It’s no use claiming that trade unions are the best guarantors of fairness at work if we cannot help vulnerable workers. We need to reach out and give these workers a voice.

The TUC deserves to be congratulated for exposing the nature and extent of vulnerable employment. Now everyone in the labour movement has a responsibility to work to eliminate it.

For more information go to www.vulnerableworkers.org.uk.