Employment Law

Newsnight has had some good stories about the state of low pay employment for immigrants in Britain. They exposed the fact that Romanina/Bulgarian workers who are not allowed to work as full time employees are exploited by being classed as contract workers. This happens to the extent of mininum wage laws being broken by insisting that payment is for the number of rooms cleaned (the example cites Hotel work).

This has pushed out reputable companies who cannot compete on those terms and lets cleaning contracts go to companies who exploit this type of law.

Part of this is down to the out source culture and contract at cheapest price - the government could go a long way to fine the Hotels involved to ensure they source labour from appropriately run companies.

The frustrating thing is Britain is not short of employment legislation to outlaw this practice - and to provide some protection to these vulnerable workers. As always, typical of the Blair era, we made laws we had no intention or idea of how to enforce - just assuming that everyone would abide by them.