Precarious lives: Experiences of forced labour among refugees and asylum seekers in England
- Document number
- 2995
- Date
- 2013
- Title
- Precarious lives: Experiences of forced labour among refugees and asylum seekers in England
- Author/publisher
- Universities of Leeds and Salford
- Availability
- View/save PDF version of this document
- Document type(s)
- Guidelines/Recommendations, Research/Study/Analysis,
- Keywords
- England, migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, exploitation,
- Summary
- This research uncovered evidence that refugees and asylum seekers are susceptible to forced labour in the UK. The findings are based on a two-year study by academics at the Universities of Leeds and Salford, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The research explored experiences of forced labour among 30 people who had made claims for asylum in England, supplemented by interviews with 23 practitioners and policy-makers.
Key findings
• Forced labour is experienced by three particular groups who interact with the asylum system at different points while in the UK: asylum seekers at entry, trafficked migrants and undocumented migrants. Most of our interviewees moved between various types of precarious work across a spectrum encompassing vulnerable work, seriously exploitative work and forced labour.
• All found themselves either on the margins of the labour market or in transactional exchange in a wide range of jobs in catering and hospitality, care, domestic work, food packing or processing, cleaning, manufacturing, retail, construction, security and other sectors.
• The most common experiences were of ‘employers’ and/or ‘intermediaries’ abusing workers’ socio-legal status of diminished rights to welfare, work and residence to withhold promised wages, enforce excessive overtime and subject them to abusive working and living conditions.
• Payment below the National Minimum Wage is a normalised reality for asylum seekers and refugees, even including those with permission to work.
• Asylum seekers and refugees often resisted their situations – declining highly exploitative ‘opportunities’, confronting employers over unpaid wages, and even escaping from confinement – but their compromised socio-legal status repeatedly pulled them back into precarious work.
• Specialist support services have the potential to offer invaluable help to allow forced labourers to understand their experience and begin to build routes out of precarity. However, identification of forced labour by refugee and migrant sector organisations is often hampered by a lack of awareness of forced labour and how to respond to it.
• Tackling forced labour among refugees and asylum seekers requires a major overhaul of government policy to restore asylum seekers’ right to work and to ensure universal access to basic employment rights irrespective of immigration status.