Live-in care workers ‘have pay docked by agencies to cover accommodation’

theguardian.com:

Live-in care workers recruited from overseas to care for disabled and elderly people in Britain are being exploited by “unscrupulous” agencies who dock their pay to cover “accommodation costs”, according to new research.

The workers, who live with clients to provide round-the-clock care, in some cases had their pay reduced by hundreds of pounds a month despite being paid only the minimum wage to begin with.

The practice is exposed in a landmark report published by Nottingham University’s Rights Lab, the world’s biggest modern slavery research grouip, based on an 18-month study involving London-based live-in care workers from countries including Zimbabwe, South Africa, Hungary and Poland.

It identifies several cases where workers were given “unclear payslips where the number of hours worked and any deductions were not specified”, including instances where pay appeared to have been withheld unlawfully.

Employers can legally deduct £8.70 a day – up from £5.35 in 2016 – from workers’ pay if they are providing accommodation, as might happen with farm workers in rural areas.

But Dr Caroline Emberson, who led the research, and Dr Agnes Turnpenny, from the Institute of Public Care at Oxford Brookes University, said it was unethical and “absurd” that low-paid live-in care workers should be charged for accommodation when their jobs required them to stay in clients’ homes overnight.

As well as the deductions for accommodation costs, the research found that some workers were subject to sexual harassment or racist abuse, and were expected to carry out non-caring duties for the whole family such as cooking and cleaning. These workers were often left without support from their agencies, which act as an intermediary between workers and