Nick Clark was involved in the Portuguese Workers Project in the early 2000s, hosted by the Trades Union Congress in London. In this article, Nick reflects on the experience of organising with Portuguese migrant workers in London.

How did the Portuguese Workers Project come into being?

The Portuguese Workers Project came into being after CGTP-IN (Confederação Geral dos Trabalhadores Portugueses - Intersindical Nacional or the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers, National Inter-union) approached the TUC (Trades Union Congress, the largest union federation in Britain). They wanted to collaborate with British trade unionists to support Portuguese workers.

The CGTP-IN was established at the end of the Portuguese dictatorship. It was associated with the Communist Party and was the more militant of the two union confederations. There was a large Portuguese diaspora across Europe and CGTP-IN had a history of organising with Portuguese workers abroad. In Germany and France they had projects working with diasporic organisations and trade unions, although how much actual industrial activity was attached is less clear. The CGTP-IN liked the idea of having these agreements with confederations around Europe.

CGTP-IN were interested in supporting something similar in Britain and struck up an agreement with the TUC. CGTP-IN pointed out that there were growing numbers of Portuguese workers in Britain, with more coming in the 1990s and early 2000s, and there were a few well-established communities, mainly in South London. Some of these were exiles from fascism in Portugal. There was also a younger layer of workers who would travel to work in agriculture, and some would stay in London. There was the start of a little diaspora network. Based on the Labour Force Survey - which is probably not that reliable - we reckoned there were around 20,000 Portuguese nationals working in Britain.

I was working at the TUC when the CGTP-IN suggested the agreement. The plan was to mutually support each other’s members. The TUC had no objections because, by and large, they did not mind signing their names to things and didn’t anticipate doing very much about it other than symbolically. Usually, the TUC would just put a project like this down as a footnote in the Annual Report to Congress and move on.

It fell to me because I was working in the “European Union and International Relations Department” at the time. This department carved up the world - I don’t know where that habit originated! - but I got a couple of Latin countries, such as Spain and Portugal, as well as countries like Uzbekistan, Belarus, and so on. As Portugal was one of my countries, a senior official said, “Well, see what you can do.” I thought this was a great chance to do a bit more of an investigation.

There was this little network of activists in London, some members and former members of the Portuguese Communist Party. They were mainly older workers, but some were younger. They had constituted themselves as the Portuguese Workers Association. I got in touch with them to see what we could do together. A handful of us working at the TUC had been shop stewards, unlike those who came from student politics and were on their way to the House of Commons (or believed they were!), and we were excited to get involved in some new worker organising.

I was already quite interested in the phenomenon of migration work, which in the late 1990s was not talked about much - and certainly not in trade unions. Most of their equalities issues were not unreasonably centred around race. There were Black workers’ committees and the Black workers conference was a big thing. This meant that there was an element of internationalism in organising in Britain, as opposed to just sending messages of solidarity to people far, far away. It’s been noted by other people than me that the average trade union official takes a more radical position in direct proportion to the distance they are away at the time. It is much easier to be radical when you don’t have to do anything about it.

The activities of the Portuguese Workers Project

I met with the group of Portuguese activists. Most were already trade union members, including a BT engineer in the Communication Workers, some in T&G, and so on. Nuno, who became the chair, had run an unemployed centre at some point. He had been around the movement for quite a long time. He was well-educated and spoke about four languages. He was a former Communist Party member but wasn’t too impressed with the ‘British road to socialism’ or, probably, the British Communist Party. He was, I think, still affectionately attached to the Portuguese Communist Party. He chided me on several occasions for describing people as Stalinists, which he quite rightly said is sectarian. He would work with anyone who hated the bosses, so we got on like a house on fire. We started building this little group, and they knew people with problems. In South London, Portuguese workers were working as contract cleaners or catering staff.

We had a few meetings and I think that was all the TUC expected us to do. However, we saw that some people needed more help, so we started doing employment rights surgeries. We made a leaflet and distributed it around the various cafes and people we knew. It being Britain, a leaflet on employment rights wouldn’t be that long, but we thought explaining what rights workers did and didn’t have was important. For example, getting a 13th-month wage each year was typical in Portugal, which they would expect during the holidays. There is no such thing in Britain. We tried to put down what expectations they would have, as well as explain how things work. Then, suddenly, you realise how bizarre some things are. Think about the distinction between employee and worker, and it’s almost impossible to explain in English, let alone Portuguese. The leaflet ended up looking really nice. It was interesting to see how some of my colleagues at the TUC were so keen to do something that might actually make a difference in workers’ lives, rather than issuing a press release or lobbying parliament or whatever.

From the leaflets, we started to get some more interest. We organised employment rights surgeries at Congress House. We didn’t have to pay for it, and we managed to get a number on the Congress House switchboard. Workers could leave messages in Portuguese, and Nuno would ring them back, find out what was happening, and make an appointment. He would interpret with me when they came in, going through the problems. At first, we would have a two-hour session where maybe one or two people would come in. Then it started growing. We didn’t even promote it after a while, as it was already at full capacity. Word of mouth got it around in the community. There was even a labour attache at the Portuguese embassy who would pass it on to people if they were angry enough to get in contact with the embassy.

The heart of it was giving advice. However, neither I nor the Portuguese Workers Association were satisfied with only offering advice. We ended up doing a lot of advocacy. We had an informal agreement with most of the general unions in the London area to do so. None of them wanted to write it down, of course, but they knew if someone joined, they wouldn’t be able to give them legal support during the first six months of membership. So we said, “Well, how about we represent them? Is that ok with you?” And, by and large, it was ok because they didn’t have to do the work. I don’t want to generalise too much, but for the average union official, that’s quite good news as they get the membership. Although we didn’t make membership a condition of helping workers, we did recommend they join. It was pretty obvious who workers should join. For example, if they were cleaning in a school, making sandwiches, cleaning car showrooms, and so on. If it wasn’t obvious which union to join, then we just took turns with the general unions. If you had asked the TUC to design a strategy for this, it would have taken years to develop a massive document. So we just didn’t ask; instead, we just got on with it. If it went wrong, the TUC could say they had nothing to do with it, but if it went well, it could make them look good.

Why organise with workers in this way?

Some Portuguese activists felt there wasn’t much trade union consciousness in the diaspora workforce. It became their political ambition to change that. From my point of view, that is something to begin with, but it was also exciting to get access to this granular detail of what is going on in the labour market. Through doing all this, you could discover things going on in the labour market that wouldn’t be detected by any other means for years. As soon as the employers start coming up with a new scam, you hear about it. Some scams are the sort you would expect, and others are new. For example, we won a tribunal case despite the fact there was not one single piece of documentary evidence of an employment relationship, not one. However, quite remarkably, the judge said, it’s not credible that you would have gone through all this if you hadn’t worked for them.

The project was very instructive for finding out details about what was going on at the fringes of the labour market. Some of these details about abuses and exploitation you find out from being a shop steward, but this was the cutting edge of employer strategies. We saw finding out about these as important developing proper organisation at work. However, it’s worth saying that as soon as there was any possibility of that happening, the union involved would take it over. In some cases, this was effective, like at Bernard Matthews in East Anglia, where there were a lot of Portuguese agency workers in the factories. The unions wanted to find Portuguese-speaking stewards and build up an organisation. We can’t claim much credit, although we did help with the first steps, making contacts, and so on. We did recruit most of the cleaning workforce for a car showroom in Park Lane. Unsurprisingly, they were outraged by the pittance they were being paid compared to what was happening around them, as well as having to work very early or late. Most of the workers we met, of course, were working in notoriously hard-to-organise industries. This included restaurants, bars, and contract cleaning, particularly in the private sector.

Often, with the Portuguese workers, their instinct was to write a denunciation of the boss. I would then say, “What do you want me to do with the denunciation? Bring it to the attention of the authorities?” Okay, I can see we need to have a long conversation here. Nuno’s take on this was that even in Portugal, that wouldn’t work as the labour inspectorate was full of people who had been civil servants under the previous fascist regime. But, it could work to start a beachhead for organising.

Much of this happened before the Gangmasters Licensing Authority was even established in Britain.¹ There had been bad press about employment agencies and working conditions. The industry established a “temporary labour working group” to see if they could develop a voluntary code to regulate gangmasters, those who supply workers into certain industries. It didn’t work - no surprises there. From my point of view, it was a very steep learning curve. I found that I was pushing at an open door in terms of policy with the TUC, but there was less action to back it up.. By the end of the first year in 2001, we organised a conference on trade unions and migrant workers at Congress House. Hundreds of people came to the event, and we had people like Theresa Hayter, who wrote a book about no borders. Given who we invited, I don’t think the TUC paid too much attention to what we were doing.

Much of what we did was focused on employment tribunal cases. These didn’t really get reported, partly because we judged it would be better for the TUC to have plausible deniability if they went wrong. They were all scared that there would be either some sort of big legal challenge or that bad advice would be given. However, we actually won the majority of cases because, frankly, they were open goals. We didn’t always get the money back for workers, of course. Getting a judgement isn’t the same as having the employer pay. It was instructive to see how these things operated in practice. For example, a worker came to see us who was a former professional footballer, but now drove minibuses. He worked for a series of agencies that brought people over from Portugal and put them up in accommodations they controlled. The driver knew about all this because he was taking them there. Later, the GLA would try to address this double exploitation at work and with accommodation. This agency owner was busing people from the North of Portugal, putting them to work in food processing and contract cleaning for service stations.
We also had a case with a woman worker in a salad processing factory who wasn’t being paid properly. It then transpired that the worst part of production was the organic line because they didn’t use “chemicals.” Instead, they used things to clean, which had a much worse effect on workers’ skin. Some workers would react really badly to it. In their generosity, the agency would fly them back home to recuperate. The reason for their “generosity” was that if the worker went to A&E, there was a chance it would be discovered that there was an occupational factor in these injuries. However, if they went home, nobody would find out.

This is what I mean about how casework can get you into the granular level of exploitation. It is very instructive about how employers exploit workers and the new scams they develop. I don’t think it gets through to people involved in policy discussions about the difference between having regulations and knowing how employers try to get around them. For example, the Health and Safety Act is quite a strong piece of legislation. But if employers are shipping people off so it’s never detected, what can be done with the legislation?

To some extent, the things we found became part of lobbying for new regulations by the TUC. For example, when the Gangmasters Licensing Authority was being established, we could make much better arguments because we knew what the agencies were up to, not just from newspaper reports, but from workers’ experience. In the early stages, when our data was good enough, we persuaded them that they would have to inspect everyone who is going to get a licence.

Using employment law in worker struggles

We thought taking on employment tribunal cases, even the ones we knew we would lose, was essential. We did not want to be anything like the Citizens Advice service. Instead, we wanted to be unequivocally on the side of the worker against the employer. We didn’t want to be there to ensure workers got the bare minimum of their employment rights. Most trade union lawyers or legal departments say a case has to have a better than 50% chance of winning. 50% is just spurious anyway, as how can you know for sure in advance? We took the position that it would be an exception for us not to pursue a case. There were one or two where we told the workers that there was no way we could make a case work. This was usually because they were involved in something dodgy themselves, so it wouldn’t be a good idea for them to do the case.

It is important to remember that employment lawyers know very little about what actually happens in the workplace. For example, when someone says that an employer is changing the timesheets, the average lawyer isn’t going to see that as a red flag. I will assume that if it is not a new company policy, it will be because the area manager gets a bonus for keeping the number of hours worked down, and they’re fiddling the numbers. When you’ve been doing this kind of casework, you start recognising the signs. And the funny thing is, the average trade union solicitor doesn’t really want to deal with unpaid wages cases. They are all looking for equal pay and discrimination cases, because those are the cases they will make their name - and some money. The “ordinary” stuff isn’t very interesting to lawyers, but it is what happens to workers every day.

Given the kinds of cases we would take, this meant we weren’t always successful, of course. For example, I remember one that came in late, and it had no chance of winning. Nuno said to me, “It is important we do something.” This was a young gay man working in contact cleaning at service stations. He just needed someone to be there, even if the case didn’t have much prospect of success. We lost the case, but he had someone on his side who tried. Nuno thought it was important that the trade union movement would be there for workers. For most of the Portuguese migrants, they were already suspicious of unions, because everyone else they had met so far had ripped them off. Why should they think we’re going to be any different? This is a perfectly legitimate question. It means we had to work hard to win trust.

I’m sure that one of the reasons we were able to win cases was that we actually prepared. On the employer’s side, the lawyers often thought that just because they went to public school, they would be able to walk all over us. That is not what happens in a tribunal hearing, as they need to know the ins and outs of the case. Either way, the most important thing for us was getting a win for the worker. But winning and getting their money back was often more complicated. I learned very quickly that Companies House was the first port of call. If this company is about to go under, or the director has a track record of winding companies up, then the likelihood of getting any money out of them is very low. For some workers, just getting the judgement is important though. It is sometimes just about proving that they were right.

On the other hand, a lot of times, it just wasn’t worth the trouble for the employer to go to the tribunal. This meant sometimes they just paid. If you have got the documents prepared, the evidence is in place, there are letters before action, and all that stuff, they just decide to pay up. A lot of our cases were settled before getting to the tribunal. However, some employers just can’t let go of the money. For some agencies and contract teams, this is their business model. They know that nine out of ten workers aren’t going to fight them. So when that one worker does, they just pay them off. Wage theft is just part of their business model. They are not emotionally attached to the money; they just pay and move on.

There are different employer strategies for different segments of the labour market. Often, it has to do with employer size and the nature of work in the sector. The culture in a sector shapes the type of abuse perpetuated and what different scams employers use. For example, the whole construction industry is built around the false notion of self-employment. This was a deliberate strategy after the building worker strikes and a government policy to encourage so-called self-employment. In this way, a culture of what employer strategies involve can be developed. There were different employer strategies in restaurants, often associated with tips, how they are distributed, and the extra unpaid time to clean up. The more contact you have with workers in different sectors, the more you can start to see what scams are common.

Learning from the Portuguese Workers Project

Looking back over the project, I learned a few things I would have done differently. One issue is that this kind of advocacy can take its toll. I used to have sleepless nights before a tribunal hearing because I was always worried that I would screw it up. It also wouldn’t be me who lost out if I did. The risk of doing this kind of advocacy is that you can easily slip into a saviour complex. This is common in voluntary organisations. People can start to think that what they are doing is so important that they cannot do anything wrong. Worker centres in the US have tried to combat that by developing an activist layer involved in running it. This is a really important step and safeguard. This can involve getting people who have been helped to try and help someone else. However, this takes a lot of time and effort to get going.

The other issue was that getting people to join unions is a start, but it’s not necessarily a challenge to capitalism. Getting workers’ money back that has been stolen by an employer is something, but you don’t only want to achieve a lawful level of exploitation. If you have a bigger perspective, you have to work out how advice and advocacy connect to that bigger project. Otherwise, the advice and advocacy will take over. It is important to scratch the surface of the enormous level of unlawful exploitation that happens, but that is only one part of the wider pattern of exploitation under capitalism.

When I look back on it now, the main issue was that it was only ever a plaster over the exploitation more widely. If you ever wanted to make it more than that, you had to have a deliberate strategy. We didn’t find the time to sit down and talk strategy. Making time for this is really important. Strategy cannot wait.