European Review Issue 40 page 4

RECENT COURT CASES, SURVEYS AND television programmes have all confirmed the resilience of abusive employers in Britain who exploit migrant workers, many of them from the new EU Member States. Despite the Gangmasters Act, the recruitment drive by trade unions and agreements such as that between the government, CBI and TUC to ‘ensure that the contribution made by workers from overseas is both recognised and enhanced to the full’ (see issue 32), there is plenty of evidence of mistreatment. The Unite union has won a case in Cheshire against an employment agency who maintained a ‘tied cottage’ system and evicted a group of Polish workers after sacking them.

By inserting bogus provisions into their contract of employment which purported to allow them to refuse work or work for other employers the ‘Consistent’ agency tried to claim that they were self-employed, thereby reducing their entitlements. According to the chairman of the Employment Appeals Tribunal the agency wanted ‘compliant people through whom they could meet the demands of their clients. But they did not want people with expensive and troublesome rights’. Thousands of agency workers will now be entitled to greater employment rights. An even worse case came before the new Gangmasters Licensing Authority (GLA) who immediatley revoked the licence of Baltic Work Team Ltd. The company had not paid 40 Bulgarian agricultural		workers for 35 days, leaving them to scavenge the potatoes and courgetttes that they were employed to pick.Chairman Paul Whitehouse said ‘The GLA was set up to curb the exploitation of workers and in the case of Baltic Work Team Ltd, we had to take action immediately to protect the workers’. New TUC research suggests that such employment practices are by no means rare. In a survey of Polish and Lithuanian workers who requested a rights leaflet, over half said that they had had some kind of problem at work. A quarter had no written contract of employment and slightly more had experienced trouble with payment such as ‘not being paid for hours worked, discrepancies between pay and payslips, unauthorised deductions, and errors in pay calculation’.
	Large numbers of migrants work in agriculture in eastern England

31% were living in accommodation linked to their employers which, many said, meant that they had little control over their working hours. Although only 3% of respondents were members of a trade union 54% expressed an interest in joining one; those that were already members were much more likely to have a written contract. TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber reacted strongly to the survey conclusions: ‘This study reveals systematic abuse of migrant workers which is tantamount to modern day slavery ... the full force of the law should be used against those profiting from such appalling ill treatment’.

German workers fed up with work

Lithuanian TU membership booms

A NEW SURVEY IN GERMANY has revealed that every third employee is discontented with their job and does not think that they will be able to carry on until retirement age. Only 1 in 8 workers reported themselves happy in their work in the reseach conducted for the German trade union federation, DGB. Temporary workers recorded the lowest levels of satisfaction with stress, bad management and low pay the most common gripes. Engineers were the happiest while, in general, the lower the qualification needed for a job the worse the pay and the poorer the working conditions experienced.
Unions backed the results as support for their campaign against the government’s raising of the retirement age from 65 to 67 and for a statutory minimum wage. DGB head Michael Sommer said the survey was ‘further proof for the miserable conditions in the low-wage sector’. The German government has stalled on a pay minimum while average net wages have fallen to the lowest level in 20 years.

RAPID ECONOMIC GROWTH allied to worker migration since the Baltic countries joined the EU in 2004 has led to labour shortages and rising wages. Last year the average gross salary in Lithuania rose by 20% but the public sector recorded practically no increase; collective bargaining only existing in education and healthcare. The percentage of employees working for the state has fallen from 34% to 26.3% over the last six years due to an exodus to the private sector. However, after a group of public sector workers failed to persuade the Constitutional Court to rule in their favour and increase pay, a series of new trade unions were founded. Workers in the prosecution service, tax inspectorate and the statistical department unionised themselves. Added to these new, independent organisations, the established unions have recorded membership gains of up to 40% in one year. In May the three Lithuanian confederations signed a declaration of co-operation to avoid competition for new members.

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