The UK’s Seasonal Worker Visa and The Exploitation of Migrant Labour

By Sophia Sheera

On the 2^nd November, the Guardian reported that more than 200 Indonesian fruit-pickers working in the UK have sought diplomatic help since July. One man shared that he had paid £5,000 to an unlicensed broker in Java to secure his temporary visa in the UK, but was only offered a zero-hours contract when he arrived in Kent.

The use of unlicensed middlemen is incompatible with the ILO’s guidelines on fair recruitment. The Seasonal Worker Visa - the scheme through which temporary migrants access employment on British farms - explicitly bans the use of zero-hour contracts.

In 2019, the government created The Seasonal Worker Visa in response to predictions that Brexit would cause labour shortages in the U.K. The scheme involved 3 500 workers in 2019, whereupon it was rapidly expanded to 30 000 in 2021 and then 40 000 in 2022. Initially, two-thirds of incoming migrants came from Ukraine. Following the outbreak of war in Ukraine, workers have flown in from countries as diverse as Uzbekistan, Nepal and Vietnam.

The visas correspond closely to the demand for seasonal labour, lasting a maximum of six months per annual cycle. Some permit employment for only 8 weeks.

How are Seasonal Migrants at Risk of Exploitation?

Employment opportunities under the Seasonal Worker Visa are restricted, and access to social services extremely limited. Migrants may only work in the sector specified by their visa, and they are prohibited from permanent employment. They cannot bring family members with them, as was reiterated to Ukrainian fruit-pickers in February 2022. Seasonal workers have no recourse to public funds.

The freedom to switch employers is central to labour rights; without it, workers run a much higher risk of being financially unable to leave exploitative conditions. The official Guidance on the Seasonal Migration Visa stipulates that ‘participating workers can change employers if they wish and must normally be allowed to do so’. However, research by Focus on Labour Exploitation (FLEX) found that 62% of their interviewees had been refused a transfer. For these migrants, both their financial status and access to legal employment in the UK is tied to their employers.

Migrants’ social circumstances make them further vulnerable to exploitation. Alone in foreign countries, potentially with limited knowledge of the English language, migrants lack access to formal and informal networks.

Many farms hosting seasonal labourers also provide nearby accommodation at some cost; this means that for many migrant workers with no social network in the UK, leaving their jobs amounts to becoming homeless.

This array of financial, legal and social restrictions together mean that migrants are far less likely to speak up if faced with harassment and discrimination. For example, a group of Central Asian workers interviewed by RadioFreeEurope feared that they would ‘get in trouble’ for speaking out against illegal changes made to their contracts. One worker from Tajikistan who escaped labour exploitation on a farm in Scotland explained that although migrant fruit-pickers face ‘mistreatment’ from ‘abusive’ employers, few choose to leave their jobs.

only 84% of workers said they had been fully paid for their work

Deregulated labour markets like agriculture offer little certainty in terms of hours and wages. This, combined with the informal and often exploitative migratory processes that bring seasonal workers to the UK,  produces a ‘precarious workforce’ pushed into compliance. In this way, argues the social scientist Bridget Anderson, employers exert ‘particular mechanisms of control’ over workers legally made vulnerable.

How have Migrants been Exploited under the Seasonal Worker Visa?

The government’s own review of the 2019 pilot phase of the Seasonal Workers Visa sheds light on the frequency of labour exploitation. According to the review, 19% of workers interviewed by the government reported that operators failed to uphold their contractual agreements.

The same document states that only 84% of workers said they had been fully paid for their work.

The survey also highlighted that living conditions provided by contractors were substandard. Quoting the publication, ‘15% said their accommodation was neither safe, comfortable, hygienic nor warm and 10% said their accommodation had no bathroom, no running water, and no kitchen.’

At four of the fourteen sites visited by the government for their review, seasonal migrants said that ‘their employers had not provided promised health and safety equipment as they were legally required to do, specifically wet weather gear and steel toe capped boots’. This is especially concerning in the knowledge that the agricultural industry has the highest levels of fatal injury across all sectors of employment, according to the Health and Safety Executive.

Additionally, 50% of workers had not received their employment contract written in their native language, which was a requirement of the visa scheme.

State Complicity

The aforementioned governmental review of the Seasonal Worker Pilot was published on 24^th December 2021, over two years since the visa started bringing in migrant labourers. The delay in publication, as opposed to the speed at which the Seasonal Worker Visa was expanded, suggests that migrant rights have not been a governmental priority.

rich countries increasingly treat immigration as a labour-supply system, rendering migrants akin to commodities

Although the government has now clearly acknowledged the scale of labour injustice wrought by the Seasonal Worker Visa, it has failed to expand any meaningful due diligence measures to ensure exploitative practices do not continue. The report simply states that ‘increased training for managers would be offered in 2020’, alongside expanding migrants’ access to ‘group social media chats with agents to report concerns’. These small measures fail to grasp that the restrictive opportunities for employment and integration permitted by the Seasonal Worker Visa create an intrinsically vulnerable migrant workforce.

The advocacy group FLEX also highlights that the government’s review insufficiently analyses the practical likelihood that migrants are able to leave their employers. The report provides no information about debt, level of dependency on the employer, nor the confiscation of documents. The review also makes no mention about reduced hours, or contractors’ illegal implementation of working cultures resembling zero-hour contracts.

Through their own research, FLEX found that 62% of migrant workers at one farm in Scotland had indeed taken on debt to travel to the UK.

The Proliferation of Temporary Migrant Labour around the World

The UK government’s expansion of the Seasonal Worker Visa symptomises how globalisation has enabled states in the Global North to profit from cheap and disposable foreign labour. As early as 1988, Saskia Sassen argued that rich countries increasingly treat immigration as a labour-supply system, rendering migrants akin to commodities whose manpower can literally be bought. The presence of temporary migrants is tightly calibrated to labour demand; when work runs out, this workforce is treated as expendable.

The question of migrant rights hit mainstream headlines in the lead up to the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. FIFA’s controversial choice of host state amplified criticism of the Gulf States’ kafala system, whereby private employers have total control over the legal status of the migrants they employ. Under significant pressure, Qatar began making tentative steps towards reform in 2018.

However, less attention has been directed at migrant labour exploitation in the so-called liberal democracies of the Global North. In the EU, around 1 million seasonal workers are hired each year, most of whom take up precarious work in agriculture. Italy, for example, employs around 500 000 migrants in the agricultural sector, around 40% of whom work under irregular conditions. Meanwhile, the strawberry-laden Spanish province of Huelva is dependent on the circular migration of 50 000 seasonal workers from Eastern Europe and North Africa – circular because many make the trip every year.

In the US, agricultural industries compose the largest economic sector, turning over a profit of $1.053 trillion in 2020. Migrant labour makes up around 73% of this agricultural workforce, with around 50% of all employees with no legal papers to their name. With ‘crimmigration’ – the entanglement of criminal and immigration procedures – on the rise across the world, many of these undocumented workers face criminal conviction and deportation.

Why are our Environments so Hostile?

Right-wing policymakers bear much of the responsibility for the institutional production of migrant vulnerability. In particular, the notion that migrants drain public services has led to the popularity of ‘welfare chauvinism’ across the Global North. Welfare benefits are increasingly restricted to citizens, with migrants’ access to social support stratified according to perceptions of a migrant’s value to the host state. This has major implications for liberal discourse around human rights; increasingly, said ‘rights’ are only accessible to citizens and migrants who can prove their substantial contribution to a host country.

It is difficult to estimate the fiscal contribution of migrants, but consensus is that they generally contribute to the economies of their host societies. One reputable study by Dustman and Frattini found that EEA migrants coming to the U.K. between 2001 and 2011 brought a net fiscal contribution of £20.2 billion, and non-EEA migrants £5.2 billion. Despite this, migrants have subsequently excluded even more from public funds.

Immigration controls are often justified on the basis of ensuring priority care is given to native citizens, as with Gordon Brown’s infamous slogan ‘British jobs for British workers’ in 2007. Yet the production of a vulnerable migrant workforce, brought in to fill the roles that nationals won’t take up, also has troubling implications for the national workforce. Firstly, it does nothing to address the root causes of why work in certain industries is unsustainable, perhaps due to low wages and poor working conditions. Secondly, the institutional exploitation of migrant labour undermines labour law and sets a dangerous precedent for other vulnerable social groups at risk of having their rights taken away.

Who is Profiting?

The major beneficiary of migrant workers’ exploitation is, of course, the host nation. The nation-state that is able to redefine ‘rights’ as something only applicable to citizens is able then to legally justify restricting migrant access to support. In this way, Virginia Mantouvalou situates the terms of the Seasonal Worker Visa in a wider framework of ‘state-mediated structures of injustice’. She defines this as ‘instances where legal rules with an appearance of legitimacy create vulnerability that is systematically exploited.’ Couched in a populist rhetoric of protecting the job market and public services - whilst discursively reconstructing migrants who break unjust rules as ‘criminals’ - the government benefits from only partially allowing migrants into the national community.

EEA migrants coming to the U.K. between 2001 and 2011 brought a net fiscal contribution of £20.2 billion, and non-EEA migrants £5.2 billion

Then come private employers who evade pressure to better working conditions and raise wages by plugging labour shortages with a workforce deprived of rights. Also worth mentioning are the host of other actors comprising the ‘migration industry’ – for example, the middlemen who charge thousands of pounds to secure migrants’ visas, and the growing number of private detention providers who will deport those who can’t afford the flight home.

Lastly come people like me: citizens of high-income countries, in whose name the job market is protected and welfare provisions saved. So, when you’re munching away on an apple come your legally-entitled lunch-break, take a second to think: who picked that apple?

Check out FLEX’s work to see their recommendations on reforming the Seasonal Worker Visa