An Ethnography of Global Labour Migration

The Middleman

I followed the same work-seeking route as most Chinese workers. Having got myself a photocopied IS96 document in the name of Chen Min, I called up a Chinese recruiter, Mr Lin, based in Thetford. I managed to convince him that I am from northern China and have outstayed my visa and am desperately looking for work. There's work and accommodation in Thetford, he said.

When we met in Victoria coach station to travel to Thetford together, Lin suspiciously asked questions about my origin. When he became more relaxed, he poured out to me stories from his past. During his five years in Britain, he's been involved in the business of ‘status manufacturing’ — as he called the business of producing and selling passports, for £400–£500 each — making a profit out of the plight of fellow Chinese. Lin was the man who organized the team of 20 Chinese cocklers who tragically died in Morecambe this February. He claimed that he used to make around £600 a week from the business. ‘My girlfriend was among the victims. It was a shame’, he looked ahead through the wind screen, ‘it was fortunate that I wasn't there at Morecambe when it happened. I didn't want to get caught, you know. It wasn't my fault.’ She was in her 20s, a North-eastern Chinese woman persuaded into cockling by Lin.

Lin asked for a registration fee of £200 upfront, for me to get registered with the recruitment agency in Thetford. He tried to exercise control over where I went and watched my movements closely. At the same time he's busy with his new scheme — going back to the cockling business in Lancaster. ‘It only takes around £6,000 to get all the equipment ready’, he said. He's trying to recruit around 15 workers, and will organize forged permits for them and provide them accommodation and meals in Liverpool as well as hiring transport for them. ‘I'm looking for only those who can put up with hard work’, he said.

Days later, Lin asked me to go with him and work for him as his accountant. ‘All you have to do is count up the number of bags of cockles and how much they're worth. We'll get something like £12 a bag from the English buyers and give the Chinese about £6 per bag. Easy money.’

Living

It was a dingy-looking four-bedroom house located in the outskirt of Thetford. When Lin showed me into the front room, I realized there was not a bed or sleeping place prepared for me as agreed on the phone. There were three men sleeping on mattresses on the floor, against a double bed. ‘Where do I sleep’, I asked. He pointed to the double bed which I immediately understood as his bed. A man on the floor was woken up. I pointed at the small space at that man's foot and insisted that I sleep there, for which I was to pay £30 weekly to a local landlord.

One of my roommates, Mr Zhang, was having spaghetti with baked beans for breakfast in this narrow-shaped kitchen. ‘This is cheap and tasty’, he said. Four or five people can eat in there at the same time, but not without brushing aside each other. ‘Whoever comes home earliest from work can use the kitchen first’, Zhang said. When the first round of people finished their dinner, the second round came in to cook, and then the third round.

Things are used in the most economical way here — 1/4 kilo of flour can be made into steam buns, pancakes and noodles for breakfasts and lunches for the entire week. If there's a meat dish, it's always for at least two days’ dinners. Pig tails and ears are a favourite dish for the southerners as they're the cheapest things you can get in a butcher. The cost of food and general living is extremely low among my housemates — lower than £6 each person per week.

Live to Work, Work to Live

My roommates were construction workers in Shanghai. Fierce competition as a result of China's opening up to world market and international capital means privatization, lay-offs and high level of unemployment. The university-educated Mr Zhang and Mr Qin were among the hundreds of thousands of unemployed in this city endowed with the beautiful title of the future of China. Mr Zhang said:

He continued:

The Shanghainese have been in Britain for a year, but have never stopped travelling. As Mr Qin recalls:

The 52-year-old Mr Tan said he only did cockling for one day. ‘All that cold sea wind and backaches, ay, I had to pack it in.’ Mr Zhang said he's the fittest among them and he lasted for a month there. They then moved on to their next stop, Birmingham, working on a flower farm again. As Mr Qin said:

Mr Qin shook his head and sighed. His anger almost brought him to tears as he remembered how they were treated.

I asked whether he thinks anything could be done to stop this from happening again. Mr Qin replied:

Mr Zhang and Mr Tan nodded in agreement. ‘And we always have our immigration status to worry about. How do we speak out if we do not have the same rights as everyone else?’ Zhang said.

The recruiter of these Shanghainese has given them two weeks to pay up the registration fees before it rises to £250 in the third week. ‘I only have £60 on me now. I really need to work right away to pay back the fees’, said Mr Qin.

Waiting for work, recovering from work and getting ready for work seems the pattern of life here. There's not much else to hope or aim for.

My housemates were getting very depressed about the irregularity of work from the agency. However, none of them can afford to leave for work elsewhere. Mr Zhang said:

The Agency

Lin took me to the agency, ¹ to register. Situated in the centre of Thetford, Pertemps is a major recruitment company for the food-processing industries in Norfolk, and has more than 203 branches in 95 towns and cities all over the country. It currently has over 25,000 workers registered, large numbers of them are workers from Portugal as well as undocumented workers from Brazil and China.

I could see that Lin's relationship with the agency isn't all that harmonious. While he tries to make a profit from us, he has to keep appeased and share some of his profits. Other recruiters would do the same and pay up to £100 cash or goods in kind to.

One day, Lin handed the wrapped-up ‘presents’ to the two administrators at the agency. ‘You need to feed them with little presents, cigarettes and money. Then they'll guarantee you work.’ The administrators confidently took the presents, and booked me a job for this afternoon, at, the largest poultry and meat manufacturer and supplier in Britain.

I showed my amazement at how efficiently the bribery works. Lin said:

During the second week, the waiting for work was killing us. Mr Lai, one of the most experienced worker who has regular work with the agency, gave me his advice:

I decided to take his advice and prepared £20 and a pack of cigarettes. I went in one day and handed one of the administrators the ‘present’. She accepted it, with the other staff and a manager witnessing it.

And the bribery worked. That day, I was given two morning shifts for the next day and the day after, at

On pay day, everyone was comparing their pay slips. Mr Li anxiously showed me his payslip, ‘look, they didn't pay me overtime! It was four hours’ work. How can they not pay me?’ We were about to go into the agency to find out why, before Lin aggressively stopped me and warned us about our lack of legal status.

Other workers reveal that the agency sometimes avoids paying wages and makes deductions. One said that he did two days’ overtime work on a weekend and never got paid for it, despite his complaint. ‘We don't owe you anything’ were the words of the agency.

We went to collect our wages on the second pay day during my stay. ‘We're collecting our small money’, one Brazilian woman jokingly said. The agency office is full of workers of all nationalities, all queuing to get paid. When the Chinese workers got their cheques, some were upset by the low pay, especially the newly registered, who only got paid £23.60 for an eight-hour daytime shift. A Chinese worker raised his voice:

We are all paying tax with the NI numbers from photocopies of outdated documents. There's no explanation why the tax is so heavy. We're the tax payers without the rights to know.

The Food-Processing Companies

One afternoon, I got on the agency minibus that took us all the way to largest site in Suffolk. There were 10 of us, mostly from Brazil, Portugal and Eastern Europe. More people were picked up along the way. It seemed so bleak outside. I asked my fellow workers if anyone knows which county and where exactly we're going. No one knows. All they knew is that they're being sent to to work and that seems all they need to know.

An hour later, the minibus entered the gates of There you see a large-type sign hanging high above the grey concrete blocks of the plants, shining in your eyes with these four words, ‘Making Life Taste Better’, as we get off the minibus to go into work. How does our life taste, you wonder?

We were quickly put into teams. I was put in the butchery unit with many Eastern Europeans. We got into our uniforms and caps and were taken to the unit to join a team of local workers.

The factory floor was wet and slippery as we walked through the butchery. I was careful not to fall over. Our first job was to machine-cut pork, select and separate good from bad meat. There was no training for newly recruited agency workers like us.

We were then taken to another part of the butchery where we packaged all cut-up pork in plastic papers from a huge pool of tons of meat. The next step down the line was to pack them into cardboard boxes and refrigerate them. The first two hours I was trying to adjust to the fast and monotonous pace of the work.

By the third hour of standing in the same position, my feet were growing stiff. The smell of meat was suffocating. There were two half-hour breaks during the shift. The first break felt like 10 minutes, as we had to go upstairs and take off our dirty uniforms to be allowed into the canteen for a cigarette. Some fellow workers sat in the canteen, their eyes shut.

The following two hours became harder, as we were made to unload large chunks of frozen pork ribs, each weighing about 10 kilos. We worked non-stop as box after box of ribs were sent to us. The supervisor was nearby. Everyone had their heads down. There was no stepping off the line. During the fifth hour, my feet became numb and my back was aching from lifting the heavy ribs.

‘So all these are eventually going to a fellow worker who just started her first day, said. ‘It's amazing!’

processes 3.6 million pigs a year at this site in Suffolk. The amazing thing is that whatever we workers produce will be detached from us in the end. We have absolutely no control over the processes or the end result. We are the cogs on the rolling wheel, identity-less. The sense of alienation is most strongly felt by migrant workers.

A second break, then more unloading of pork. I was struggling to keep up with the pace of work during the final two hours, my body moving on auto-pilot. Everyone was too tired to talk.

When the shift finished at 11.30 pm, we went out to the gate to wait for the minibus to collect us. It was a half-hour wait in the cold rain. We were all annoyed at the fact that £2 is being deducted daily for transport from our wages and sometimes the agency doesn't even send a minibus to us. It was 1.30 am when I eventually got back to the house in Thetford. All this for a pitiful £28.42 after tax.

In the following days we were put in the wash room at, alongside Brazilian and local workers, de-labelling, loading and unloading containers on the conveyor belt before and after de-contamination.

A full-time local worker reveals that he gets £240 weekly take-home pay. He had no idea that migrant workers earn at best half that amount for doing the same work.

Most of my housemates are sent to the multinational food-manufacturing company in Redgrave, half an hour away from Thetford, to work in the duck-processing factory there. They are on morning shifts and get up at 4:00 am and some at 6:00 am. One-fifth of the 200-strong workforce at are Chinese. The majority of the workforce is Portuguese-speaking, and so is the factory-floor supervision. The work is notoriously demanding, and a housemate told me that he suffered from a muscle injury a while a go from lifting. Other housemates advised me not to take a job there. One said:

supply food products to 120 countries globally and its annual sales currently exceed 3.75 billion euros. At the same time, a full-time Chinese worker at like my housemates, at best gets paid £149 for a 40-hr week.

Social Isolation

Life outside work is extremely cut-off for the fellow Chinese workers, as they have no social network or money to spend on entertainment. ‘Pubs and clubs are just not affordable’, said Mr Zhao. And they are too worried about the possible exposure of their status to allow themselves appear in public places too often.

My roommates were learning English from a dictionary and an electronic translator Zhao got in China. Listening to the distorted electronic sounds on the machine didn't seem a very effective way of learning, but there was no choice. Mr Feng said there can be bullying if they don't speak the language, especially from the foremen at. He keeps all his new English vocabulary in a notepad and frequently refreshes his memory. ‘It's very frustrating when I really want to express myself but can't. Even just to say ‘thank you for picking me up’ to the driver.’

Fear

I was told by my housemates to lock the front door at all times. They all expressed a fear of the gang members who came to take ‘protection fees’ last year, although the head of the gang was arrested recently and put behind bars. A housemate recalls:

Another housemate said that he got robbed £250 and felt lucky that he wasn't hurt by them.

Constant fear, combined with job insecurity, has lead to poor health. Mr Feng has serious sleeping problems that he often takes sleeping pills before bed. Every evening I can hear him turning again and again trying to sleep. He said

He continued: