Illegal workers

The position of illegal workers is even worse. Their illegal status means that little is known about their working conditions, which are brought into sharp focus from time to time by catastrophic events such as the Morecambe Bay disaster of 2004 in which 23 cockle pickers, all illegal workers from China, were drowned. In 2010. Researchers from the University of Liverpool put together a revealing study, The wages of fear: Risk, safety and undocumented work, based on qualitative interviews with 14 illegal immigrants. The report’s authors highlight how “the threat of destitution compounds the relative powerlessness of workers and disciplines them into compliance with degrading working conditions”.