Stop abuse of migrant workers before Britain becomes the next Dubai

Britain Saudi Arabia Nigeria Uae city Dubai Ukraine Qatar county Gulf Barbados Nepal Tajikistan Beyond COST Visa

27.05.2022 - 10:37

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theguardian.com:

Impoverished migrant workers forced to pay thousands of pounds in illegal recruitment fees, housed in squalid accommodation and unable to leave their jobs voluntarily. Is this Qatar? UAE? Saudi Arabia? No, it’s post-Brexit Britain.

Revelations that Nepali workers have allegedly been forced to pay extortionate fees to agents in Nepal for their jobs on a British farm supplying some of our leading supermarkets are just the latest in a series of shocking reports. Such cases expose how the UK is adopting practices commonly seen in the Gulf, a region with an appalling record of labour abuse.

Severe labour shortages in the wake of Brexit and the pandemic have forced the government to look beyond Europe. Its seasonal worker scheme, which offers short-term visas for farm work, is now recruiting from more than 50 countries – as far afield as Barbados, Tajikistan and Nigeria, as well as Nepal. The scheme began with about 2,500 workers in 2019 and may recruit as many as 40,000 this year.

But testimonies from migrant workers hired through the scheme sound uncomfortably like those I have heard countless times in the Gulf.

A Ukrainian employed on a British farm said she was forced to cover the costs of her own recruitment and duped into signing a contract she didn’t fully understand. When workers staged a protest, they were punished by being suspended for a week.

A government review of the pilot year of the scheme published late last year found workers subjected to “unacceptable” conditions, including racist abuse, accommodation without running water and contracts not in their own language.

The scheme requires workers to pay for their own flights and visas, in breach of International Labour Organization guidelines, which state that the