uk_grenada

Gordon Barlow

Here's a useful link to a report on the modern slave-trade. In the Caribbean it's common to import domestic servants from faraway places, bonded to specified employers. During my forty years in Cayman it's been flourishing under the heading of "indentured labour", with "Work Permits" being traded on the side. (It's become rather better in recent times, but it still goes on.) And not only in Cayman, of course. Our Laws require that the indentured servants must speak English, but a few corrupt Immigration clerks manage to get around this easily. The UK government knows it goes on, but doesn't seem to care.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50228549

scot47

Happens in the UK as well. Last week saw the end of a criminal case when a group in Glasgow were convicted of selling Slovakian women. Cash changed hands on Sauchiehall Street.

scot47

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-49813942

Pot and kettle ? Let us focus on matters within our jurisdiction before pointing the finger !

Gordon Barlow

Fair enough, scot - but Cayman is a British colony still, so technically we are in your jurisdiction. What to do, eh?

Yorkey

Do you need support

uk_grenada

Clearly the solution to the BBC article is to leave the EU [ducks head awaiting incoming]

This is not an indigenous british problem - well not for the last few hundred years. Clearly the issue in some countries is the linking of a temporary right to reside, with having a specific job, i’m all for the former where the workers are useful but you need them to bu...er off at the end of that period or if they become a burdon on the country and that must be enforced by someone, they need to be made to leave which doesnt happen in the uk.

Yorkey

Gordon Barlow

It's a nice thought,Yorkey, but the whole indentured-labour thing exists (at least in the British colonies) with the blessing of the UK's Foreign & Commonwealth Office. Cayman is the regional HQ of MI6: that fact came out clearly in a court case ten years or so ago. So it suits the the FCO to give the local politicians their heads when it comes to exploiting cheap-labour migrants. I was on our local human-rights committee many years ago, but quit as a last resort in the hope that the publicity that accompanied my quitting would change things, but it didn't.

On the positive side, it has to be taken into account that our migrants are a whole lot better off here financially than they would be back home in India, Jamaica, etc. And with labour unions implicitly banned, there is no practical likelihood of reform. I tried to get the ILO (International Labour Organisation) interested, but they didn't want to know. Maybe MI6 had a quiet word. We'll never know.

scot47

So Cayman is ho,me to MI6 Regional HQ ? Not much chance of Independence then !

Gordon Barlow

You would think not, although they ("They"!) did switch from Bahamas to Cayman back in the '70s smoothly enough.

But there is actually not the slightest wish for independence here, from the local populace. Everybody knows that our wealth derives from our offshore-tax-haven status, and that would disappear if we weren't protected by the British flag. Tourism is very much a secondary source of wealth.