Migrant agricultural workers will co-create research to analyse the impact of the UK's new visa rules introduced following Brexit.
The research will show more about living and working conditions of those who arrive in Britain to work on farms.
The project is among the first studies to be undertaken in the context of the new migration regimes following the end of free movement between the UK and the EU.
It aims to analyse the effects of the visa conditions attached to short-term migration schemes on people’s vulnerability to exploitation.
This includes access to protective labour market structures, such as union membership, and statutory enforcement and redress, for example through employment tribunals, and whether it creates vulnerability to exploitation.
The Seasonal Worker Visa (SWV) allows workers from a range of countries to enter the UK to work in agriculture for periods less than six months and limiting their right to change employers.
Researchers will discover more about the working conditions of agricultural by engaging support workers in charities and NGOs to conduct interviews.
Dr Inga Thiemann from the University of Exeter, who is leading the project, said: “We want to centre migrant workers’ own voices and their lived experience in these sectors.
"We want to find out how they view their working conditions and which support they think would be useful to them. We feel it is important to base policy suggestions on that lived experience.”
The team and their NGO partners will conduct a survey and interviews with migrant workers and their representative organisations on their experience of work, their bargaining power and access to protective mechanisms, as well as what they would like enforcement mechanisms to look like.
Dr Thiemann added: “There is growing evidence that both insecure visa regimes and insufficient labour protections contribute to migrant workers’ vulnerabilities to exploitation, discrimination and modern slavery.
“This project will actively engage migrant workers as co-creators of the research and collaboratively generate new data on their working conditions, experiences and risks of exploitation and access to protections and redress.
"It will also assess the suitability of the relevant laws and enforcement mechanisms to adequately protect workers.”
