The most interesting thing about the labour exploitation of young people from overseas here in the UK on student visas by the security industry and the service sector more generally is how uninteresting everyone finds it, writes Mark Rowe.
In the October 2023 edition of Professional Security Magazine, I first reported the peculiar and striking percentage increase in Security Industry Authority (SIA) badge-holding, in terms of nationality, by those from the Indian sub-continent – Pakistan and Bangladesh, besides India. While the number of those from the UK by nationality who were SIA-badged was about static, the rise in the SIA badged was explained by those from those countries.
The latest monthly statistics from the SIA, for May 2024, compared with those for May 2023 are even more stark. Overall, the total of SIA-badged continues to be a record; 417,600 (to round the number to the nearest hundred) in May 2023, and 434,700 a year later; a rise of 4.1 per cent. Yet the total of SIA-badged who are by nationality British has fallen, by 3.87 per cent, from 256,800 in May 2023 to 246,800 in May 2024.
In the year to September 2022, the UK issued some 476,000 ‘sponsored study’ visas, another stark contrast with the roughly 200,000 a year in the 2010s. As nearly all the student visas were for universities, usually for three-year courses, that would suggest more than a million in the UK on student visas. If a tenth of those are misusing the visa by working more than the 20 hours a week allowed, that would dwarf the tens of thousands a year of migrants to the UK by boat from northern French beaches. Even though ‘stop the boats’ is a major political issue and student visa over-working is unmentioned.
To state the obvious, overseas students on a visa must do temporary contract work, and not a permanent, full-time job. Besides that supply of labour, the summer – when students have the ‘long vac’ of a holiday from mid-June to mid-September – has a demand for labour, of hospitality and other services such as stewarding and security, at events, from the glamorous – tennis, concerts, evenings at the cricket – to the less so; caravan parks on the Kent and Essex coast.
Students have long been of two sorts – those who see the summer as a time to go travelling, and those who have to work to afford the rest of their year. It’s no more than an assumption that summer service jobs are filled by students, including ones from overseas, working according to their visa conditions or not (for who is checking?) and it isn’t a direct comparison. The largest nationality with student visas is Indian, and as featured in Professional Security in October 2023, the number of those with Indian nationality with an SIA badge went up by 55 per cent, to 19,489 between October 2022 and August 2023; and has risen further, to 22,395. The second most common nationality taking UK student visas is Chinese, and the total of Chinese nationals (the world’s most populous nation) with an SIA badge is 38; Burundi (with a population of 13m) and New Zealand (five million) each have 39 SIA-badged.
You don’t have to go far among guarding sector people to hear grumbles about ‘rogue operators’; who don’t care about staff, only profit. Those grumblers for the 20 years of the SIA regime have been calling for a ‘level playing field’ because reputable guard companies that do the right things cannot compete with the ‘rogues’ that under-cut the market by paying cash in hand, perhaps offering £50 for a shift, whether it was of eight, ten or 12 hours. Overseas students are the target labour for the ‘rogue operators’, because if they complain about being paid less than the legal minimum, the operators can say ‘take it or leave it’. If the students are working 60 hours a week, not 20, they are hardly going to report to the authorities.
The grumblers are wrong in one respect. To call the under-cutters ‘rogue operators’ is to imply comfortingly that the rogues are apart from the upstanding majority. In truth they are not rogues but central to the UK’s service economy. TUC General Secretary Paul Nowak has this month stated ‘we have seen an explosion in insecure, low-paid work’, whether on zero-hours contracts, seasonal or casual work. Who, working in the security industry, can earn a secure (pardon the pun) living, and afford a family and shelter, from summer events? They will rather work in a shopping centre, hospital, or university campus for year-round work.
The over-working overseas students are the ones directing you to your seats this summer, serving you grotesquely over-priced burgers and beer. Buyers evidently do not mind (another guarding sector lament for as long as anyone can remember has been that procurement only look for the cheapest bid).
As for which regulator should look into any wrong-doing, the UK is spoilt for choice. The SIA? It can only regulate according to statute, the Private Security Industry Act 2001 – which does not include any offence by a buyer of ‘rogue’ security. The SIA inspectors look for a valid badge, and that the name and picture on the licence matches the person carrying it; ‘cash in hand’ working is a matter for HM Revenue and Customs. Labour exploitation is for the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA).
Worker exploitation continues to grow, the GLAA says; whether in the ‘gig economy’, in food processing factories, in the fields, or in care homes. It hardly sounds as if the GLAA has the time to drop in on a summer festival or stadium concert; and how welcome would it be, if it did?! In any case, out-staying or over-working during a student visa are matters for those who issue the visa, a division of the Home Office.
Who cares, if overseas students work longer than they are supposed to? Everyone benefits – those who want labour this summer and aren’t asking questions of the contractors where the labour comes from, so long as the workers perform (and stay at post – as presumably they must if they want their cash at the end of the shift), and the customers. The universities certainly benefit; what else but overseas student fees are paying to keep the cranes in position, to build more and better campuses? The only ones who perhaps don’t benefit are the students if they are exploited.
