Care agencies accused of exploiting migrant care workers

The care of Britain’s older people is increasingly being carried out by migrant workers. Now evidence suggests that some agencies are seriously exploiting staff.

When Gosia moved from Poland to begin work in a UK care home for elderly people her English was still quite shaky and she felt very foreign and very vulnerable. Asked by her employers to work harder than her British colleagues, she felt unable to refuse.

“When you are from a different country, you don’t feel very confident. It is easier to manipulate someone who doesn’t know the language well,” she says. “The English staff knew when they could refuse to do something. When you are new to a country you don’t know what the regulations are.”

As the UK’s population ages, it is becoming increasingly reliant on migrant workers to care for older people. A report published today by Oxfam focuses on the vulnerable status of these migrant carers, highlighting how the unregulated nature of employment agencies leaves them open to exploitation.

Oxfam’s Who Cares? report has gathered evidence of abusive practices among some of these agencies that supply workers from abroad.

The report describes widespread exploitation of migrant care workers, revealing that they are routinely forced to work excessive hours, often with no holiday or sick pay, and may also be required to be on call for no extra pay.

“The increasing use of migrant workers has not been matched by a recognition of the experiences of migrant care workers and the ways in which employers and agencies will exploit their vulnerabilities in order to keep costs down and compete with other social care providers,” the report states. So far there has been little scrutiny of how the employment rights of this workforce are met, it adds.

The charity calls on the government to extend the Gangmasters Licensing Authority (GLA) – the body that regulates the employment rights of migrant agricultural labourers in this country – to the care sector, as a first step towards protecting the rights of care workers from abroad.

The GLA was set up in 2006, in response to the Morecambe Bay tragedy two years earlier, when 23 Chinese cockle pickers drowned. The author of Oxfam’s report, Krisnah Poinasamy, argues that there is little to distinguish the gangmasters who recruit agricultural labourers from abroad and the employment agencies that supply migrant care workers to care homes.

Exploitation within this sector “bears a striking resemblance to that found in the GLA-enforced sectors: underpayment of wages, debt bondage, excessive hours, spurious deductions, dangerous and unsafe working conditions,” he says. Poinasamy believes that the GLA would be more effective at regulating these agencies than the body currently responsible for monitoring them, the Employment Agency Standards (EAS) Inspectorate.

Care work in Britain is perceived as low status and badly paid, making it difficult to attract UK workers. There is high turnover and agencies are increasingly relied upon to supply staff to make up the shortfall. According to the report, about a fifth of the estimated 1.5 million workers in the care sector are migrants, and particularly those employed through agencies “experience significant abuse and exploitation at work”.

A number of the 50 workers interviewed by Oxfam (in collaboration with Kalayaan, a partner charity that campaigns for the rights of migrant workers,) said the agencies employing them would routinely dock their wages, registering them for 12-hour shifts but paying them only for 11.

Some workers complained that they had paid large sums to an agency in their home country to find them work in the UK, and had been misled about the wages they were to receive. Others had stories of intimidation from officials working for employment agencies both in their home country and in the UK.

There is currently no requirement for an employment agency to register its services in the UK. However, if these agencies were to come under the remit of the GLA it would only register organisations committed to respecting employment rights and paying the minimum wage.

Oxfam says the experiences of Magda, another care worker from Poland, are typical. She told the report’s authors that she was recruited in Poland by a representative of a well-known British care company. She was made to sign a binding contract for a year, which she was not able to break unless she repaid £1,000 in travel and accommodation, which she was unable to do.

Desperate

“I had to do a minimum of 60 hours a week for almost two years. I was doing the night shift five to six days per week, from 8pm to 8am,” she said. She added that she was too afraid to complain about her excessive workload for fear that she might lose her job, and said she felt employers took advantage of migrants who were “desperate”.

Imie, a care worker from the Philippines, had a similar story of exploitation by the employment agency that found her work in a care home. She paid £9,000 to secure the position – money that went towards her air fare, processing fees, visa and a training course (which never materialised). She said she was made to work 14-hour shifts, six days a week, while her British colleagues were given two days off a week.

“You don’t have any time to rest. You cannot sleep,” she said.

The Care Quality Commission is responsible for monitoring the quality of the care provided in residential homes, but is not involved in protecting employees’ rights. Agencies supplying workers are not obliged to register with the EAS, which is set up to respond to workers’ complaints but not proactively to investigate the quality of agencies’ adherence to labour rights’ protection. Yet, because they are not unionised, know little about their rights, and have staked a lot on travelling to the UK to earn a Western salary, migrant workers tend not to complain about their treatment.

“We always have that fear that they can take it [the job] away from us and send us home,” Joy, from the Philippines, told Oxfam’s researchers.

Poinasamy says improvements to the regulation of employment agencies need to be made urgently, because the UK’s reliance on migrant labour to care for an ageing population is set to increase.

“By 2030 the number of people aged 80 and over will double. At the same time, the government is pushing for personalisation of care, with plans to extend personal care at home to a further 280,000, he says. “Whether we like it or not we are going to need a bigger migrant workforce. That workforce is being exploited.”

Regulation

Oxfam refuses to name the agencies or companies accused of exploitation by workers interviewed for its report, arguing that the charity’s aim is to persuade the government to tighten its regulation, rather than to name and shame individual organisations.

Asked whether the remit of the GLA might be extended to encompass the care sector, a spokesman at the Department for Business implied that it was unlikely. He said the government was working on “effective enforcement of the existing law, not the introduction of new regulation”.

Oxfam, however, argues that it is “illogical and unfair” that a worker employed through an agency in the care sector does not receive the same level of protection as a worker employed by a gangmaster in the agricultural industry.

• Some names have been changed.

Who Cares? is available at oxfam.org.uk/ukpoverty