Levana Coker had recently moved to Dorset, on England’s south coast, when she first saw the advert in her local Job Centre. It was for a housekeeper at a large-scale accommodation site, she said, £11.50 an hour for the first month, rising to £12 per hour after that. Levana was training to become a dog groomer but needed a job to stay afloat until she qualified. She applied, and was duly accepted.
It was the summer of 2023. Levana didn’t realise it at first but the job was on the Bibby Stockholm, the controversial barge that would go on to house a total of 901 asylum-seeking people in Portland, a small island attached to the mainland by a narrow causeway.
“I got the job before Bibby even moored,” Levana told openDemocracy. “I thought our role was to help people – that we were there to support people who needed our help.
