What happened at Byron has brought back memories of the terrible events at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 2009, when all the cleaners were summoned to a meeting, the doors were locked, and then the UK Border Agency (now UK Visas and Immigration) detained and deported eight cleaners, one of whom was six months pregnant. At each of the many protests we have held since then this has been spoken about and remembered. It is difficult to represent the persistent experience of trauma that this raid caused the workforce. Yet in the face of this the cleaners at SOAS in have continued to fight against their poor working conditions, subsequently winning a living wage, sick pay, holiday pay, pensions, and most recently a promise to be brought in-house (one of the key practices of the informal economy is to outsource, so multinationals take responsibility for immigration concerns while more reputable-seeming institutions keep their hands clean. Often the abusive management practices I detail below are perfected by outsourcing companies who know full well they have paperless workers on their books. Many companies providing outsourced services for a wide range of institutions also run immigration detention centres, and are therefore involved in the entire circuit of the damage done to migrant workers.) In the last seven years SOAS still has done nothing to apologise or make good what they did.
There are lots of people opposed to #BoycottByron who are saying things like “they have to live by the law, and it’s good the workers were deported.” These people fail to remember that the entire UK runs as a result of super-exploited labour in a black economy. Paperless workers have no protection, and in almost every institution are subject to the worst abuse. Sexual assault and abuse is frequent, as managers threaten to deport anyone who complains. Wages often aren’t paid. Frankly I never want to hear of another person being forced to give blowjobs to a manager who is threatening to break their family apart and tear them from their children. Within the workings of the informal economy bullying and violence is rife. The harshness of these conditions, and the sword of damocles of deportation, is precisely why this labour is so cheap, and so many businesses opt for it. Bullying makes workers subservient, and scares them away from industrial organising (although there are now amazing unions now fighting for workers in these sectors – the IWGB, IWW, and UVW.) It is not just those businesses that do well out of this exploitation. It makes things cheaper for everyone, and oils the cogs of the whole economy. Many people are happy to reap this work’s benefits without ever taking responsibility for the suffering it causes.
Meanwhile, the UK maintains one of the most brutal immigration systems in Europe. Those who are due to be deported are subject to indefinite detention, normally in privately run prisons where the staff are often violently racist (for anyone with doubts, look up the Channel4 undercover documentary from Yarls Wood.) In the last week we have seen a government U-Turn which will see children also subject to these conditions of detention. Deportations have been so violent that people have been killed, perhaps most famously the murder of Jimmy Mubenga by G4S guards in 2010.
To some people who defend what Byron did, “the law is the law.” The statutes invented by humans are fixed into a shape of a new nature under which we must simply live. Those who for whatever reason fall outside of it are apparently fair game to be cast away, and the illegal and brutal practices they are subject to in the informal economy are justified. These people tell the story as though it were a tragedy in which illegal workers were hubristically above the law, and the co-operation of businesses and the immigration system is merely their natural comeuppance. What they fail to see is that there is no hubris in the exploited worker, doing three jobs, being abused, bullied and exploited just in order to make a living. These workers do not find themselves “above the law” but below it, enduring crushing violence and intolerable suffering. We should be clear “the law is not the law”, because the history of our society is one in which the law has always been used to define its bounds, to guarantee rights to some, while reaping profits from beyond the border, from those the law refuses to protect. It is these laws which are the very guarantors of the perpetuation of informal economies in which many have to live under the endless fear of sexual abuse, poverty, arbitrary violence, being ripped from the friends and families, indefinite detention, and racist administrative murder. These laws disguise the violent anarchy of the practices of companies.
All of this is to say that counter to the arguments made by various legal positivists, who seem so certain of the identity of the ideals of the law and the ideal of freedom: Immigration laws do not protect workers from exploitation. On the contrary, they maintain a system in which workers have no recourse against everyday workplace abuses. And those of us who are standing in solidarity with the workers at Byron are fighting this on other grounds too – mainly because we have experience of these sectors, and know what our friends working these jobs have to put up with. We are fighting to end detention, and specifically the brutal practices of indefinite detention. There is basically nothing to be gained from arguing the point, as “the secret barrister” does, as if the UK were an economy not based on the endless labour of people without papers. There is no point in asserting the blinding majesty of a lawful society in a context in which, for so long, the real implementation of these laws has meant exactly the contrary.
Another line of argument from these lawyers is that what is at stake in the Byron case is merely a matter of law, and therefore those who challenge what takes place must be challenged democratically through trying to change the law. They fail to see that the immigration system already implicates both the law and its other. The claim is an attempt to argue for the illegitimacy of protest – even in situation which the law, for all intents and purposes, functions in such a way that creates a space of lawlessness beyond its bounds. At the same time they fail to reflect that migrant workers are a severely abused minority whose protection ought to be guaranteed not merely through a democracy that, since they are a minority, could at any moment choose to crush them (as we have recently seen in the Brexit vote), but also constitute a workforce in which wider social problems of sexism and racism are highly accentuated by the lack of worker protections.
We have no choice but to demand justice for these workers: and this justice will be formed from the memory of what was done to them, just as we have continued to practice for seven years at SOAS, through the bringing to consciousness of the contradiction in the law itself, and through social forces of resistance that combine the two. Please come and join us outside Byron on High Holborn on Monday evening.