Forced Labour among Asylum Seekers and Refugees: Exploring Precarious Lives

1. Precarious lives: Asylum seekers and refugees’ experiences of forced labourDr Louise Waite (School of Geography, University of Leeds)Dr Stuart Hodkinson (School of Geography, University of Leeds) Prof Peter Dwyer (Centre for Social Justice Research, University of Salford) Dr Hannah Lewis (School of Geography, University of Leeds)

2. Presentation outline • Defining and problematising ‘forced labour’ • The link between immigration and forced labour • Asylum seekers and refugees • The concept of ‘precarity’ and connections to resistance and organisation

3. 1. Forced labour • Forced labour → a violation of fundamental human rights in international and national law. • ILO Forced Labour Convention 1930 (No.29) and the European Court of Human Rights: • All work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered themselves voluntarily. • Skrivankova (2010) introduces a continuum of exploitation and interventions, ranging from decent work to extreme exploitation and covering both labour law and criminal law. • UK’s new criminal offence of forced labour; section 71 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009.

4. 2. Immigration and forced labour • Close connection between immigration and forced labour. • Labour and immigration policy increasingly tied through ‘managed migration’ → state purpose to draw in and expel migrants when required (Kundnani, 2007). • Since 1970s increased flexibility & deregulation of economy → pursuit of enhanced global competitiveness. Parallel growth of informal economy. Growth of sub-contracting and ‘contingent’ workforce. ‘Flexicurity’? • Civic stratification and migrants’ rights (Morris, 2002) → frames relationship between immigration status and access to labour market.

5. 3. Asylum seekers and refugees (AS/R) • Our focus is on AS/R as a group of migrants whose susceptibility to and experience of forced labour in the UK remain under researched and largely ignored • Importance and disciplining power of socio-legal status • and gender (domestic exploitation/servitude)

6. Asylum Process

7. Push-Pull Forces on AS/R Informal Work Material Immaterial Debts Poverty income No cash Limited volunteering / training chances Excluded from work Limited choice of shops Boredom, low self-worth Solicitors fees Informal economy Lack basic necessities Basic survival Limited educational chances Children’s needs Daily fear of detention, deportation Pressure from family back home Cut off from society Poor housing Remittances

8. Burnett and Whyte (2010). The wages of fear: risk, safety and undocumented work • Study of 14 refused, destitute AS and their experiences of forced labour in UK finds variety of factors pushes / pulls AS into underground economy • Highly temporised, Just-in-Time-When-Required workforce performing hyper-intensive, sweated labour, long hours for poverty wages with ‘no pay’ common • ‘Structured vulnerability’ and disciplinary power of labour market, labour process, legal status and destitution • Wage manipulation and theft • Slavery / forced labour • Violence

9. 4. Precarity • Precarity: a useful neologism? • Limited attention by geographers (e.g. Ettlinger, 2007) in comparison to those writing from labour relations, feminist philosophical, sociological and anthropological perspectives (e.g. Butler, 2004; Tsianos and Papadopoulos, 2006; Anderson, 2007). • Referring literally to those experiencing precariousness, precarity invokes life worlds characterised by uncertainty and insecurity. But beyond this contestation: both a condition and a possible point of mobilisation.

10. Precarity as a life-condition – a result of a generalised societal malaise and insecurity (e.g. Bourdieu, 1998, 2000; Butler, 2004; Neilson and Rosseter, 2005). • Precarity as related to the specific conditions of labour markets, especially those in advanced capitalist economies. Associated with intensifying trajectories of neoliberalism and globalisation and increased mobility. • Marginal and casualised employment condition as prevalent form of contemporary labour relations in post-Fordism. Flexploitation.

11. Experiences of precarity creating possibly rallying points for resistance. Political potential. • Examples - ‘Precarity Map’, ‘McStrikers’ in France, ‘Precarity Ping Pong, ‘Precarias a la Deriva’, ‘Frassanito’, ‘San Precario’. • Transnational / trans-sectoral bodies using similar tactics to ‘new labour internationalisms’. Concept of precarity linked to a potentially disruptive socio-political identity that is tied to a new brand of labour activism.

12. Migrant workers as a precariat? A political force capable of collective action and revolt against neoliberal capitalism? • Foti (2005:3), “The precariat is to postindustrialism as the proletariat was to industrialism”. • Hardt and Negri (2004) – migrants as a ‘special category’ within the ‘multitude’ who embody revolutionary potential.

13. Resistance and organisation? • Characteristics of precarious labourers mitigating against the ‘celebratory’ imagining of migrants. Trans-spatial movements as a deterrent to territorialised syndicalism (traditional unions). • Compounding this; the highly precarious / undocumented / shadow economy positioning of asylum seekers and refugees in forced labour. • Wills (2005); organising in low-paid service sectors. • Rogaly (2009); the agency of unorganised temporary migrant workers. • Coe & Jordhus-Lier (2010); agency as relational and importance of labour’s positionality with respect to global production networks, the state, the community and labour market intermediaries.