Flora’s story
Those of you who remember Moh (see the Dangerous Detention and Dangerous Job pages here) may be interested to hear about Flora. Flora lives in Hull. Her case is different to Moh’s case because she is not an asylum seeker, and her claim to stay is on other grounds, as I explain below.
What happened
Flora Yennyuy has applied for leave to appeal to the Immigration Appeals Tribunal against the Home Office’s refusal to allow her to remain in the UK. An acquaintance from Cameroon, who is an EU citizen, sent her the names of several universities to apply to in 2006. She came to the UK from Cameroon in 2007 to do a Master’s degree at the University of Hull, and she received her MSc in Environmental Technology in 2010. They later began a relationship in the UK and he supported her application for a work visa based on their relationship. The visa was due to expire in 2016.
However, the relationship broke down after he subjected her to abuse, violence and, finally, sexual assault. He then informed the Home Office that the relationship had broken down and the Home Office revoked her work visa. They did not inform her of this. She went to Germany to visit friends and on her return she was refused entry and placed in Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre. She was released on bail after 5 months, and she had a tribunal hearing in October 2013. The tribunal judge rejected her appeal, saying that she did not believe her claim of domestic violence and that Article 8 (the right to family life) of the human rights legislation was not engaged. If her claim of domestic violence had been accepted she believes she would have been given indefinite leave to remain. She has now made an application for leave to appeal to the Upper Tier of the Tribunal.
Flora’s history in Hull
Flora came to the UK as a student and then to work. She has made herself part of the community in Hull in a number of different ways: she has worked at the Open Doors Project at Princes Avenue Methodist Church since 2008 as a volunteer, where she campaigned in schools together with other volunteers to break the stigma attached to refugees and asylum seekers. She has also worked in Humber All Nations Alliance (HANA), the Mental Health Action Group (MHAG), the Refugee Council, The Haven Project, Positive Assets and Environmail Hull. She has also been an active member in the Catholic Compliancy. In terms of jobs she has worked as a Health Care Assistant under NHS-Hull and HICA, a sales assistant in the British Heart Foundation and as a factory operative at Greencore cake and dessert factory. The relationship she was in broke down through no fault of her own and she should not be punished for it. She wishes to stay and continue building her life in the UK.
Flora’s application is supported by Unite the Union’s community branch in Hull.
Amazon undercover
Just watched Panorama on Amazon’s ultra-exploitative battery-hen type working conditions (and pay scales – the daily rate is £6.50 per hour, the nightly rate £8.25). See the BBC’s webpage report:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25034598
In addition to the stress of work patterns, the constant surveillance, the system of disciplinary warnings, intense pressure on how fast you work and the real health issues that arise from this exploitation, there is the fact that profit-rich Amazon has been given millions in taxpayers’ money as an incentive to set up warehouses in Wales, Scotland and elsewhere. So the state uses public money as a bribe to big business but withdraws public money (in the shape of benefits) from individuals in order to force them into low-paid, temporary, health-threatening jobs at places like – well, yes – Amazon.
What can be done? The GMB was mentioned in the programme but I’m not sure that the union has members there. Individuals, of course, could withdraw their custom or other kinds of involvement (I have published a book in the Kindle store, for example, and could withdraw it). But individual action (though it makes you feel better) feels like a long route to nowhere. At the end of the day union organisation and action is the answer. I can’t apply for a job myself – I’m 71, and the young man who did the undercover job for Panorama was 23 and he nearly keeled over! There are worse epitaphs than one that says, “He tried to organise a union at Amazon”, but I’m not volunteering!
I’m going to retweet this to various unions (GMB, Unite, Unison, USDAW – any more?). If you’re concerned, let them know. And let Amazon know.
And if you have any ideas, use the comment box or reply. I’m out of ideas. I’m just angry.
Don’t grovel – demand!
“It’s not much to ask in return for a year’s work”, argues Barrie Clement in the current issue of Unite the Union’s magazine, uniteWORKS. What’s this about? It’s the “Living Wage”.
The Living Wage was invented by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University. The aim, says Clement, was “to provide the minimum pay rate required to provide the essentials of life.” According to Clement that means “enough to cover rent and energy bills and something left over for one cheap holiday in the UK.”
But the last part of that sentence suggests the grovelly position of the union on this question. Apart from eating and paying the bills, all we deserve “in return for a year’s work” is “one cheap holiday in the UK”. Thanks, Barrie.
Of course, everybody understands that the national minimum wage of £6.31 an hour is not a living wage. But neither is Loughborough’s £7.65 (£8.80 in London), although 5 million people across the UK are paid less than that. Yet, in September, Unite argued to the Low Pay Commission that “the statutory minimum should be uprated in line with the Living Wage.” Why did they argue for that? For replacing poverty wages with – er, well – poverty wages?
It looks like they were less robust than even that. According to Clement, Unite urged the Commission “to ‘take the boldest possible step’ towards doing so.” Whatever could that mean? Do it? Do a bit of it? Don’t do it? How hesitant and grovelly can you get?
It’s not clear what General Secretary Len McCluskey thinks. He says, “The legal minimum should be raised to a living wage to end the desperate wage depression inflicted on working people.” Well, a proper living wage would do that – but not Loughborough’s Living Wage.
There are a number of dangers here. Ed Miliband may have the odd nightmare about the first: the Tories could uprate the minimum wage to the Loughborough levels (Boris Johnson supports Loughborough, David Cameron apparently does) and that would leave Labour with no trousers.
The second danger is for the rest of us: McCluskey and Unite clearly want a Labour government. But – in line with previous form – Labour could promise to implement such an uprating and, on winning the 2015 election, break their promise. “It’s unaffordable to make it anything other than voluntary”, they might say, “both for the public and private sectors. The Tories have left such a mess, we didn’t realise.” If that happened the disillusionment of workers with politics would be increased beyond measure, with all the benefits that that might bring to outfits like UKIP, the BNP and the EDL. But even if Labour did raise the minimum rates to Loughborough levels, low-paid workers would still be left without enough to pay for Barrie Clement’s list of food, rent, energy bills and a cheap holiday.
But a better scenario is possible. Clement tells how cleaners in parliament went on strike to obtain the Loughborough Living Wage – and got it. London Underground cleaners did the same. So imagine what other workers might achieve if they strike, not just for Loughborough but for a proper living wage, well into double figures.
Well, Barrie, I don’t think you meant to send us in that direction – but thanks anyway.
A place to build and inhabit
As a relief from the demonising of niqabs and mosques, from the exceptional publicity given to the Al-Madinah school compared with non-Muslim academy schools also in special measures, and from Islamophobia generally, I take you back, gentle reader, to a time when, at least sometimes, multiculturalism was managed better. W. A. Meeks[1] writes of a time and place when a particular minority’s rights within the community were under threat. They protested to the local magistrates and council. The city authorities responded by declaring that the rights of those citizens should be maintained. They had, said the city council, the right to
“‘come together and have a communal life and adjudicate [their affairs and controversies] among themselves, and that a place be given them in which they may gather together with their wives and children and offer their ancestral prayers and sacrifices to God …’ The magistrates are to set aside a place ‘for them to build and inhabit’, and the market officials are to make provision for ‘suitable food’ to be available for [them].”
The time? 49 BC. The place? Sardis, in the Roman province of Asia. The minority? The Jewish community. Meeks continues:
“The subsequent history of the Jews in Sardis was apparently extraordinarily happy. In the second or early third century they were given for their ‘place’ a remodelled basilica, of huge size and elegant decoration, part of the monumental Roman gymnasium complex on the main street of the city, which they kept until the city itself was destroyed, long after the [Roman] empire had become officially Christian.”
Those were the days.
[1] Meeks, W.A. (2003), The First Urban Christians: the Social World of the Apostle Paul, Yale University Press, Yale, pp. 34-35.
Let’s be clear – Tory and Lib Dem MPs have decided terminally ill patients should work or starve
(not satire – it’s ConDemNation today)
Back in 2011, Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs joined together to reject an amendment which would have exempted terminally ill cancer patients from benefit cuts.
They decided that if you are diagnosed with a terminal illness such as cancer – but have been given more than 6 months to live – you will have to work or starve.
Here’s a previous blogpost about that:
The government has finally done something so outrageous even I can’t be bothered to satirise it
This decision by coalition MPs was so outrageous that after intense lobbying, there were some concessions made by the government.
However, in a bizarre piece of upside-down DWP logic, it now seems that if you have less than 6 months to live – you will be refused benefits.
This is from the Chester and Ellesmere Port Foodbank blog:
Jenny
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Henry V, Williams and Iraq
Well, when you feel a theme coming on …
Henry V, eh? Well, I’ve sometimes thought (not recently) that if someone had sent Tony Blair the following bit from Henry V the whole Iraq fiasco could have been avoided. In this scene Bates and Williams are debating in the trenches (well, you know) with the king (they don’t know it’s him) the merits or otherwise of the war. Henry describes his cause as “just and his quarrel honourable”:
“Williams: That’s more than we know.
Bates: Ay, or more than we should seek after. For we know enough if we know we are the king’s subjects. If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.
Williams: But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle shall join together at the latter day, and cry all, ‘We died at such a place’ – some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it …”
So do I think that if someone had quoted Williams to Blair (“the king who led them to it”) he would have listened? No, I don’t. But I still wish someone had done it.
Sycophancy is not new
The words quoted below are from Shakespeare’s Henry V. It simply struck me that their equivalent can be heard on a regular basis in today’s House of Commons, as lowly backbench MPs intent on promotion suck up to the prime minister in the hope of being given their just reward. The two sycophants are the Earl of Cambridge and Sir Thomas Grey, and they are talking to Henry:
“Cambridge: Never was monarch better feared and loved
Than is your majesty. There’s not, I think, a subject
That sits in heart-grief and uneasiness
Under the sweet shade of your government.
“Grey: True. Those that were your father’s enemies
Have steeped their galls in honey, and do serve you
With hearts create of duty and of zeal.”
Unlike today’s politicians, Henry didn’t swallow this sickening stuff. He already knew the two were traitors. After spelling that out for 3 pages he told them at the end of the audience:
“Get ye therefore hence,
Poor miserable wretches, to your death;
The taste whereof, God of his mercy give
You patience to endure, and true repentance
Of all your dear offences. – Bear them hence.”
“Bear them hence.” Wouldn’t we just love to hear someone speak those words (who could do it?) to today’s entire tribe of politicians, sycophants and hangers-on. Not to their deaths, of course – perish the thought. But hence. Far, far hence.
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