In 2019, when she was twenty-five, Farah (not her real name) moved to the United Kingdom to pursue a master’s degree in business. Despite already holding bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering and technology from universities in India, she faced significant challenges in finding stable employment. The expiration of her student visa meant that she would need to secure a work visa in order to remain in the country with her husband (whose right to remain depended on hers) and their new baby.

Farah submitted more than three hundred work applications before finally receiving a job offer from a care home in Greater Manchester in December 2022. This offer came via Indeed, a reputable recruiting website. The care home company assured her of a certificate of sponsorship, a crucial document linking her immigration status to her employer. The UK government grants these work visas through employer sponsorship, a program that allows foreign nationals to work in the United Kingdom for employers that have a government-approved sponsor license. This means that if someone’s employment is terminated, he or she can lose the right to remain.

“During the interview, I made it clear I couldn’t work six days straight because of our baby,” Farah explains. “They assured me that we could manage with a combination of shifts shared with my husband, telling me I can work four days and he can work two days, and we would get one day together off at home.”

Although entry-level care work was far afield from what Farah had studied for, she was glad of the opportunity, and her initial experiences working in care were good. “I received good training and support,” she says, and the management was pleasant and accommodating.

However, as time passed, the promise faded. The job made escalating demands on her time and Farah and her husband found themselves shuffled into grueling shift rotations and schedules that stripped them of any family time. Farah expressed her concerns to management but was met with indifference or hostility. When the couple tried to refuse shifts, their hours became, if anything, even more punishing.

Under UK law, a care worker who is sponsored must work a minimum of 37.5 hours per week and be paid a minimum of £11.44 per hour. The worker must have at least eleven hours of rest between working days and at least one full day off each week, or two full days every two weeks, with at least 5.6 weeks’ paid holiday per year. These regulations bore no relationship to the schedule Farah and her husband were required to perform.

In the midst of this turmoil, sickness arrived. An outbreak of vomiting and diarrhea swept through the care home, leaving Farah, her husband, and their baby daughter very ill. Even so, the management’s primary concern was to force employees back to work, threatening their jobs if they refused (and apparently without regard for the patients they might expose).

Later, Covid-19 struck the care home, affecting patients and staff. Farah and her husband tested positive but their illnesses were quickly dismissed, and despite their being very unwell, the management demanded they return to duty. “That’s when our real struggle happened,” Farah says. She recalls her manager throwing the phone, shouting, “I have given you a free visa and I didn’t know you have a baby, why have you not left your baby with your family in India?” She says he threatened to fabricate a story about her that would put her directly in jail. “He got very aggressive. He was shouting and I was shivering through the phone.”

At this point Farah’s husband resigned. But Farah did not, as the whole family’s right to reside and work in the United Kingdom was dependent on her visa. The work environment continued to sour.

“Sometimes they made me work nine days in a row with back-to-back shifts. After five months, I had not had a day off and no weekends,” Farah says. Meanwhile, she was shouted at and humiliated in front of the other staff.

At the end of these five months, Farah requested to take two weeks of her annual leave, so she could visit her family in India for the first time in four years and so her family could meet her now two-year-old child for the first time. Her child also required some specialist eye surgery back in India. At first management refused, but then reluctantly granted her ten days.

On the family’s return to the United Kingdom, Farah faced a new challenge; the care home refused to give her any shifts. “For two weeks I called them and I asked them why you are not putting me on the rota, as they were stopping any income, and they said it’s punishment because I took annual leave.”

Farah and her husband’s financial situation became so difficult that they were unable to pay rent or bills. They borrowed money from her parents back in India (who did not have much themselves) to make ends meet, and were soon at risk of homelessness.

In December 2023, a British colleague working at the care home, perhaps more aware of national law and resources, pointed Farah in the direction of the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA), a UK government agency focused on preventing and tackling labor exploitation. She also got in touch with a charity called Justice and Care, which partners with police forces in the United Kingdom to support the victims of egregious labor violations. I have reported alongside Justice and Care on a number of stories over the last seven years, including being present on police investigations. In the last two years the organization has seen a surge of exploitation cases within the care sector.

Justice and Care connected Farah with one of its “victim navigators,” Melissa (also a pseudonym, due to the nature of her work), who taught Farah about her rights and how to report her employer’s exploitation. Melissa guided Farah through the process of formally reporting her treatment to the GLAA, which started to investigate the care home.

Other care workers at the home made anonymous complaints, but when UK Visa Immigration (UKVI) and GLAA came to interview the staff individually they did not want to talk, possibly due to fear of repercussions. When a company has its UKVI sponsorship license revoked, it cannot continue to employ international workers, leaving those workers only sixty days to either find new sponsorship or leave the country – an outcome similar to the threat their employers might use against them.

After Farah’s employer found out she was the whistleblower, the company tried to force her to sign a legal statement to retract her complaint, threatening her that all the other staff would lose their jobs and livelihoods because of her. The management refused to give a reference for any future employment or sponsorship.

The investigation came to a close with little remuneration for Farah. The care home did have its sponsorship license suspended for a short time. However, after an investigation by the UKVI the company made some changes and was given its sponsorship license back. Farah, who has stayed in touch with some old colleagues, does take comfort in knowing that at least working conditions have improved for them somewhat after this intervention.

Sadly, Farah’s story is not unique. In my thirty-year career as a photojournalist and filmmaker, I have traveled to nearly seventy countries to gather stories. My calling is to investigate, document, and expose the disturbing truths around modern slavery, human trafficking, and exploitation. And yet, even I was shocked to learn of the exploitation happening right on my own doorstep here in the United Kingdom.

There is a huge demand for people willing to work in care, a vocation that many native Brits find unattractive. This has been amplified since Brexit, as there has been a significant drop in the movement of European Union nationals coming to work in the sector. The latest government figures show almost 106,000 visas were granted to care workers in 2023, a number that has tripled from the same period in 2022. People from India, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Bangladesh, and Pakistan topped the list of nationalities traveling to the United Kingdom to plug the labor gap. Although there are some safeguards in place, many of those coming to work in the care sector have a poor understanding of their rights.

On top of that, many of these workers are misled as to the true costs of their visa. A common situation, says Melissa, is that a supposed middleman “will charge illegal fees for the visa. This could be anything from £10,000 to £50,000 for a visa that actually costs just over £300.” To pay these illegitimate costs, many international workers sell family assets such as land or businesses in their home countries.

Nine out of ten cases that come through the GLAA are from the care sector, Melissa says. Victims “confide in us about the struggle to find alternative sponsorships, all while carrying the burden of feeding their families. They fear letting their families down back home, to tell them it hasn’t worked out; it’s very embarrassing and shameful for them.”

Melissa emphasizes the psychological as well as financial toll such exploitation takes, recounting a stark example:

We had a woman who came to the United Kingdom with her husband and two children and paid £28,000 for her sponsored job, using her dad’s pension money to pay the illegal fee. When she complained about her hours, she was told, “You’re here on my visa; you’ll do as you’re told.” The woman received a lot of psychological abuse as well, and one day her husband came home to find her writing a suicide note. Luckily, he managed to stop her.

Justice and Care considers these kinds of employment pressures so acute as to call them “slavery.” According to the GLAA, forced and compulsory labor is defined as “all work or service which is exacted from any person under the threat of a penalty and for which the person has not offered themselves voluntarily.” The agency’s latest report focuses solely on labor exploitation, excluding other forms of modern slavery, such as sexual exploitation and forced begging.

One of the most striking findings from the report is its insights into what factors make victims of exploitation most vulnerable. The most common vulnerability stems from immigration status being linked to employment. Fear of deportation or job loss keeps many silent even in the face of unacceptable working conditions.

As Melissa notes, “Many of these international workers believe that their sponsors hold the power to deport them. This fear keeps them in a place of compliance, even when exploitation is at play.”

The care sector has emerged as a critical area of concern in the GLAA’s report, consistently marked as the most reported sector for modern slavery indicators. In the most recent quarter alone, care home and social care settings accounted for 47 percent of all reports and referrals related to forced labor.

The report highlights a range of exploitation types, with pay issues featuring prominently. This includes inadequate or withheld wages and unexplained deductions. The next most common form of exploitation reported was being made to work long hours, a condition often linked to jobs in the care sector that require workers to travel between various locations during shifts.

Another critical finding suggests a direct correlation between the provision of accommodation and exploitation. In 33 percent of cases, victims were forced to live in substandard conditions controlled by their employers. This factor creates an additional layer of vulnerability, leaving these workers fearful of being evicted.

Most reported victims were female. Conversely, the exploiters were predominantly male, and mainly of British nationality. This points to a troubling power dynamic as well.

I spoke to Andrew Brown, the National Investigations Lead at the GLAA, whose role involves tracking the rise of labor exploitation and modern slavery in the UK care sector. His insights shed light on the systemic issues that allow these violations to persist.

The GLAA has successfully implemented a licensing scheme in sectors like horticulture, agriculture, food processing, and shell fishing, focusing on stringent oversight through rigorous inspection processes. However, in the adult care sector there is a troubling gap in regulatory measures from the government, as it is not one of GLAA’s regulated sectors. The increasing demand for care services, coupled with low interest in that work from British citizens and generally undesirable pay and conditions, “creates a perfect storm for exploitation,” he states.

The sharp rise in exploitation cases follows the government’s decision in February 2020 to make foreign social care workers eligible for temporary visas that were previously reserved for higher-paid workers. In the following eighteen months, 180,000 health and care visas were granted, a rate almost three times higher than before, filling more than 165,000 vacancies.

Between August 2020, when the health and care worker visa was launched, and March 2024, the latest month covered in the report, the number of care providers with visa sponsorship licenses ballooned from just over 250 to more than 3,200. Since then, nearly 200 have been removed from the Home Office register for bad practice.

Brown notes that the partnership between the GLAA and organizations like Justice and Care has proven invaluable in providing a support network for victims of exploitation. He hopes to achieve better industry regulation and more collaboration among agencies. “We need to drive toward regulations that safeguard workers – both from predatory recruitment practices and from the cycle of exploitation fostered by the current sponsorship system,” he says. He also hopes to raise awareness among prospective workers for their own protection.

Melissa also hopes to raise awareness among the people who rely on these care workers, often hidden in plain sight. “When you visit care homes or meet care workers, check in with them. Are they well? Are they overworked?”

With Melissa’s help, Farah found a new sponsor and began to rebuild her life. Both she and her husband work for a different company now, and their daughter is thriving.