FRA released a report on migrants' severe labour exploitation in the EU

The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (the FRA) released yesterday its report, Protecting migrant workers from exploitation in the EU, that focuses on the workers' perspectives. The report is informed by fieldwork carried out in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and the UK. As the UK FRANET Contractor, HRLC conducted research interviews and focus groups with adult workers who have been victims of severe labour exploitation.

The report was launched yesterday at a conference in Brussels, organised by the FRA, in cooperation with the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the EU, the European Economic Area/Norway Grants and the Council Secretariat. Dr Alex Toft, co-author of the UK report, was attending on behalf of HRLC.

Research findings show an urgent need for European governments to do more to tackle severe labour exploitation in firms, factories and farms across the EU. The report reveals that over half of the workers found their jobs by word of mouth but ended up in ‘concentration camp conditions’ where ‘they keep us like dogs, like slaves’. Interviews across the eight Member states found that exploited workers are:

• paid as little as €5-a-day;
• forced to pay debts to traffickers before earning a cent;
• working 92-hour, seven-day weeks, with no holiday or time off;
• sleeping in shipping containers, with no water or electricity;
• monitored on CCTV 24/7 by bosses;
• subjected to beatings, verbal abuse and threats of further violence;
• given no protective clothing to work with hazardous chemicals;
• facing sexual and gender-based violence or forced into moving drugs;
• threatened of dismissal and deportation when they ask for their wages.

One area of concern for the UK that was highlighted by the research is the use of recruitment agencies, with almost one fifth of interviewees who ended up facing labour exploitation having been recruited through an agency. The majority of domestic workers interviewed in the UK for example, were recruited in the Philippines by an agency specialising in sending Filipinos to work abroad.

The prevalence of “gangmasters” (licensed labour providers and employment agencies who provide workers for the agriculture, forestry, horticulture, shellfish-gathering, and food-processing and -packaging sectors) in the UK also raised significant concerns. The majority of EU workers interviewed were recruited by gangmasters either in their home country or through people who introduced them to the gangmasters in the UK who often went on to withhold pay from the exploited workers.