Miliband: Labour will make it criminal to exploit migrant labour

18 December 2014

Miliband has announced that Labour will make it a criminal offence to employ migrant workers on different terms to local workers, a practice which both exploits migrants and undercuts the local workforce.

This would involve closing a loophole which allows foreign agency workers to be legally paid less than the national minimum wage.

Of the 236,000 low paid workers in the UK, 11.3% are migrant workers.

Miliband said: “We are serving notice on employers who bring workers here under duress or on false terms and pay them significantly lower wages, with worse terms and conditions,” he said.

“This new criminal offence will provide protection to everyone. It will help ensure that, when immigrants work here, they do not face exploitation themselves and rogue employers are stopped from undercutting the terms and conditions of everyone else.”

A collection of papers by the UK’s leading experts on labour law, Labour Migration in Hard Times: Reforming Labour Market Regulation , details the need for labour law reformations, and what these might look like.