Home care workers hired overseas to care for disabled and elderly people in Britain are being exploited by “unscrupulous” agencies who siphon off their pay to cover the “costs of accommodation”.
The workers, who live with clients to provide 24-hour care, have in some cases had their pay cut by hundreds of pounds a month despite starting on just the minimum wage.
The practice is exposed in a landmark report published by the University of Nottingham’s Rights Lab, the world’s largest modern slavery research group, based on an 18-month study involving home care workers in London from countries such as Zimbabwe, South Africa, Hungary and Poland. .
It identifies several cases where workers received “unclear blanks with no number of hours worked and no deductions,” including cases where payment appeared to have been illegally withheld.
Employers can legally deduct £8.70 a day (up from £5.35 in 2016) from workers’ wages if they provide accommodation, as might happen to farm workers in rural areas.
But Dr Caroline Emberson, who led the research, and Dr Agnes Turnpenny, from Oxford Brookes University’s Institute of Public Care, said it was unethical and “absurd” that care workers underpaid home workers were being charged for accommodation when their jobs required them to stay at clients’ homes overnight.
As well as deductions for accommodation costs, the investigation found that some workers were subjected to sexual harassment or racist abuse and were expected to do non-caring tasks for the whole family, such as cooking and cleaning. These workers were often left without the support of their agencies, which act as intermediaries between workers and clients. Others were given no sick or holiday pay, forced to work more than 80 hours a week with insufficient breaks, and subjected to severance or severance clauses, a practice that ‘Observer first exposed in March.
One worker said she had found caring for vulnerable clients “rewarding” but had been scarred by encounters with a bad employer. “The pay was very low, they charged a lot for accommodation and they treated me very badly. They basically wanted to keep me as a slave,” he said.
The new research, which also involved academics from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the charity Focus on Labor Exploitation (Flex) and paid research colleagues with experience working in the same sector, will feed even more concerns about exploitation in social care, which is facing a staffing crisis and increasing cases of modern slavery.
It warns that migrant workers living in care, many of whom are women, are particularly vulnerable to exploitation: describing them as a “hidden workforce” that is often “invisible to the local community” and “unheard of” in national political debates. It calls for a range of policy changes to reduce workers’ vulnerability to labor exploitation, including reform of the tied visa system, where workers require sponsorship from a particular employer; eliminate or reduce visa fees; and prohibit or regulate sunset clauses to ensure they are not used to tie workers to their jobs.
It also suggests that, like agriculture, health and social care could become a sector authorized by the Gangmasters and Labor Abuse Authority, which would require recruitment agencies to register to supply workers to the UK, which will make it easier for employers to identify “fair and safe” recruiters.
Another of its recommendations is that the Department of Health expand the powers of the Care Quality Commission to oversee the labor rights of home care workers. However, the department said it had “no plans” to do so.
Emberson said the investigation showed urgent changes were needed to ensure home care workers, many of whom had come to Britain on the promise of good pay and working conditions, were protected.
They were often “isolated” in clients’ homes and dependent on agencies to ensure their employment rights were maintained, he said. “These vulnerabilities can turn this form of care work into a trap where the unscrupulous can keep workers in exploitative situations.”
Suzanne Hewitt, a care worker and one of the fellow researchers, added that some care workers seemed “almost indifferent” to their exploitation out of fear or because they believed that if they did, nothing would change.
“They are silent in their frustration, because all they want to do is take care of the most vulnerable, while being vulnerable themselves,” he said.