Migration for work is nothing new to the UK. Individuals have always moved in search of work, whether from Scotland to the East Midlands, to work in the steel industry in the 1950s or from Ireland to England in the nineteenth century, to work in construction. More recently, successive governments in the 1950s and 1960s encouraged migration. Migrant workers drove buses, worked in hospitals and kept many essential services afloat then, as they do today. But from the 1970s through to the mid 1990s migration was more likely to occur in relation to family reunion and with the aim of settlement. The idea of migrant workers, whose aim was to work, possibly only for a few months or years and then return to their country of origin, is a relatively recent development and one for which UK unions were not necessarily prepared.

In a TUC report, Overworked, Underpaid and Over Here, provides examples of the poor treatment of new migrants, with the report concluding that “their weak bargaining power” contributed to their exploitation. Obviously the way out of this poor treatment involves organising migrant workers into strong and effective trade unions.  However, recruiting and organising new workers does present new challenges. In both the research we carried out for the Health and Safety Executive and in our research for the East of England Development Agency, union organisers contacted identified a number of problems inhibiting recruitment. These included:

• Fear of victimisation by employers and agencies;
• Inability to communicate due to lack of a common language;
• Mobility and the temporary nature of much of the employment available;
• Existing difficulties in organising the sectors, even in respect of UK staff;
• The fact that migrants are more likely to work for agencies and less likely to work directly for the employer. Unions historically have had limited success in recruiting agency workers;
• The fact that they may see their stay in the UK as temporary and therefore not see the relevance of joining a union;
• They may earn such low wages that union membership subscriptions seem excessive; and
• A lack of a tradition of union organisation among some groups of migrant workers, or a suspicion of unions, based on their historic role in their country of origin.

Both in our interviews with more than 250 migrant workers over the two research projects and in interviews with trade union officials, we were made aware of real difficulties that the unionisation of new migrant workers presented. Although over the last few years, unions have adopted policies on the recruitment and organisation of migrant workers, in general these policies have been introduced by unions at national or regional level and while there have been a number of notable gains, in terms of membership, these have perhaps not been as great as might have been hoped for and as a result most migrant workers are unorganised.

Our interviews with migrant workers confirmed that few were members of trade unions. Those who were in unions were mainly from Portugal and from Eastern Europe, but their membership in general was more related to where they worked than to their particular commitment to trade unions. Those that had joined a union had usually done so because there was one in their workplace, but had not necessarily used the services of the union in relation to their individual employment. As with UK workers, migrants had joined out of a sense of solidarity or as insurance should things go wrong for them, with one worker describing his reason for joining the union as something that was there to help “if there is unfair treatment”.

Their current lack of union membership was partially due to the fact that they were frequently changing factories or agencies and were moving around the country, thus making them more difficult to organise. Another factor was the relatively high proportion of migrants working in sectors like hotels and catering and in agriculture, which historically are not well organised. Migrant workers’ low wages also played a part in their decision not to join a union, as the cost of membership had to be considered. Additionally some of the workers we interviewed were sceptical about unions and not clear what benefit they would have from joining.

Inability to communicate with migrant workers has been identified as a barrier to recruitment. Some unions have been attempting to address problems of communication, by translating recruitment literature into the languages of the main migrant groups and through working with community organisations and representatives from different migrant communities. In the East of England this has been most successful in relation to the Portuguese communities, where links with workers have been established and where some recruitment has taken place, but again mainly in those factories where union organisation had already existed and where there was a tradition of recruitment.

Another issue is the extent to which union full-time officials at local and regional level have actually ‘bought into’ their union’s national policy on recruiting and organising migrant workers. In some cases, in the course of our research, it was clear that busy full-time officials were not acting on union policies, not necessarily out of opposition to them, but due to the time and energies that would have to be assigned to this type of recruitment that is relatively labour intensive. One way that this might be demonstrated is in the very low response rates to our requests for information on what the union was doing both locally and regionally. While it is the case that union officers are very constrained by time, the response rate appeared to be much lower than when requests for information have been made on other subject areas. This suggests a certain ambivalence among trade union full-time officials and activists as to their relationships with new migrants. On the one hand there is a policy imperative to recruit such workers into the union, but there are also recognised contradictions which unions face, between the protection of their existing membership and the accommodation of new workers.

There are thus complex reasons that may account for low levels of recruitment, that go beyond those identified by union full-time officers and listed above. One such issue is of whether migrant workers are perceived as a ‘shield’ protecting others from having to undertake unacceptable forms of work. Employers may see the use of migrants as a way of having work performed in conditions that might otherwise be contested by organised workers. Organised workers for their part may consciously or unconsciously feel that so long as migrants are not union members, there is no obligation to defend their interests, particularly where, in the absence of sufficient strength of organisation, that can successfully challenge their employer’s power, such unacceptable forms of work would have to be shared by all workers, local and migrant. Yet contradictorily as we have noted, the research is clear that currently unions are more likely to gain new recruits in workplaces where union activists already exist.

Additionally strategies around migrants mainly seem to focus on recruitment. A more rounded strategy, focusing on wider terms and conditions’ issues was less evident, although of course there are notable exceptions, for example, the campaign for a living wage among London’s cleaners. But these high profile campaigns are not necessarily typical of union activities with migrant workers. In particular, in relation to our research on health and safety, very little information was provided to the researchers on strategies in relation to migrant worker health and safety, in contrast to the willingness of unions, at national level at least, to publicise their recruitment and organising campaigns that generally were not so focused on specific issues.

In the East of England research, of the 19 national and regional unions that completed our postal questionnaire, the main issues they raised, in relation to migrant workers were:

• language and a lack of knowledge of English and how it was a major barrier in the workplace, leading to communication problems, not just between managements and the workforce but within the workforce itself;
• exploitation and racism encountered by migrant workers, with at least one union reporting having frequently received complaints about bullying and harassment;
• problems that migrant workers raised with the unions included those related to family issues, banking and religious issues;
• there were problems over a lack of clarity over pay slips and unions believed that employers should be obliged to provide a clearer explanation of pay slips and pay deductions; and
• migrant workers required training in how to raise grievances with their employers.

The research also documents evidence of good practice. For example, SERTUC, the regional TUC for the East of England, was providing free one-day courses for its members on employment rights, but also permitting access to non-members at a small charge. It had translated the course materials into Spanish and Polish and planed to produce them in Portuguese. The TUC has established a website that provides accessible advice on rights at work.(i)  However, our interviews with migrant workers also suggest that in some cases unions had not made sufficient efforts to locate and recruit them. One of those interviewed had been working in a unionised workplace without even knowing it.
 
In some cases it is individual migrants who end up approaching the union rather than the other way about. But as a consequence migrants may be joining unions as isolated individuals rather than in a group. And due to their mobility they change employers frequently and are therefore not in a position themselves to organise in their workplaces.

One conclusion that we can draw from the research is that there is still a gap between the policy position which most unions have adopted and which is welcoming of the recruitment and organisation of migrant workers and the practice locally and regionally which sees barriers to recruitment and organisation and cannot construct simple and low cost (both in terms of time and energy) methods of overcoming these barriers. But if recruitment ideals cannot be translated into effective organisation that not only brings migrant workers into unions but also brings unions into workplaces from which they are currently absent, it is difficult to see how unions can reverse their membership decline.

Sonia McKay
Working Lives Research Institute
May 2006

(i) www.worksmart.org.uk

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