Campaigners are calling on the government to close a minimum wage loophole, two years after the independent Low Pay Commission warned that it allowed vulnerable migrant workers in private homes to be exploited.
The commission (LPC) was asked by the government to examine the family worker exemption, which permits employers to pay domestic staff less than the national minimum wage if they live-in and are treated like a member of the family.
The LPC urged the government to scrap the loophole after hearing directly from domestic workers about their pay and conditions, including not being allowed to leave the house, and in one case being forced to sleep with the family dog.
The then business minister Paul Scully told the House of Commons in March last year that the government would accept the LPC’s recommendation and bring forward legislation to remove the family worker exemption. But no such legislation has been forthcoming.
Marissa Begonia, the director of the pressure group the Voice of Domestic Workers, said: “Many migrant domestic workers find themselves on 24-hour duty in childcare and elderly care in addition to neverending household chores cleaning, laundry, ironing, and cooking.”
She called for the recommendation to scrap the exemption to be “implemented and enforced, so migrant domestic workers can be released from slavery work conditions”.
Asked about it this week, two years after the recommendation was made, a Department for Business and Trade (DBT) spokesperson said: “The next steps on the commission’s recommendations will be announced in due course.”
Bryan Sanderson, the chair of the LPC, renewed the call for change. “At the end of our review we made a clear recommendation to the government to remove the exemption. We continue to believe the government should take action on this,” he said.
“The individuals affected by it are often vulnerable and almost entirely female. The evidence we heard from these women on their situation and working conditions was often harrowing.”
The deputy Labour leader, Angela Rayner, said: “For too long this loophole has given permission for employers to exploit live-in workers, which acts as a barrier for care workers, for au pairs, cleaners and nannies seeking to protect their rights and secure fair pay.
“Labour will turn the page on the Tories’ abject failure and broken promises on rights at work with a new deal for working people.”
One domestic worker, Ann Santos, 50, told the Guardian she left her four children behind in the Philippines to earn money in the UK as a housekeeper and send back home.
Before the Voice of Domestic Workers helped her find a better-paid role, Santos was being paid only £200 a week for working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. She had no idea she was being exploited because she had few contacts outside the home, and the conditions were better than a previous job in Saudi Arabia.
“They offered me to join with them at the table, and I was very surprised because that’s very different to when I was in Saudi. But the feeling was more sad for me because they are very happy and I was sitting in the corner at the end of the table and I’m thinking all the time of my family, my kids, and it’s really making me emotional,” Santos said.
The work was so hard, she said, that “I got to the point where I couldn’t get up from bed”. She has not seen her children for six years – though hopes to travel to the Philippines soon, after being formally identified as a victim of trafficking, which allowed her to apply for a visa to stay for up to two years.
Since Scully’s announcement, turmoil in the Conservative party has led to him being succeeded by three other junior business ministers, and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has been restructured. The current occupant of the post is the Thirsk and Malton MP, Kevin Hollinrake.
A DBT spokesperson said the government “will always stand on the side of vulnerable workers and has a wide range of measures already in place to protect them against exploitation”.
Intended to allow for au pairs, anti-trafficking campaigners and employment lawyers say the exemption – section 57 (3) of the 2015 NMW regulations – is also used to justify poverty wages for migrant workers doing long hours in difficult conditions.
Jamila Duncan-Bosu, a lawyer who works for the Anti-Trafficking and Labour Exploitation Unit, a charity providing representation to low-paid workers, said she had repeatedly taken part in cases where employers accused of abusive terms and conditions sought to use the exemption.
“You have a whole spectrum of cases – people being sexually assaulted, beaten and so on – and wherever there was any claim for wages, the employer would automatically say: ‘family worker exemption’.”
One key employment tribunal judgment in December 2020, concerning a worker called Ms KPK Puthenveettil, found that the exemption was indirectly discriminatory because the workers involved were disproportionately female.
