By Aaron Barbour
As part of our informal economy work programme, we launched a jointly produced report entitled ?The Hidden Workforce Building Britain: exposing exploitation and protecting vulnerable workers in construction?.
This report was the culmination of a two year programme with UCATT (the UK?s largest construction industry trade union) and Manchester Business School, funded by the BIS Union Modernisation Fund.
We co-hosted an intimate launch event at TUC?s Headquarters with union reps, vulnerable workers and government officials to share the findings and discuss how to take them forward. The later being the tricky bit because we are still awaiting the outcome of the Davey Review into the government?s workplace rights compliance and enforcement arrangements. The government is parceling this into its ?Red Tape Challenge?, and the general feeling is that they will probably relax enforcement rules, whilst reducing the capacity of enforcement agencies. This will be a challenge in itself as enforcement agencies are already miniscule. For example, there are only 12 construction health and safety inspectors to oversee the thousands of construction sites in London. Cutting this sort of supposed ?red tape?, as government tried to do with the Equality Laws, will not improve profitability nor make construction businesses grow more, but it will make matters worse for many construction workers by increasing their vulnerability.
The report aims to capture the position of vulnerable workers in the construction sector and how we should protect them and also enforce their rights in the workplace. Our part of the research aimed to capture the voices and direct experiences of vulnerable workers; whilst Manchester Business School focused on the role of regulation and enforcement agencies in relation to vulnerable workers.
We went out into the community to talk to people for the research. One of the team, for example, went early in the morning to the car park of a large DIY and building supplies store in east London and spoke to some construction workers being picked-up for the day. We met a young Romanian man there, no older than 20. He?d come to look for work because a two-week stint with a Turkish gangmaster had come to an end. ?The guy I was working for employs around ten people who are all foreigners, including Romanians, Bulgarians and Iranians. He took us to sites where we were usually painting and renovating houses,? he said. ?I was paid ?50 for a nine or ten hour day with half an hour for lunch.?
The young man says he can?t work legally because he does not have a national insurance number. ?I went to the Jobcentre and asked for an NI number,? he says, ?but they said I had to be in a job before I could get one.?
Then at about 8.30am, our researcher watched as the workers were chased by the police, a daily charade as we later discovered,? as they simply return later once the police had left. So at a community level many know this sort of exploitation is going on, but there isn?t yet the resolve to address it.
The report contains three overarching recommendations to address these issues:
- Structural change: there should be a renewed, independent labour inspectorate for the UK. It should be a single organisation which would have a coordinated strategy, joined-up resources (budgets, staff, common training, materials and one database etc). It should have a clearly recognisable brand and have a single point of access for members of the public.
- Building Alliances and Working with Society: there should be increased partnership work must be developed with unions, the voluntary sector, advice groups, local authorities and business groups ? forming alliances to reach and support more vulnerable workers and prosecute exploitative employers.
- Pro-active Investigations: The new labour inspectorate should be carrying out more proactive investigations. We acknowledge that this will of course require additional resources which will be difficult to find in the current economic climate. However the cost of not increasing the number of pro-active investigations will continue to be extensive in terms of lost tax revenue for the state; stunting growth of businesses and therefore the economy; breaking employment law; and increasing the vulnerability of workers and preventing some from being able to leave the benefit system.
We found that many people working on construction sites do not know where to go for support, let alone have heard of the enforcement agencies. So we?ve also launched a credit-card sized leaflet ?Agency Workers ? we?ve got you covered?, informing people of their employment rights and where to get information, advice and guidance. It?s designed to be discretely carried in pockets or shoes because on some construction sites workers are searched before entry.
It?s this fear factor that contributes as much to the vulnerability of workers, as it is the poor work and pay conditions. Many construction workers are ?just surviving?, particularly in these precarious economic times. If they speak up, as one young man told us, they will receive a ?tap on the shoulder? and are told not to return tomorrow. Their shoes easily filled with unemployment levels being so high. They know they are being exploited but would rather that than have no job at all.
We hope this report contributes to the minister?s thinking for his Review about how to address the conditions that many vulnerable workers face on construction sites each day.
