Employers & forced labour
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Presentation to Forced Labour Monitoring Group, Liverpool, 9th October 2013
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Employers & forced labour
- 1. Employers and forced labour Nick Clark
- 2. Domestic workers: contributory factors to abuse
- 3. Imprecise notions of employment “like a member of the family”; relationship based on favours rather than contracts and rights: “I don’t have a contract. My present employer, they accept me to work in their house, they trust me that means.” Filipina female 40-49 in Clark & Kumarappan (2011)
- 4. “Othering” of the worker Poverty, docility, lack of sophistication – foreignness . . . they’re [Nepalese] so quiet and discreet. Filipinos are brasher. They’re more social and they like to chat and gossip. They are quite pushy. Some people would say they were greedy. (Employer interviewees, ‘Markets for Migrant Sex and Domestic Workers’ cited by Anderson (2007))
- 5. Flat rate payments: pay unrelated to work hours – two thirds of employers set pay at round numbers, but hours of work vary widely in jobs with same nominal rate Nature of the work: lack of limits to demand, emotional content & location in the home
- 7. Sectional or regional norms: for example textile workshops in Spain, construction in Italy, agriculture in general. Similar process noted for non payment of wages in Russia during ’90s: “a one-month increase in the average use of the practice in a community increases the probability that a firm will use wage arrears by 6 to 7 percent in the following year” (Earle, Spicer & Peter 2010)
- 8. Pay systems: output-related in Swedish berry picking, Romanian strawberry pickers in Germany, Netherlands, flat rate in Connors case(UK) “Othering” can also be found – for example seasonal workers in agriculture in S. France
- 9. Employers & forced labour: a preliminary hypothesis There is a tendency for certain labour market practices and social relationships in combination to facilitate a decline from exploitative practice into forced labour
- 10. References Anderson, B. (2007) A Very Private Business - Exploring the Demand for Migrant Domestic Workers European Journal of Women’s Studies 14:3 pp 247-264 Clark, N. & Kumarappan, L (2011) Turning a Blind Eye - the British state and domestic workers employment rights London: Working Lives Research Institute Clark, N. (2013) Detecting and tackling forced labour in Europe York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation Earle, J., Spicer, A. & Sabrianova Peter, K. (2010)The Normalisation of Deviant Organisational Practices: Wage Arrears in Russia 19911998 Academy of Management Journal 53:2 pp 218-237
Editor's Notes
- Foreignness as a benefit cited in Bridget Anderson’s work, came out in some of our domestic workers’ testimony: “always being called stupid”
- Similarly in say small shops & restaurants, family and other links of obligation may blur the economic aspect of the relationship
- Market relations are amoral and are forged between atomized actors, governed by contract, in which individuals buy and sell their labour. This transaction is imagined as separate from notions of the ‘real’ self. The home, in contrast, is imagined as governed by mutual dependence and affective relations, altruism, responsibility and duty. The opposition of these spheres is mutually reinforcing. (Anderson 2007)
- Ref norms – see paper on non-payment of wages in Russia: more likely where others in industry were not paying: speculate that reduces prospect of exit, also ; could be proposed in Chinese workshops, too: means of paying debt, then could become exploiter