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Theresa May leaves legacy of cruelty for domestic workers [1]

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Date: 2024-03 

Earlier this month, Theresa May, former home secretary and prime minister, announced that she would stand down as MP at the next general election. This news was met with video compilations of career highs and lows – Brexit, the 2017 snap election, and awkward dancing – and tributes praising her “decency, integrity” and “passionate campaigning for vital causes”.

That’s not how I will remember her. To me and many others in migrant communities and the migrants’ rights sector, she will be remembered for four acts that demonstrated her fundamental lack of humanity.

She was the home secretary who failed the Windrush generation, who didn't meet the survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire, who created the hostile environment for migrants, and who changed the overseas domestic workers visa to tie workers to their employers. All cruel, all the opposite of “decency”. And the last two made countless migrants vulnerable to exploitation, in direct contradiction to May’s professed passion for ending modern slavery.

When it came to migrants in the UK, she was heartless and deserves to be remembered as such.

The overseas domestic worker visa

The ODW visa, created in 1998 after years of campaigning by domestic workers, allowed workers who had been brought to the UK to switch employers, settle, and apply for their family and dependents to settle in the UK with them.

But in April 2012, then-home secretary May altered the rules, making it more difficult for workers to escape abusive employers. Domestic workers could still technically switch to a new employer if they left an exploitative employer – but they could still only work for as long as their visa is valid (a maximum of 6 months). The visa is not renewable and domestic workers cannot switch to a different form of leave to remain in the UK while here – even if they are escaping abuse.

Combined, these rule changes made it very difficult for employees to escape abuse without being threatened with removal if they overstayed their visa. Few employers will hire a domestic worker midway through a six-month visa, as they have to register these changes with the Home Office to sponsor the worker, which is too complicated for most employers, especially for such a short period of time. But domestic workers cannot be without an employer and remain legally in the UK.

This is what it means to be tied, and the result has been that migrant domestic workers can’t escape the exploitation and abuse because they cannot afford the consequences of protecting themselves, or might not know what options for protection they have.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/theresa-may-mp-leaves-legacy-of-cruelty-for-migrant-domestic-workers/

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