On 21 November, the EBoP team members and colleagues discussed ‘Low-Paid EU Migrant Workers. The House, The Street, The Town’ by Catherine Barnard, Fiona Costello and Sarah Fraser Butlin.
The book offers an in-depth exploration of the lives of the less visible – low-paid, remote – EU migrant workers, living and working in a small coastal town in the UK. It looks at this situation through the prism of legal geography to examine the interaction between law and space.
Drawing on interviews with migrants and the NGO workers who support them, the authors provide a unique perspective on migrant workers’ struggles at work, but also in relation to housing, access to healthcare and benefits, showing how their lives – and problems – have changed (or stayed the same) following Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. The book powerfully illustrates how these struggles accumulate and push already precarious migrants further into precariousness.
By showing how low-paid EU migrants in the UK cope with abuse and injustice, the book also highlights the vital role of NGOs in supporting migrants in their daily struggles by helping them to navigate the legal system and offering pragmatic solutions to legal problems that are usually resolved by bypassing legal channels.
It is in many ways a painful, if essential, read: the book raises universal questions about the limited rights of low-paid migrants and what they endure in the face of legal, linguistic and economic obstacles, even as they fill essential jobs.
The E-BoP team was drawn to this book for two main reasons. The first is the use of a mixed methods approach, merging legal analysis, with systematic document analysis and qualitative approaches (interviews, ethnography, focus groups), which we felt made for a powerful narration. The second is the role of legal change (Brexit) in making “migrants” out of “mobile workers”, highlighting the sometimes thin border between the two categories.