Marking this year’s Labour Day, Ben Ryan explores the complex dynamics of the UK labour market, highlighting the intersection of work and exploitation. 01/05/2024
Working at a modern slavery charity (see more about Medaille Trust here) you see closely the double–edged sword that the UK labour market represents. On the one hand, the right and capacity to work is pivotal to the recovery and development of people who have had their dignity and agency denied them by their exploiters. On the other, the UK labour market is riddled with abuse and exploitation that strip out and compromise dignity on a significant scale. A key barrier to a better attitude to work is the absence of tougher policing and enforcement measures.
Catholic Social Teaching (those aspects of Church teaching that concern social and economic structures in society) helps to unpack this tension with its conception of the dignity of labour. This teaching finds deep resonance across the political and theological spectrums. At its most basic, it is that work is valuable, not only in allowing someone to support themselves and others but also in providing a sense of purpose and dignity. Saint John Paul II summarised this in the 1981 Papal Encyclical Laborem exercens – “[work] is not only good in the sense that it is useful or something to enjoy; it is also good as being something worthy… something that corresponds to man’s dignity, that expresses the dignity and increases it”.
Crucially though, Catholic Social Teaching, while extolling the virtue of work, is not blind to its abuses. As John Paul II argued on a different occasion, “The obligation to earn one’s bread by the sweat of one’s brow also presumes the right to do so. A society in which this right is systematically denied, in which economic policies do not allow workers to reach satisfactory levels of employment, cannot be justified from an ethical point of view, nor can that society attain social peace.” (Centesimus annus,1991).
Certainly, in the modern slavery sector that abuse of the dignity of labour is very apparent. Estimates of modern slavery and trafficking in the UK are notoriously difficult, but the Global Slavery Index put it at 122,000 last year. Just over 17,000 potential victims were identified by the UK’s National Referral Mechanism – an all–time high – last year. Not all of these are victims of labour exploitation, but it is the most common form of slavery identified in the statistics.
Forced labour is endemic in a number of industries including farming, hospitality, beauty, construction, manufacturing, car washes, and domestic service. In recent times, it has become apparent how vulnerable the care sector has been to such abuse. In our desperation to staff the collapsing social care sector, a vast number of visas have been given to care workers, mostly to low paid temporary workers from non–EU countries. The enforcement and monitoring of these visas has been woefully lacking, a feature exploited by traffickers and abusers. Calls to Unseen’s Modern Slavery Helpline concerning care sector workers increased by 606% in a year in 2022, and now account 18% of all identified potential victims through the hotline.
All of which makes for a salutary reminder that a humanized, dignified economy and conception of work is not an organic or natural development. Predators identify weaknesses in enforcement and compliance and exploit the complicity of companies and consumers turning a blind eye to abuses if it means lower prices and higher profits.
The predators turn significant profits on remarkably minimal risk. A Centre for Social Justice report in 2022 estimated that based on National Crime Agency figures there were 6,000–8,000 offenders involved in modern slavery that year. Yet in 2020, there were just 91 prosecutions and 56 convictions for modern slavery offenders. Nor are those successfully caught likely to serve a long prison sentence. In theory, modern slavery can under particular circumstances carry a life sentence and successive pieces of legislation have increased potential sentences time and again. Despite this only one perpetrator has received a sentence of more than 15 years. The average custodial sentence for modern slavery offences in 2021 was four years and one month. Meanwhile in the past few weeks, the government has announced a slashing of the budget of the GLAA – the agency tasked with investigating and enforcing labour exploitation.
This is the too rarely identified part of the picture for creating a good, humanized and ethical approach to work. To take on the most sinister aspects of the violation of the dignity of work needs a strong state–backed enforcement regime with serious teeth. It needs to be able to aggressively stamp out those abuse. The present reality is that it is far too easy to profitably make a trade in human lives without significant consequences, and that leaves an ethical hole below the waterline in any model of good labour.
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