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Slavery today – and in Scotland

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In one of the most indefensible actions, in 2012 the current UK Government amended the conditions laid down in the 1998 Overseas Domestic Workers Visa provision, a conscious reform of working conditions for foreign domestic workers that create nothing less than slavery today – as inhuman, as brutal and as absolute as anything taught us by what we had assumed was now ‘history’.

Tied Visas

This 1998 regulation had been praised as ‘good practice by the United Nations, in removing the so called ‘Tied Visas’ which compelled domestic workers brought into this country with their employers to work for them in residences here to work only for that employer.

This had meant that UK employment rights were beyond the reach of such workers, many of whom were known to be forced to work 16-20 hour days, often underfed, physically and sometimes sexually abused, often completely unpaid,  with no time off, often not allowed to leave the premises and with their passports held by their employers.

Slavery is defined as a situation where one person is in the compete control of another. These workers were in the UK on ‘tied visas’, limiting their stay here to working for the employer who had obtained their visas and brought them here. In abject fear of deportation, with no money, no access to their own passports and often physically locked in, most were unable even to run away.

These domestic workers coming into the UK with their employers are traditionally most regularly found in two specific social sectors – rich families from the Gulf States who have moved to live in residences in London; and the diplomatic service, whose foreign-based employees enjoy diplomatic immunity.

The visa modifications introduced by the 1997 Labour government in 1998 enabled such workers to change employer where the need or wish arose; and to apply for a change of status to their working visas.

This reform was praised by the United Nations as an example of good practice.

In 2012, the incoming Conservative Government, for reasons it seems unable to articulate but can only centre on the acceptance of the value of cheap labour at whatever cost to the labourers concerned, removed the 1998 modifications.

Today, 2015, this sees overseas domestic workers back on ‘tied visas’ and once again subject, with no recourse whatsoever, to the utterly inhumane working conditions and treatment they have no legal option but to endure.

Worse than this, under the current government the United Kingdom is one of only eight nations not to sign the International Domestic Labour Convention. Modern Slavery Minister, Karen Bradley, challenged by John Waite for the BBC on why Britain is content to line up with El Salvador and Panama as one of the no-signatories, ran a high pitched readymade script at speed, ignoring all interjections, saying that the UK was committed to the ‘intentions‘ of the Convention but had yet to find ‘appropriate‘ ways of implementing it.

Back in 1987, in Radio 4′s Face the Facts, John Waite had investigated the issue of modern slavery. In an edition of the same programme at 12.15 on Thursday 20th February 2015, 28 years later, in a contemporary investigation of the matter, he found exactly the same practices in operation.

The breaking point for these domestic slaves appears to come when they are not paid at all – £1.90 an hour appears to be a common rate – but many of these Middle Eastern and diplomatic corps employers stop paying them anything. This has made a few eventually run away and put themselves in the care of the British authorities. They sustain their working conditions and their entrapment to earn some money to help their families; but when they are not paid at all, they can ake no such contribution and a few then, in desperation, will run away; with probably even fewer going to the authorities.

Leading Conservative MP, Deputy Chief Whip Sit John Randall, has been so disgusted with his own party on this matter that he has voted against its action in this field. At the moment, the government is putting through parliament the Modern Slavery Bill, which Sir John, contrary to government promotion, says will make no difference to the essential impotence of the abused to defend themselves and to escape from this slavery.

It is interesting to see that, under a Freedom of Information request from the BBC, the UK Government admitted that it has never once brought a prosecution for slavery against any member of a foreign diplomatic service based here – although it knows the practice is far from uncommon. Conversely, the Irish Government has taken such action, successfully prosecuting a member of the diplomatic corps, obtaining a conviction and seeing the diplomat in question ‘withdrawn’, rather than face a year in jail. These no nonsense values send the right signal to the international diplomatic services.

There are overseas diplomatic missions based in Edinburgh. Does anyone even know what the position is in our own capital city of the use of slave labour imported and abused under tied visas?

Transit Visas and the fishing industry here

Even worse than the ‘tied visa’ is another form of visa which, to the slavery of the conditions enabled by tied visas, adds a genuine and omnipresent risk to life and limb.

This is the notorious ‘Transit Visa’ which the UK Government is flatly not prepared to amend.

The ‘transit visa’ allows workers from overseas to pass through the UK en route to taking up employment on a vessel which is headed out of British waters.

The visas was introduced to facilitate workers on cruise ships when they call into British ports.

It is however extensively used in the offshore fishing industry. Workers from without the European Economic Area [EEA] are contacted by agents overseas to work on fishing vessels based in the UK but operating outside territorial waters.

What they sign up for is almost never delivered. They may be taken to a fishing boat anywhere in the UK, not in the area they think they have chosen. Whatever the working week they have agreed is almost certain to be as close to non-stop work as the human body can stand.

  • Pay? Little or often nothing. These people too are slaves, living and working in unimaginable conditions they are in position to leave. If they step ashore they are in breach of their visas and are liable to be deported. They too have there employers generally retaining their passports. They live aboard in minute, unheated, unwatertight, ill-ventilated conditions, drilled with the constant diesel rap of the engines, breathing the ever present diesel fumes.
  • Food? Once, sometimes twice a day, is it.
  • Training? Forget it. We’re talking about the cheap or free labour here. Throw them on the boat and let them learn the hard way.

This is serious trouble. Commercial fishing is work that veers from monotony to mania in the immediate pressure of hauling the nets, with heavy gear capable of mangling unknowing, inexpert or flustered hands. There are the cables that haul the nets in, set at neck height and moving at around 20 mph.

There is the language problem – with skippers yelling the odds in the heat of the haul – with instructions on unfamiliar or unknown tasks delivered in inaccessible accents – along with copious abuse. Many of these workers say they are treated as subhuman.

What is certain is that the very lives of these men are at a discount.

In 2008 three foreign fishermen – two Filipinos and a Lavtian [Ramilito Calipayan, Benjamin Potot, both 33 years old and 50-year-old Latvian, Rimants Venckus] – died in Fraserburgh harbour in a fire on the Banff registered trawler they were living aboard.

They had been unable to escape because an emergency exit would not open. The Maritime Accidents Investigation Board [MAIB]  report said that the fire had started in an electric fire whose vents had become blocked. It appeared to have been fanned by a fire door left open for ventilation. Fire alarms had been switched off – evidently standard practice when a fishing boat is in port – from the days when foreign labour on transit visas was not compelled by law to live aboard in such conditions. [Ed: We do not know whether or not those who died in Fraserburgh were on transit visas or not; or whether they chose to live aboard to save money to send home. Either way, the conditions in which they lived were not compatible with a care for their safety and their humanity.]

What has to be a matter of real humanitarian concern is the deaths that simply must be happening,

We’re talking about rookie untrained labour, working in swell conditions well offshore, unfamiliar with the gear and the systems and unable to understand shouted instructions in times of highly pressured physical  effort on a moving platform.

Thy will not just get injuries like impromptu amputations in winches. They will fall overboard. No one seriously knows or cares who they are. They have come supposedly through the UK and out of it again in transit to a vessel. They wold not necessarily return through the UK so no one’s counting heads.

The percentage of fishermen who can swim is not as high as the general public might imagine. Some deliberately chose not to be able to swim as they reject the eventuality of a prolonged death where recovery is unlikely. Whatever the official version may be, the reality in the fishing industry is that where dead bodies are hauled with the fish they are generally thrown back, as anything else is a troublesome and costly nuisance.

Overseas cheap labour enabled by transit visas and routinely abused simply must create a situation where the lives of such men is cheaper than bothering. There must be unreported deaths; families waiting for news that never comes; and for returns that are no longer possible.

John Waite on the BBC programme on 20th March, cited a Filipino taxi-driver, Marco, who signed up with an agent to work on a trawler out of Cornwall, working a 48 hour week.He was flown to Belfast and put on an Irish prawn trawler, not paid, rarely fed and working virtually around the clock.

When, during hauling, a winch slashed his finger, his skipper dumped him ashore in a Scottish port to fend for himself, He got to hospital where the top of his finger was amputated. He was interviewed by the BBC at Brodick in Arran. He handed himself over to the authorities – he had nowhere else to go – and told them his story. His case has been take up and he now has permission to stay in Britain for a year.

General Election hostages

Here lies the rub.

The UK Home Office is afraid to relax the conditions on Transit Vias and is refusing to do so – lest UKIP make capital out of what would be presented as more laxity in immigration controls.

So these ‘fishermen’ [and some genuinely become skilled fishermen through practice] are hostages to the May 2015 General Election.

What does all of this say about the culture and civilisation of the United Kingdom and every part of it? It is exploitative, unevolved in its failure to recognise a common humanity, brutal in its abuses – about as trashy as it gets.

The government, through the deeply alienating robotic script screeched at John Waite by Modern Slavery Minister, Karen Bradley, may seek to deny that these overseas slaves on tied visas and transit visas are hostages to the General Election. It is, though, a hard allegation to refute, given their actions and position; and refutation is itself inadequate from a government that cannot explain why it chose to amend retrogressively a humane regulation internationally admired; or to align itself with the pariahs in refusing to sign the International Domestic Labour Convention.

Note: The 40 minute Radio 4 Programme programme, Face the Facts, presented by John Waite at 12.15 on 20th February, is online here for the duration of the BBC iplayer’s arrangements.


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