(This was first published in the Morning Star, December 24th 2016)

THE traditional season of goodwill to all men and women is the right time to remind ourselves that the cause of the working class is international and extends to all who sell their labour across the planet.

Among the ranks of this international working class we need to count the 244 million people who earn their living outside the countries they were born in.
It is amongst this group that we find some of the most grievously exploited of wage earners, labouring for a pittance a day in conditions where their most basic human rights are routinely denied.

Many people think that the accounts of employer abuse of migrant workers concern places far away, like the Gulf state of Qatar, where the conditions of south Asian construction workers building the amenities for the 2022 World Cup are the stuff of scandal.

Or perhaps in Thailand, where Burmese migrants suffer situations akin to slavery in the country’s vast poultry industry and as operatives in its fishing fleets.

The disturbing truth is that people concerned with labour exploitation and specifically migrant labour exploitation can be found a lot closer to home, and in some cases in sectors where they work alongside trade unionists.

Reports from Germany, seen by many as a country where the regulation of workplaces still ensures decent conditions, tell us of sectors like construction where the imposition of abusive conditions on migrants is rife.

In one well-reported instance, Romanian workers employed on the construction of a prestigious shopping mall in the centre of Berlin were being paid as little as €6 an hour — far below the minimum wage rate which required an hourly rate of over €10 at the time.
Other European countries provide evidence of migrant labour exploitation.

Across the continent migrants make up a large proportion of the agricultural labour force, imposing conditions on people employed in farm work that are often brutal.

In Spain the predominance of Africans in this sector arises from the racialised, inferior social status of black people, condemning them to unskilled work, on poor pay, and with short periods of employment in jobs that are rarely part of a promotion ladder.

The influence of race and a past history of colonialism is also evident in France, where discrimination works to deprive people of access to the rights which the law appears to extend to them.

The percentage of people of north African nationalities engaged in semi- or unskilled occupations is in the region of 70-80 per cent.

At this level of concentration in jobs which provide the least compensation the disadvantage experienced by migrants tends to become inter-generational — being passed from parents to their French-born children.

In Britain the drive to push back against labour market regulation has been under way since the days of the Thatcher government in the 1980s.

The vast expansion of a low-wage service sector with variable demand for workers according to season or the state of the firm’s order books has created the need for the “just-in-time” employee — the individual who will turn up when their labour is needed, and when it isn’t, impose no costs on the business.

The availability of this group to the needs of capital is secured through mechanisms like “zero-hours” employment contracts and the use of intermediaries working as gangmasters and private-sector employment agencies.

All of these work to transfer a larger share of the risk of running a business from the employer to employee.

The burden of having to provide paid holidays, sick leave or maternity rights is shifted to what is represented as a temporary labour force to which the owners owe nothing in the way of social protection.

Unsurprisingly, anyone who has the opportunity to avoid employment in sectors where rights have been reduced to such a low level will do so.

Citizen workers who have some capacity to negotiate more favourable terms of employment will tend to shun the low-skill jobs offered in areas like construction, hospitality, farm work and food processing, domestic work and social care.

In their place migrants become available to take on jobs which, though necessary for the overall functioning of the economy, offer minimal rewards to workers.

In recent times a myth has emerged that migrants are “happy” to take on jobs of this sort because the wages they can earn in low-skilled work in an economically developed country are generally higher than what they would get even in skilled, professional work in the regions they come from.

This encourages the view that migrants effectively collaborate with employers to keep wages in certain sectors low so they do not have to compete with locals for what would otherwise be seen as desirable jobs.

This would be an unreasonable conclusion to draw.

Right across the world neoliberal ideology has been using market forces to restructure great swathes of manufacturing and service sector jobs in ways that bring a maximum of downward pressure on wage levels and conditions of employment.

Reversing these deeply entrenched trends will require more than simply closing jobs to migrants: it will require a fundamental challenge to the entire logic of a global capitalist system that has been unfolding since the 1970s and beyond.

Renewed efforts are required from the labour movement to counter the gross exploitation of migrants, across the rest of the world as much as in Britain.

However this will not be achieved by the current favourite policy of tighter controls over immigration with the aim of admitting only “the brightest and the best” on terms that will depend on them proving their “value” to British capitalism.

Tighter controls nowadays means the sort of police state measures enacted in the two recent Immigration Acts, which redouble the drive towards passport and identity checks by employers and workplace raids by Border Force enforcement officers.

These are conditions that are designed to snuff out the emergence of workplace activism among migrant workers as surely as the anti-trade union legislation of recent decades has aimed to end working-class militancy.

The deep indignation that ripped across migrant communities during the incident when Byron Burger collaborated with the Home Office produced a real stirring class awareness that has been followed up in the drive by Unite to recruit hotel workers, the GMB to bring care workers into the union, and Unison to deepen its work amongst the hundreds of thousands of migrants who work in the healthcare sector.

Then there are the bold experiments by the so-called independent unions — such as United Voices of the World and the International Workers of the World — who are even pushing the idea of workplace organisation into such ultra-casualised areas as the Deliveroo operation, contract cleaning and bicycle couriers.

With these developments the mood is being set for a revival of grassroots activism which will extend across the working class.

The call for the workers of the world to unite has long been the inspiration for labour in the days when it could pit itself against the forces of capitalism.

Applied to today’s world it means action in solidarity with migrant workers, and a repudiation of all efforts to divide us.

(This first appeared in ‘Morning Star’, 15 Oct 2016)

AMBER RUDD went out of her way to present herself as a home secretary very much in the mould of her predecessor when she spoke at the Tory Party conference last week.
“I succeed one of the most successful home secretaries of modern times,” which was her description of Theresa May, who of course has gone on to achieve the giddy heights of Prime Minister.

Many would take issue with this claim. Theresa May will be remembered by many as the home secretary who was responsible for ensuring that Britain remained opted out of any positive role in resolving a crisis of refugee policy that has blighted the reputation of Europe as a humane and compassionate region and has allowed the Mediterranean to become a grave for 3,610 people in this year alone.

Then there is the deplorable situation at Calais. Possibly as many as 10,000 people are languishing in the makeshift refugee camp known as the Jungle — including 1,000 children of whom some 400 are believed to have compelling grounds for resettlement in Britain.

During the six years of May’s stewardship as head of the Home Office, she has been obdurate in her refusal to consider any other role for Britain in tackling this deplorable situation other than pay a share of the hefty bill to cover ever larger areas of the Channel port in barbed wire-topped fencing.

More charges could be levelled which illustrate her failure at the Home Office to support the necessary humanitarian dimension to her government’s immigration policies, including measures on family reunification which massively discriminate against households subsisting on modest incomes; a refusal to permit overseas teachers to settle in the country after five years of work in British classrooms because they receive wages of less than £35,000 a year and a record of wrongfully deporting up to 48,000 international students who were innocently associated with a scam carried out by an English language testing company.

Yet despite the harshness of all these policies, May still failed to by a massive margin to achieve her government’s target of pushing net migration below the 100,000 figure.
At the time she shuffled off to her stint at No 10, statistics showed a surplus of incoming over outgoing migrants of over 330,000 people.

Judging by her speech to the Tory faithful, Rudd seems to have embraced May’s record of severity and failure and is working to add to it with policies which promise even more hardship for people of migrant background.

She outlined measures that continue the recent trend in immigration policies to push controls well beyond the border areas of air and seaports and into workplaces and local communities.

The controversial laws which require landlords to check the immigration status of prospective tenants are to be ramped up by making prison sentences the penalty for making mistakes about the meaning of someone’s visa conditions.
Campaigners against this measure, led by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, have pointed to evidence that immigration controls of this type produce adverse effects for sections of communities which go far beyond the irregular migrants which the government tells us are the target group.

Very few landlords have the expertise needed to distinguish between an “illegal” and “legal” immigrant and many believe that they are courting the risk of breaking laws whenever they have dealings with people with non-British accents or black and other ethnic minorities.

The result is a large ripple effect across communities which sees obstacles being raised to large numbers of people who landlords feel just might — if not now perhaps some time in the future — fall into the category of an immigrant who has broken rules.
We already know that there are tendencies towards discrimination on grounds of race in the private-rented sector — the policies Rudd is advancing will reinforce this.

Rudd went on to outline plans she has for cutting back on the numbers of international students entering the country each year.

The expansion of higher education in recent times is usually considered to be one of the great success stories of British economic and social policy.

The Oxford University-based Migration Observatory calculates that the contribution that non-EU students make to the sector is in excess of £7 billion a year. Contributing around 13 per cent of the revenue earned by colleges and universities, the fees paid by these young people have supported the expansion of higher education which has benefited British students as well as themselves.

Rudd proposes to jeopardise these significant achievements by cutting back on the numbers of young people coming from abroad to study in Britain. In her speech she sketched out ideas that suggested that universities not considered to be “the best” would not be permitted to admit international students.

While the Oxbridge and elite Russell Group universities would be exempt from this restriction, scores of establishments outside the privileged few would be at risk of losing the proven benefits which come from having a diverse, international student community on campus.

This punitive approach to dealing with organisations and bodies which accept migrants is also to be extended, more deeply than ever, into the workplace. Migrants make up 11 per cent of the UK workforce. Many are employed as the highest levels of the skills spectrum, as doctors, engineers, scientists and technicians.

Others work in sectors like hospitality, food production and processing, and social care, which have operated for decades with business plans that require ultra-flexible working at generally low pay rates.

In the days that followed Rudd’s speech, rumours flowed suggesting that the Home Office would push back against the employment of migrants by requiring employers to report the number of foreign nationals they had on their staff.

The idea was even floated that firms employing a higher than average number of migrants would be “named and shamed” in a drive to force them to change hiring practices.
The subsequent uproar against this suggestion — which extended from trade unions to the Confederation of British Industry — seems to have led to a retreat on this most extreme version of the policy.

What will apparently remain is a requirement on the part of firms to report this data to the Home Office for, it is claimed, confidential use.

Few are convinced that the system will operate in this apparently benign way. The act of reporting staff data itself is likely to generate discriminatory outcomes as employers are obliged to sort their workforces out into categories of “foreigners” and “citizens.” Current work practices which tend to put migrants on agency contracts and while retaining natives on regular work contracts are likely to be reinforced by measures of this kind.

The combined effect of all the measures which Rudd hinted at in her speech will be to reinforce the already worrying divisions which exist in many working-class communities.
The upsurge in xenophobic hate crimes illustrates all the dangers that lie ahead if the government is allowed to continue its manipulation of the policy agenda by dividing people into “us” and “them.”

Working-class communities need unity if they are to meet the challenges that lie ahead.
Repudiating Rudd’s divisive intentions will be an essential start to this achieving this solidarity across communities.