1 week ago
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Billionaires and politicians fan the flames of hate, but without migrant workers, Britain would grind to a halt. That’s especially true when it comes to health and social care: more than a fifth of the NHS workforce is made up of migrant staff. The same proportion of care workers nationally are migrants, rising to half in London.
Yet these workers, many of whom are members of Unison, have increasingly become a punchbag for politicians. In particular, they have become a scapegoat for this Labour government, which has sunk to a new low with its proposals on earned settlement. These changes could see low-paid public sector workers, including carers, forced to wait 15 years before being granted indefinite leave to remain, instead of the five years they were promised before they made the decision to come here. These changes would entrench and worsen the environment of fear and exploitation that defines the current system.
This is nothing less than a full-frontal attack on migrant workers and a wrecking ball for public services from a government that should be standing up for both. We already have a visa system that ties care workers to their employers, leaving them vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Months without pay. Working without days off for weeks on end. Grafting for 16 hours and only getting paid for two of them.
As Unison general secretary, I have been speaking to our migrant members in the care sector, and what I hear is harrowing. “Every conversation with the managers feels threatening, and often ends with the word ‘visa’,” a domiciliary care worker from India said. Another member put it starkly: “We cannot continue to work under these kinds of pressures. It is emotionally draining and mentally exhausting. You lose yourself. Fear becomes your shadow.”
When Unison raises these issues with politicians, we are often told it’s just a few “bad apple” employers. But insecure work, zero-hour contracts, illegally low pay and exploitative practices more widely are endemic throughout the social care sector. Our members are silenced as the threat of deportation is punitively held over them. I don’t say it lightly, but the sponsorship system has effectively made modern slavery a structural feature of our care system.
A genuinely humane government would do away with this heartless system. But despite the urging of Unison – in a national campaign led by our migrant members – this Labour government is proposing to extend it. For many of our members who had only months left before being freed from the terrifying vulnerability of sponsorship, the Home Office is proposing to lock them into exploitation for another decade and more.
These proposals are not just an attack on the migrant care workers who work beyond breaking point to look after us. They are also an attack on the most basic values of the Labour party, in offering rapid routes to settlement for those earning six-figure salaries while making lower-paid workers wait and continue to suffer.
Such a hierarchy is based on the notion that care workers are “low-skilled” because they are low-paid. The logic could not be more perverse. Care work is highly skilled work, and it is only paid so poorly because of the failure of successive governments to value it properly. The Home Office describing those who run our health and social care system as low contributors and making this a metric of human worth, having failed to ensure they are paid fairly, is an attack on the working class.
Care in England is already creaking, and without urgent action it risks outright collapse. The demand our migrant members are dealing with is gargantuan. Age UK estimates that 2 million older people have unmet care needs, while up to 1.5 million working-age disabled people may be missing out on support they are entitled to.
At the same time, the workforce is haemorrhaging staff, with vacancy rates among the highest of any sector and nearly a quarter of workers leaving each year. The root cause is no mystery – it’s low pay. Four in five jobs in the wider economy pay better than the care sector. Such depressed wages push workers into poverty and food insecurity.
Sadly, the government seems determined to make the environment for migrant workers in this country more hostile than ever. But Unison will always stand up for our members, regardless of where they were born. Indeed, in leading our Fair Visa Campaign, migrant members are standing up for themselves: late last year, they organised one of the biggest parliamentary lobbies in modern history, with 700 migrant workers travelling to meet their MPs. This week, more than 70 parliamentarians joined us in opposing the unfair indefinite leave to remain changes.
Labour MPs vying to replace the prime minister must take the fight to the far right instead of imitating it, stand up for migrant workers by dropping the earned settlement proposals, and represent the whole working class. This is the stuff of basic principles. Unison will use its unparalleled size and resources without hesitation to challenge any politician who fails to live up to them.
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Andrea Egan is the general secretary of Unison
