iblog

I was disgusted to watch the special report on the BBC News at 10 tonight, concerning migrant labour in the UK. An undercover reporter from Lithuania posed as a migrant worker and, after being fleeced by a series of dodgy “fixers” from his own country, found himself in the UK without the job he had been promised and with £500 of debt to pay off. Living in cramped conditions, he was forced to pay £50 a week in rent and received a below-minimum-wage rate of £4.85 for his job as an operative in a factory (for which he was not trained). And the company paid him 2 weeks in arrears, failing to declare on his wage slip that they had automatically deducted the £50 in rent.

Added to this, there were suggestions that workers had to be compliant in order to be sure of work, with no guarantee of names being placed on rosters. It all adds up to a shameful example of greed, exploitation and inhumane treatment at the heart of British business. This example was near Hull, but I’m sure it’s happening all over the UK. How the overlords of this bonded labour system manage to sleep at night is beyond me – surely the concept of a man making himself rich through the blatant exploitation of powerless labourers is something we got rid of about a hundred years ago? How do we expect to set a great example on the world stage, and why do we feel in a position to upbraid developing countries on their human rights records when this is happening in our own back yard?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 11:52 pm and is filed under Current Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.