Let me start with Elizabeth Lower-Basch’s recent work on thirty years of American welfare reform, in which she warns that without a new narrative we remain “stuck in the discourse of 1996.” She was describing a country that keeps returning to arguments it had already settled, as though the evidence collected since then had changed nothing. Britain has its own version of this problem, and we have seen it again this week.
Nineteen ninety-six matters here too. That was the year Parliament passed the Asylum and Immigration Act. Section 8 made it an offence to employ someone who did not have the right to work in the UK, and it came into force in January 1997. The idea was to target employers who were hiring people without permission to work. But there was a problem. If you make an employer responsible for immigration checks, the employer starts thinking about immigration status when deciding whom to employ, and that can affect people who look or sound foreign even when they are perfectly qualified for the job. By 1999 MPs were debating whether the provision should be repealed for that very reason.
The lesson is that when immigration control enters the workplace, some of its effects are very difficult to see. We can see when someone gets a job. We can see when someone loses one. We cannot see the person who was never offered the job because the employer treated their status as a risk.
Which brings me to the change announced this week. On 3 September, the Home Office announced that recognised victims of modern slavery on Skilled Worker visas can leave an abusive employer and work elsewhere without losing their immigration status. This is an important change, and we should say so. No worker should be forced to stay with an abusive employer because leaving puts their right to remain at risk.
The reason it matters is simple. For a sponsored worker, the employer is not only the person who provides the job; the employer is also attached to their immigration status. Losing the job becomes much more serious than losing an ordinary job. It becomes a question of whether you can continue to live and work in this country. And we know the system has been abused: more than 6,600 sponsors have had their licences revoked since the current government came into office, over 4,400 of them in the year to June 2026. The problem is real.
But the reform raises another question. What happens to the worker who needs to speak up before their situation becomes modern slavery?
The protection is aimed at people formally recognised as victims. For that, a worker normally has to go through the National Referral Mechanism and receive a positive conclusive grounds decision. In plain terms, the system is saying: if we officially recognise that you have been seriously exploited, we will give you more freedom to leave your employer. That is reasonable enough. But think about the worker before that decision is made. They are still working for the employer. They are still sponsored by the employer. They may still need that employer to maintain their status. And they may be wondering what happens if they complain. Will a worker speak up if they believe speaking up could cost them their job and, with it, their place in the country? The protection arrives after recognition. The fear, if it is there, exists long before it.
I want to think about the situations that do not look like modern slavery, using the kinds of accounts I have heard from people working in this sector.
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A worker has a disagreement with a manager. In the meeting, the manager reminds them that their visa depends on the organisation. Nothing else happens. Nobody is threatened, no passport is taken, and no wages are withheld. But the worker has heard the message and now understands how much their immigration status might matter in that room.
Another worker asks why she is never given the responsibilities that would help her progress. The manager does not say she cannot progress because she is a migrant. She simply stops receiving opportunities. She is not given the extra responsibility; she is not selected for particular shifts, and when she asks, she is told there is not enough work to go round. Eventually she leaves.
Or a worker performs well at the interview and is told so but does not get the job and is given no reason. Perhaps immigration status played a part. Perhaps it did not. We will never know, and that is exactly the difficulty. Some forms of inequality leave very little evidence behind. There is no email saying we rejected you because you are a migrant. There is a decision, a different rota, a missed opportunity, and a conversation. The worker may believe they know what happened. Proving it is another matter entirely.
Sir William Macpherson’s 1999 report gave us a way of thinking about this. Institutional racism, he explained, can be seen in processes, attitudes and behaviour, including unwitting prejudice, ignorance and thoughtlessness. The point is that discrimination does not have to be deliberate. Nobody has to sit down and decide to discriminate. It can happen through ordinary decisions: who gets the opportunity, who gets the better shifts, who gets training, and who is trusted with more responsibility. And, most importantly, who feels safe enough to complain.
That last question matters more when immigration status is tied to employment, because for a sponsored worker, a complaint about their employer is not an ordinary workplace complaint. It can feel like a gamble with their future in the country. Whether that is what actually happens inside these workplaces and how managers themselves understand the discretion they are exercising is a question that deserves proper study rather than assumption. But the design question is in front of us now.
Sponsorship turns an ordinary workplace problem into an immigration problem. A disagreement with a manager becomes a worry about your visa. Losing a job becomes a worry about whether you can stay. That changes the employment relationship itself, whatever any individual employer intends.
So a stronger system would give sponsored workers greater freedom to change employers, whether or not they have been recognised as victims. It would take seriously the possibility that promotion, responsibilities and shift allocation are places where status quietly matters. And it would give workers safe ways to raise concerns before their situation becomes severe enough to be recognised as modern slavery. We should not have to wait until someone becomes a victim before we take their concerns seriously.
The reform announced this week is important. It gives recognised victims more freedom to leave an abusive employer, and that is a positive step. But the right to leave is not the same as the right to speak. A worker may have the right to leave once they have been recognised as a victim. What protection do they have when they only want to ask why they are not being promoted, why they are getting fewer shifts, why they were passed over, or why they feel unable to challenge a manager? Those questions may never become a modern slavery case. They still tell us something about power in the workplace.
So the question is not only whether a migrant worker is free to leave. It is whether they feel safe enough to speak while they are still there. A workplace can give someone a door and still leave them afraid to use their voice.
