Filipino workers call for the confiscation of some recruitment agencies' licenses. d_pata pata/Demotix. All Rights Reserved.
In many people’s minds, words like trafficking and modern slavery are associated with sexual exploitation, especially of women and children. As the International Labour Organisation has highlighted, however, the majority of the estimated 21 million victims of ‘modern slavery’ worldwide are exploited for their labour. In diverse sectors including agriculture and food processing, manufacturing, construction and domestic work, vulnerable workers are subject to coercion that is often exacerbated by the lack of a direct employment relation. In other words, from agricultural labour gangs to subcontracted workers in factories, labour intermediaries play a role in creating a hyper-flexible workforce. In the broadest sense, and in human relations theory, labour intermediaries are any individuals or organizations that stand between a worker and the firm or entity that requires labour. They act as brokers to fill jobs and they ‘lease’ labour (in the case of temporary workers) to companies seeking flexibility. However, as research in sectors like horticulture has shown, labour intermediaries or contractors are key players in forced labour situations.
The problem is that this reality clashes with the approaches of most governments towards labour intermediaries. Since the mid-1980s, the trend has been acceptance and deregulation of markets for temp workers. I first became interested in the UK’s Gangmaster Licensing Authority (GLA), which was established to regulate labour brokers and recruiters—still called gangmasters in Britain—after the tragic drowning of 24 undocumented Chinese cockle pickers at Morecambe Bay in 2004, because it represented a rare tightening of regulations. The tragedy had spurred the government to finally increase oversight of labour intermediaries in the agriculture, horticulture, food processing and shellfish gathering sectors, but in only those areas. The GLA legislation implicitly recognised the particular vulnerability of migrant workers. However, it stopped short of increasing oversight of labour contractors in all sectors characterised by what the geographer Jane Wills has called the ‘migrant division of labour. When I moved back to my home country of Canada from the UK last year, the UK was in the process of debating its new Modern Slavery Bill. A major concern of migrants’ and workers’ advocates was the role of the GLA, which was being forced to do more with fewer resources after budget cuts at the same time as it was being touted as a possible model for regulation in other sectors.
