Brexit promised to end cheap labour from Europe, but it only served to change the accents of Britain's exploited workers
On the tenth anniversary of the Brexit vote, let’s be honest about what was promised and what was delivered, writes workers' rights expert Dr Dora-Olivia Vicol
Ten years ago, Brexit campaigners made a simple promise to voters: end free movement and your wages will go up.
Listen to this article
They claimed that employers were relying on cut-price EU workers rather than investing in their British counterparts.
The appeal of that promise was understandable. Workers would have more power, wages would rise and the race to the bottom would stop. But that’s not how things unfolded.
A decade later, real wage growth has stagnated. The foreign workers who prop up our care homes, NHS, food supply chains and hospitality sector haven't disappeared. They're simply coming from further afield, except now they’re on restrictive, employer-sponsored visas that make them even more susceptible to crushingly low pay or overwork.
For over ten years I have run the Work Rights Centre, a charity that provides employment and immigration legal advice to vulnerable workers. The exploitation we are seeing now among people who came to the UK from South-East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa on employer-sponsored visas is like nothing we have ever encountered before.
The end of free movement didn’t improve work conditions. It just changed the accents and created an underclass of workers who are too afraid to report labour exploitation, lest they lose their visas.
This isn't an accident. It is the outcome of an immigration system that hands employers complete control over their migrant employees’ status. The Boris Johnson government introduced it first. The Labour government, for all their talk of giving workers a new deal, simply reproduced it.
When your right to remain in this country depends on keeping your boss happy, you don't complain about the fourteen-hour shifts. You don't push back on the wages that vanish in unexplained deductions. You don't report the mouldy caravan you're sharing with six other people on a farm.
‘Sue them! Take them to the tribunal!’ you may say. But with cases taking up to four years to be heard, many migrant workers will have had their visas expire long before they get a chance to put their case to a judge. We recently won a landmark case for an Indian man duped into paying £17,000 in recruitment fees, but was never provided with the work promised in the UK, and was forced to rely on food vouchers. But that took more than two years of work.
Now the government is doubling down. Shabana Mahmood’s "Earned" Settlement proposals will extend the wait for settlement to a decade, keeping migrant workers trapped in sponsored work for longer, under the thumb of their employers. Whatever your view on immigration levels, a system that deliberately prolongs worker vulnerability is not controlled migration. It is state-sanctioned exploitation.
On the tenth anniversary of the Brexit vote, let’s be honest about what was promised and what was delivered. Ministers must drop “Earned” Settlement and abolish the visa sponsorship system underpinning Britain’s two-tier workforce.
____________________
Dr Dora-Olivia Vicol is CEO of the Work Rights Centre.
LBC Opinion provides a platform for diverse opinions on current affairs and matters of public interest.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official LBC position.
To contact us email opinion@lbc.co.uk