Category: Europe

Lessons we’ve learned from COVID so far

Posted on by Emily

By Bridget Anderson 

Far from being ‘all in it together’ COVID-19 is exposing the mechanisms that promote and maintain inequality within as well as between states. In the UK, Sweden and the USA, among other countries, evidence is emerging that Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people are disproportionately likely to catch and die from coronavirus. Increased susceptibility is in part because of poorer living conditions and long-term health inequalities, but also the likelihood of working in ‘forward facing’ and essential jobs.

These discrepant vulnerabilities and their association with race and class divisions are acknowledged, but citizenship status has so far been overlooked in reports and data on those who have caught and died from the virus. In a recent EUI hosted webinar, Friedrich Poeschel illustrated that non-citizens account for a substantial share of employment in many sectors that are now defined as essential.

Ambulances wait in the street
NHS ambulances collect COVID-19 patients in London. Photo by Joe Kibria on Unsplash.

This includes health professionals: in the US 25% of doctors are non-citizens, in Switzerland 34%. In the UK, Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care tweeted on 17th November 2019: ‘It’s the National Health Service not the International Health Service. Everyone should make a fair contribution towards our NHS so after Brexit we’ll extend the NHS surcharge to all non-UK residents.’ But the staffing of the NHS is international: 37% of hospital doctors gained their qualification outside the UK. Furthermore, a report by the Migration Advisory Committee found that migrant nurses are paid 22% less than their UK national colleagues. The NHS surcharges Hancock is so pleased with are currently imposed on all non-EU citizens, meaning that nurses, doctors, care workers and others on the frontline have to pay a £400 annual ‘NHS surcharge’ for themselves and for each of their family members.

The second reading of the Immigration Bill was postponed on Tuesday. Perhaps the appetite for the crackdown on ‘low-skilled workers’ from abroad is flagging. The COVID crisis has exposed how many of the jobs on which our everyday lives depend – the hospital cleaners, supermarket shelf stackers, retail workers, drivers, carers and agricultural and food-processing workers – are low waged, low status and undertaken by BAME people and migrants. It suggests we have to go further than seeking to expand definitions of skill and challenge whether skill is an adequate measure of value at all.

One of the consequences of the focus of immigration policy on skills is that non-EU nationals working in these essential sectors may be on spousal visas, visitor visas, cultural exchange type visas, with permanent residence or simply working illegally. This is likely to be particularly true for the precarious workers in the gig economy who work via platforms such as Deliveroo, Instacart and Uber. It is notoriously difficult to measure the gig economy, and migrant participation in it is even more difficult, but evidence from the US and Europe suggests that migrant workers are a significant proportion of this labour force.

The vast majority of workers in the gig economy are vulnerable. This is not only because they do face-to-face work, but also because they typically have no employee benefits. Researchers in France surveyed bike delivery workers two days before and two days after lockdown and found that those workers with incomes under 1,000 Euros a month were most likely to keep on working.

Man rides a bicycle carrying a large bag containing a food delivery
Takeaway food delivery. Photo by Patrick Connor Klopf on Unsplash.

Migrant workers are made additionally vulnerable because they often have no safety net at all. In the UK, for instance, many legally resident and legally working migrants have a condition of No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF). This means that they cannot claim Universal Credit, which is the basic safety net for people who cannot work. There is a public health risk to having people in a situation where they are compelled to work. If the COVID-19 crisis has taught us anything it is that what is bad for migrants is not good for citizens, in fact we are seeing it is very bad for citizens as well.

One of the perceived advantages of migrant labour on migrant worker visas is that migrants are not only often lower waged but also easier to hire and fire as temporary workers. Time is an important factor in demand and supply of migrant worker visa holders, who usually enter on temporary programmes. COVID has exposed the taken-for-granted access to low-waged seasonal migrant labour with its flexibility and poor wages that relies not just on them wanting to come, but on international transport infrastructure, and sending states permitting their citizens to move.

These labour supply chains are not as resilient as imagined. The obvious example is seasonal agricultural workers. Producers in Canada, Australia, US and the European Union are seriously concerned about labour shortages and the European Commission last week called on member states to allow seasonal agricultural workers to travel within the EU as essential workers. Even at this time of lockdown in the UK, large farms have been chartering planes to bring in temporary workers and labour providers and last week requested the UK government to charter planes for labour supply.

One alternative to employing migrant labour and to improving employment conditions has been offshoring. But offshoring can reduce supply chain resilience. We are learning the hard way about the perils of fragile and long supply chains in vital supplies. The UK government might say that it makes more sense to import strawberries than to be dependent on seasonal agricultural workers. But that does not mean that British consumers are not dependent on low-waged migrant labour – they are just dependent on low-waged Moroccan labour working in Spain, instead, where the UK government has no levers of control over supply.

Let’s re-think how we value work, both in terms of money and status. And may the lessons from COVID last.

‘You Clap For Me Now’ – The coronavirus poem on racism and immigration in Britain.

Bridget Anderson is Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship at the University of Bristol and Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol. 

 

‘So far from justice’: On the frontline of the Hostile Environment

Posted on by Emily

By Natasha Carver

‘Esther, can you see Amir. He’s been refused Section 95 support …’

‘Samira, I need you to do an urgent HC1 for this chap with kidney failure …’

‘Mariana, we’ve got a young boy off a lorry just turned up. He has nothing. He’s with Muna in the main hall just now getting a cup of tea and some warm clothes …’

Harriet, the Caseworker Coordinator, is allocating appointments. If the work sounds complicated, it is: Section 95, Schedule 10, Section 4, Pre-Action Protocol, HC1. Anyone could be forgiven for thinking that Harriet’s team were hot-shot lawyers, well-remunerated for their extensive knowledge and experience. But this is Bristol Refugee Rights (BRR), and Harriet’s team are all volunteers.

A teenager holds a mask he has made in front of his face
A young migrant shows his craft work at BRR

Some years ago, when I worked in the sector, there were specialist providers who received statutory funding to help asylum-seekers – who are not permitted to work – to apply for financial support and accommodation. But government policy put an end to that funding and now, in Bristol at least, those seeking access to the little to which they are entitled come in despair to the advice team at BRR. I’m an academic now and a trustee of BRR, and I’ve come to find out about the everyday impact of the Hostile Environment on its intended targets.

When she was Home Secretary, Theresa May enacted a policy aimed at creating an environment ‘so hostile’, that those seeking safety and security in the UK would abandon their quest, give up fighting for their rights and entitlements, and leave the country. This policy has not been successful: the number of those removed voluntarily and by force from the UK has fallen year by year, while recent research estimates that for every ‘authorised’ migrant in the UK, there is another ‘unauthorised’ one.

But the policy has caused untold harm to many. The national media has reported on some of the casualties. The plight, for example, of the highly-skilled, recruited with the hope that they would make the UK their home and then subsequently refused leave to remain after many years on the spurious basis of tax return discrepancies. The abrupt curtailment of the visas of tens of thousands of students following evidence that an unspecified number had cheated at an English test. And the terrible injustices and hardships suffered by many of the (often British) children of the Windrush generation.

These groups of ‘authorised’ migrants and/or their children are portrayed as being the innocent victims of the Hostile Environment Policy; collateral damage caused by confusing unlawful with undocumented. But what about the toll of this policy on its intended targets – asylum-seekers, failed asylum-seekers and the ‘unauthorised’? And what about the damage to British justice and reputation? Can we really still claim to be a welcoming society?

Once Harriet has finished allocations, she asks the team if there are any issues that need to be discussed. Esther relates that she gave up after spending two and a half hours waiting in a telephone queue last week on a routine call to Migrant Help, the charity awarded the Home Office contract as the ‘point of call’ for migrants who have questions about their applications or need to inform the Home Office about a change in circumstances. I’m aghast. Two and a half hours! But Esther is not complaining about the length of the wait. Kafkaesque-style government bureaucracy has become so normalised for this team that waiting – the very condition of being an asylum-seeker – is no longer noticeable as an outrage. She is complaining instead about Migrant Help’s recent decision to remove the indication regarding the position you are in the queue and therefore the potential length of the wait.

Later, Advice Team Manager Elinor explains to me that before the introduction of the Hostile Environment Policy, asylum-seekers and caseworkers could contact the Home Office directly about their applications for the basic support to which they are entitled: £37.75 per week and accommodation. The whole process of applying usually took a few weeks, and if further evidence was required, the Home Office would call and request it. Now, applications typically take twice as long, and then have to be chased and actively pursued by BRR volunteers. For a new claimant that usually means 6-8 weeks of living on the streets or sofa-surfing. Migrant Help is the only point of contact for everything support-related, including numerous housing problems such as broken boilers, rat infestations, major damp problems, no locks on the door. One BRR member spent six months with no running water.

‘They would be better called “Migrant Barrier”,’ says one volunteer. ‘They do not help.’

Volunteers recount experiences of waiting for hours, only to be cut off when they get through; of staff who seem to have little to no understanding about the process and who mis-advise. Complaints about the atrocious service fall on deaf ears: this is after all one aspect of how an environment is made hostile. Meanwhile the process of claiming financial support has become more complex and more bureaucratic. The volunteers give me examples where the Home Office has sent out a request for a different document week after week, or even the same document, repeatedly causing delay to applications. Or worse, refusing applications outright over failure to tick a box, meaning that they need to be appealed which takes more time.

I ask them to describe the system to me:

‘So far from justice.’

‘Insanely complicated.’

‘Chaotic but also cruel.’

‘Hostile. Deliberately hostile.’

A young man draws a picture
A young migrant at BRR draws about his experience as a refugee

These are applications made not just for the welfare of the migrant who will be destitute without this basic entitlement, but also for the welfare of our communities and the streets where we live. Street homelessness takes a terrible toll on the mental and physical health of the individual involved, but it also has a financial and social toll on all of us.

After the meeting I am given the opportunity to observe Esther as she talks with Amir, the BRR member who has been refused ‘Section 95’. He had applied for just the financial element because he was staying with a local family. They themselves were on a very low income and struggled to feed an extra person. The decision to refuse Amir has led the family to decide that they can no longer offer him accommodation. They have written a letter explaining their circumstances: feeding Amir on their very tight budget means they have had to scrimp on heating and clothing. They add that Amir often wakes up screaming, which disturbs them and their children.

Amir must now apply for both the financial element and accommodation. He has nowhere else to go. He is softly spoken, apologetic and deeply sad. He tells Esther that he has not seen his own family for ten years. Esther takes him through the application patiently and slowly. She says everything of importance at least three times. She tells him right at the outset that he is unlikely to be housed in Bristol. He tells Esther that he has friends here and a support network, and his mental health is bad and it would be too difficult to move somewhere else. Esther explains that she understands all this but if he applies for accommodation, he will be housed somewhere else, possibly far, far away.

While the asylum support system has justifiably been described as ‘disabling’, Esther is consistently enabling. She and fellow advice volunteers are just one part of BRR’s aptly named ‘Welcome Team’, a 30-strong group of volunteers who do all they can to provide hospitality and warmth to counter the overt government hostility.

‘Sometimes there’s not much we can practically do,’ explains Mariana, ‘but just listening to the person and treating them like a fellow human being goes such a long way.’

By the time I leave, the line of silent, crushed and despairing faces that waited outside the hall on my arrival has gone. In its place, the hall reverberates with the noise of chatter, games, crafts, cooking and laughter.

If you would like to help Amir and others affected by the Hostile Environment Policy any money you donate to Bristol Refugee Rights between 3rd and 10th December will be doubled as part of #ChristmasChallenge19 as part of The Big Give: https://www.bristolrefugeerights.org/news-and-events/urgent-appeal/.

Note: The names of the BRR volunteers and members have been changed in order to protect identities.

Natasha Carver is a Research Associate at Cardiff School of Law and Politics. She is currently researching criminal prosecutions involving migrants.

 

The hostile environment confuses unlawful with undocumented, with disastrous consequences

Posted on by Emily

By Colin Yeo

If a policy that deprives residents of jobs, homes and money is going to be introduced, one would hope it would be targeted using the best available data with strong failsafe mechanisms in place to reverse any errors. It would, you would have thought, be a disaster if innocent individuals ended up being forced into penury and out of the country as a result of incorrect information.

In reality, Home Office data on the immigration status of residents of the United Kingdom is often wrong and this has become increasingly clear in the years following Theresa May’s announcement in 2012 of her intention to make Britain a ‘really hostile environment for illegal immigrants‘. Public confirmation was provided as early as 2013 after a contract was awarded to the private company Capita to track down 174,000 suspected unlawful residents on the Home Office database. As soon as the company started sending out threatening text messages, though, it became clear that lawful residents and even British citizens were somehow on the database (Dixon, 2018). In 2016 it emerged that hostile environment bank account checks were throwing up incorrect results as much as 10% of the time (Bolt, 2016). In these cases, people were wrongly being refused permission to open a bank account. Officials admitted that relevant changes to a person’s status might not be entered on the relevant database ‘until some months after the event, and that data was often entered in the wrong field, commonly as free text.’

Similar issues arose with the new duty on the DVLA to cancel driving licences. The Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration examined the use of these powers in 2016 (Bolt, 2016). The Home Office made 9,732 revocation requests to the DVLA in 2015, all but meeting the target set of 10,000 per year. Some of these licences were wrongly revoked, though. The same year, 259 licences had to be reinstated after complaints. In the meantime, those affected would have been unable to drive or would have committed the strict liability criminal offence of driving without a licence. As the Chief Inspector said, ‘the Home Office did not appear to appreciate the seriousness of such errors for the individuals affected.’

Diagram showing who the hostile environment affects

As well as getting the facts wrong on people it does know about, there are many people living in the UK the Home Office does not know about. The vast majority are lawful residents and many are British citizens. They just do not have documents yet, perhaps because they did not really need them until the hostile environment was launched in 2012. There is currently no population database or register for the UK, nor is there a central register of British citizens. There are plenty of British citizens who have never applied for a passport, for example. The last census showed that 17% of UK residents (about 10 million people) do not have passports, the majority of whom are likely to be British citizens. There is simply no reason for the Home Office to know about these people and, traditionally, it would be considered none of the Home Office’s business to know about them. There are also plenty of foreign nationals living in the UK unknown to the Home Office, millions of whom are lawfully resident. Some have been resident for decades and were granted status many years ago, before Home Office computer records began. Nevertheless, they are all potential victims of the hostile environment.

One of the fundamental flaws in the whole conception of the hostile environment scheme is that it is intended to affect unlawful residents but it is actually aimed at undocumented residents. Sometimes these things overlap and a person who has no documents is also unlawfully resident. But that is very far from always being the case.

This leads us to the most famous victims of all of the hostile environment: the Windrush generation. Broadly speaking, this is the label that has been attached to lawful long-term residents from Commonwealth countries. Many either came to the UK themselves when they were in effect British citizens or are the children of those who did so (before the British Nationality Act 1981 there was no such thing as a ‘British citizen’, just ‘Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies’). Typically, they are lawfully resident because they were granted a status called Indefinite Leave to Remain many years ago, sometimes automatically by law and sometimes in the form of a stamp in a long-expired passport. For decades, they lived in the UK without anyone asking them to prove their right to be here. That started to change as the hostile environment geared up from 2012 onwards.

In 2014, Fiona Bawdon researched and wrote a report entitled Chasing Status for the Legal Action Group (names were changed for the purposes of the report). The report highlighted the plight of thousands of long-term UK residents who were unable to prove their immigration status or have ‘irregular’ status, despite having lived legally in the country for most of their lives. Bawdon called these residents ‘surprised Brits’ because they felt British, many thought they actually were British, and yet they had been caught out by the new hostile environment laws.

The Chasing Status report seemed to sink without trace. After the Brexit referendum in 2016, though, the media found a new appetite for stories critical of the Home Office following a string of articles about generally white, middle-class EU migrants who were facing difficulties proving their permanent residence. A journalist at the Guardian, Amelia Gentleman, started to investigate the cases of destitute Commonwealth migrants. Realising that the examples she was seeing must be the tip of an iceberg, she unearthed a shocking series of similar cases (see Gentleman, 2019, for the full account). As Bawdon had earlier shown and predicted, lawful residents were finding themselves turfed out of jobs and homes, denied life-saving NHS care and threatened with deportation to a country they barely knew.

In April 2018, what became known as the Windrush scandal finally received the attention it deserved. Immediately before a Commonwealth heads of government meeting, Prime Minister Theresa May refused to meet with a delegation of twelve Caribbean high commissioners to discuss the situation of long-term residents facing immigration difficulties. An article about this diplomatic snub appeared on the front page of the Guardian. Suddenly, as Gentleman writes, ‘ministers who had shown no interest were falling over themselves to express profound sorrow.’ Home Secretary Amber Rudd was forced to appear at the Commons dispatch box to make the first of two comprehensive admissions that the Windrush generation had been treated ‘appallingly’. Theresa May herself was forced repeatedly to apologise, although her initial efforts were weak attempts of the ‘sorry-not-sorry’ variety. Belatedly, the special unit that Bawdon had advocated in 2014 was set up, along with a compensation fund for those affected.

The fundamental flaw in the design of the hostile environment persists, though, and this will have major consequences if or when the UK leaves the EU and scraps free movement rules for EU citizens. This is because the majority of lawful residents without status papers are citizens of EU countries who entered the UK under free movement laws. Immigration officials are literally forbidden from stamping the passports of EU citizens entering and leaving the UK and have no idea why an EU citizen is entering the UK or for how long he or she stays.

Brexit therefore represents a huge challenge; no-one knows how many EU citizens live in the UK but estimates go as high as four million. When EU law ceases to apply in the UK, all of these EU citizens and their family members need to have acquired a new immigration status under UK law. If they do not apply by the deadline, they will become unlawfully resident. No registration campaign around the world has ever achieved a 100% success rate and it is estimated that as many as hundreds of thousands of EU citizens will miss the deadline. Some will be elderly residents in care homes, some will be young children, others will not speak good English, some may be afraid of applying and some will have believed the Leave campaign promise that their rights would be protected. Some will just be disorganised or unaware; a lot of people miss the deadline for filing their tax return every year even though they get fined for doing so. Some may refuse on principle.

No matter their reasons, the effect of being exposed to the hostile environment will be the same. Their jobs will be lost, their bank accounts closed down, their tenancies terminated and access to the NHS and welfare benefits ended.

Colin Yeo is a barrister, writer, campaigner and consultant specialising in immigration law. He founded and edits the Free Movement immigration law blog.

 

Everyday Integration

Posted on by Emma

By Bridget Anderson

The new Conservative leader, Boris Johnson, during the July hustings in Darlington complained that, ‘There are too many too often there are parts of our country and parts of London still and other cities as well where English is not spoken by some people as their first language, and that needs to be changed and people need to be allowed to take part in the economy and in society in the way that that shared experience would allow.’ ‘Integration’ continues to be a hot topic. We are looking forward to making an important contribution to these debates with evidence from the research project ‘Everyday Integration’ funded by ESRC that we’ll be starting in October. The project, led by Jon Fox (SPAIS) and also involving Bridget Anderson, Therese O’Toole (SPAIS) and David Manley (Geography) proposes a radically new approach that develops theory and learns from and contributes to the city of Bristol. We are particularly excited to be working with Bristol City Council and 25 community partners in the research design and implementation, and in the co-production of an Integration Strategy for Bristol, and an Integration Toolkit for other UK urban contexts.

Photo by Harry Kessell on UnsplashIn Bristol as in other cities, lives are very different. Histories, cultures, and structures of feeling that in the past were separated by enormous distances can now, as Gilroy puts it ‘be found in the same place, the same time: school, bus, café, cell, waiting room, or traffic jam’ (Gilroy 2004: 70), and here they shape our institutions and our relationships, including racisms and other social divisions. We take as our starting point that integration is about the everyday rather than abstract ‘national values’, and that it must be embedded in very local contexts – in our case, Bristol. We also recognise that the debates about integration must themselves be ‘integrated’ into our understandings of class, racism, and disability for example.

There are many ways in which our local communities are stratified and people are stereotyped and marginalised, and moving within and into the city can be as important as moving across national borders. Mainstream conversations about integration too often float free of these crucial considerations. An integrated city is not without its differences, disputes, or competing interests, but these differences don’t lead to exclusion, segregation, or marginalisation. We are interested in the ways that residents of Bristol experience and practice integration (recognising they may not use the term ‘integration’) and what we can learn from this, not to make everyone come together but so that everyone can come together. Rather than starting with mobility as the ‘integration problem’ and seeing ‘community’ as sedentary, we approach mobility (spatial, social, economic, and civic) as necessary to sustain and develop our relationships. We have developed some really exciting methods that, as you would expect from MMB, engage with the opportunities for mobility: Uber rides for urban snapshots, flash focus groups on Bristol buses, GPS logs to see how people manage mobility within the city. Keep an eye out too for our ‘Integration Roadshows’, four town hall meetings in different parts of Bristol to help build an integration strategy for our city.

We have just advertised for two research assistants on the project – .  Further details onthe project can be found on the MMB project page and we will have a website later this year so do check in and see how we’re doing. It is going to be a very productive two years, and we hope you’ll hear more about us in Bristol and beyond.

 

SMart solutions for the self-employed beyond the ‘British Way’

Posted on by Emma

By Harry Pitts

At first glance the UK’s current record of job creation seems impressive. But the numbers conceal more than they reveal. Self-employment represents an increasing amount of new jobs. Among these number those who have sought out self-employment to enjoy more freedom in where, how and when they work. But alongside them co-exist a vast expanse of gig workers whose legal status as ‘self-employed’ is mediated by platforms that connect customers with the providers of a service. The algorithmic control to which they are subject makes them just as compelled to work as any employee, with none of the security. Hence, this and similar situations have been labelled ‘false self-employment’ by some.

The self-employed workforce is therefore diverse, home to a range of motivations and experiences. There are certainly perceived and actual benefits to the independence it grants workers, often working in sectors where self-employment is a more appropriate way to deliver the specific kind of good or service produced. But this frequently comes at the expense of the security of workers and the stability of their income. Late payments are a major problem, with over half of invoices paid late by clients. Volatility of income negatively impacts upon the ability to get mortgages and loans.

Moreover, the introduction of the Universal Credit, with a monthly ‘Minimum Income Floor’ claimants must reach in order to be eligible for support, is set to exacerbate the consequences of income volatility for the several hundred thousand of self-employed people forecast to claim the benefit. Among these will be some of the least well-off and most precarious self-employed people, unable to evidence steady monthly income in line with the reporting criteria. The measure is currently subject to legal challenge, but it is important to remember that part of the initial impetus for the Universal Credit reforms was to drive people in unformalised, apparently unprofitable forms of work into more formalised, productive parts of the economy. It appears the Minimum Income Floor may serve to have this effect, at the risk of severe financial and personal discomfort to those on the receiving end.

Before Brexit came to occupy the legislative agenda, Theresa May’s premiership set out its stall on an agenda pitched to addressing the interests of workers. As part of this, and in recognition of some of the wider issues surrounding the formalisation of the self-employed as part of the architecture of British employment regulation, the government commissioned the Taylor Review. The Taylor Review proposed a number of recommendations for how the government could stimulate and support the creation of new platforms that, in a cooperative spin on the capitalist ethos driving their development as means of exploiting workers, bring independent workers together to organise for better pay, benefits and conditions. However, the report tends to focus on quite a individualised representation of the self-employed that overlooks the importance of collective responses to the issues they face.

More problematically, the Taylor Review advocated that in seeking to address the contradiction between security and autonomy among the self-employed in the UK, policy solutions should narrowly follow the path of a so-called ‘British Way’ distinctive to the specificities of the UK’s supposedly unique political economy, which Taylor perceived to possess sufficient dynamism to make it worth preserving. This appeal to a ‘British Way’, however, obscures the plenitude of practical examples already in evidence across the Channel among our possibly soon-to-be-former European partners. In countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands, in somewhat different political-economic contexts, social innovations responsible to the risks incurred by the self-employed are at a much more advanced stage of development.

Broodfonds, for instance, is a Dutch project that establishes a mutual fund into which independent workers pay a monthly sum, the accumulated commonwealth of which can be drawn down upon by those that fall out of work due to sickness or other factors and have no statutory right to the sick pay or other benefits afforded those with the legal status of employees. The scheme is organised around local branches and coordinated through a ‘platform cooperative’ model. Inspired by the Broodfonds, an organisation, Breadfunds UK, is currently exploring whether the slightly different structure of British financial regulation permits the implementation of such a scheme in the UK.

More extensive and interesting still is the SMart cooperative. Primarily based in Belgium but with branches in eight European countries, SMart is a platform that acts as a defacto ‘employer’ of its self-employed members. Rather than self-employed workers doing business with clients themselves, SMart invoices clients in their behalf any chases any late payments, in return for a percentage of the amount invoiced. It also guarantees those payments should clients fail to pay from a mutual guarantee fund similar to that found in the Broodfonds scheme.

SMart workers can manage their income through the SMart platform, drawing down what would otherwise be business income as a formal salary apportioned equally across months. This confers upon self-employed workers the legal status of employees with all the rights and access to benefits that flow from it. But it also enables them at the same time to enjoy the autonomy and independence of self-employment as a career choice, and mitigate some of the negatives of so-called ‘false’ self-employment in the gig economy.

An important aspect for the UK context is that the platform grants workers the ability to smooth out their income month-by-month, standing a potential solution to the problem of income volatility vis-à-vis the monthly reporting of the Minimum Income Floor for those self-employed people forecast to claim the Universal Credit.

There is already precedent for the presence of such intermediary institutions in the shape of the often exploitative ‘umbrella companies’ used to manage payroll on behalf of temporary workers and the agencies through which they are hired. The UK’s new Director of Labour Market Enforcement has set about to stamp out the abuses made possible in the latter. But SMart would represent a radical appropriation of a similar intermediary status within UK law.

Rather than further confusing the contested legal status of some forms of self-employed work under British employment regulation, the creation of a new category of what the Belgians call ‘SMart workers’ could serve to clarify it. SMart has become a semi-formalised part of the apparatus of employment relations in Belgium, and there is no substantial reason why a similar scheme could do the same in this country. Indeed, the Department for Work and Pensions have shown interest in the Business and Employment Cooperative model SMart represents.

A potential basis for experimenting with SMart in the UK may be Indycube.Community, a cooperative trade union for the self-employed established by Indycube, a co-working cooperative spreading out from South Wales to establish branches in a number of UK towns and cities, and the Community Union who, in the wake of the decline of the steel industry, adopted a new model of non-industrial organising more adept at accommodating the specific needs and demands of the self-employed than less agile UK trade unions.

Currently, Indycube.Community provides to members co-working space, invoice-chasing, financial and legal support and advice, and a campaigning voice for the representation of self-employed workers. It stands well-placed to begin bringing into reality aspects of the SMart model in the very different regulatory ad political space of the so-called ‘British Way’ of employment relations.

At a time where one half of Britain wishes to pull itself away from European institutions, it is essential to look across the water and learn from others what can be done to support real self-employment endowed with both autonomy and security, against the precariousness of its sometimes ‘false’ reality.

 

Harry Pitts is a Lecturer in Management in the Department of Management at the School of Economics, Finance and Management, University of Bristol, where he also leads the Faculty Research Group for Perspectives on Work.

Collaborating to improve responses to migration: Employment and the labour market

Posted on by Emma

By David Jepson (ACH) and Bridget Anderson

Huge changes to the labour market are underway, and digitisation is changing how people are recruited and the kind of work they do, not least in phenomenon of the gig economy.  Can these changes benefit refugees and migrants and if so, how? These issues were discussed in the second workshop, in a series of three, aiming to break down barriers between academic research and practitioner organisations.  This particular event was led by Tonia Novitz and Harry Pitts (UoB), with David Jepson and Lydia Samuel (ACH/Himilo) and was attended by about 20 people from a range of backgrounds and interests.

ACH/Himilo work with around 2500 people every year, aiming where possible to help individuals to gain median level jobs rather than simply entry level work. For example, we are currently running a training scheme for drivers for First Bus.  Economic opportunity is central to building autonomy and facilitating what at ACH/Himilo we think of as ‘self-integration’, enabling participation in wider civil, community and social networks. How will people like our clients be impacted on by labour market changes? Dr Harry Pitts from the School of Management, said that these changes will undoubtedly affect jobs but the scale of change is difficult to predict. He discussed the problems associated with the kind of precarious work generated by the gig economy including the significant increase in false self-employment where workers lack genuine autonomy. He outlined examples of initiatives such as SMART in Belgium, an organisation supporting workers who find themselves in these types of situations, and offering administrative, legal, fiscal and financial advice. This sort of initiative is beneficial to all freelancers including refugee and migrant workers.

Changes to labour markets can offer the chance for refugees and migrants to access new employment opportunities, for example via employment platforms and crowd sourcing, but they also pose risks too, according to Professor Tonia Novitz, from the School of Law. She outlined the important differences between status as an employee, a worker or a free-lance sub-contractor. Collective engagement and organisation is important here and new forms of interaction can be developed to facilitate association at work. She also explained that public authorities also had a duty under the law in relation to diversity and employment.

Dr Laila Kasem, from the University of Worcester has researched small businesses and self-employment of Syrian Refugees in the United Kingdom.  Small business can be a flexible opportunity for economic empowerment but can also be the wrong choice for some. She highlighted the problems facing middle aged men who have worked for many years in one trade which is regarded as outmoded in the UK. They can become very demotivated, and there is a need for them to have access to pathways to different forms of work.

It was very productive to have a discussion around the consequences for refugees and migrants of labour market changes as debates tend to focus on refugees’ and migrants’ impact on the labour market, and often lead to them being scapegoated for wider problems. In fact, refugees and migrants bring diversity, skills and experience that can make our economy stronger. We need that.

We look forward to the next event on 16th April which will discuss language.

Blog co-authored by:

David Jepson, Director and Policy Advisor, ACH/Himilo

Bridget Anderson, Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship, University of Bristol.