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Since lockdown I’ve been talking non-stop to UNISON’s migrant worker members on the covid frontline. Migrant workers in the UK already lived and worked under additional financial and exploitative pressures before the pandemic. But now it’s like a parallel reality.
A healthcare worker getting up at midnight to see if she could get a scarce appointment to progress her visa - they would disappear within minutes. Being charged for a phone call that didn’t get answered. Paying over £6000 and having nothing to eat and still left in limbo.
A family with two adults working in social care working 7 days a week so they can afford visa fees and feed their children. They worry about the increased exposure to covid but feel left with no choice.
A healthcare worker worrying about being allowed back into the country if she went to her father’s funeral because she had been waiting for months for her status to be confirmed.
This is a representative sample of 2 or 3 days work. Not months. In the vast majority of cases we have been able to provide urgent help, support and resolution. I worry about the workers who don’t ring our phone lines. I worry about the workers who aren’t in a union.
In every phone call I get a glimpse of a life that resonates deeply for me, the life of families from other countries trying to survive in this country. I hear about their children and their daily struggles. It is suffused with love. Love for their work and love for their family.
They are deeply committed to the kind of work they do. One member has been indignant that the govts immigration policies and minimum salary thresholds will push him out of public services and into the private sector if he wants to stay in the UK.
A nurse told me she never allows the worries she had been plunged into with her visa problems to show on her face when she is with patients - she does not want them to be affected.
In their commitment to their job, the people they look after and their care for their children, I hear the voice of my father, a migrant worker himself who worked 7 days a week for the whole time he was in the UK so he could provide as a single parent.
And so it is also love that suffuses this work for me. Migrant workers bring love and care to what they do in the harshest of climates and they get precious little of it in return. For me solidarity and justice also means love.
