The Gangmasters & Labour Abuse Authority and Precarious Workers In The UK

This contemporary study critically explores the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA) and the regulatory environment of GLAA workers in the concept of the ‘Precariat’ (Standing, 2011). This is important because there is a lack of understanding of how some groups of workers have been formed, how they migrate, and why licensed gangmaster businesses are incorporated incorrectly within Office for National Statistics (ONS) data. Using an objective stance and a critical realist research philosophy with a concurrent mixed methods case study, this thesis draws from qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques with archival research, before the analysis of semi-structured interviews and a group interview with stakeholders who have a vested interest in the GLAA, archival data, and questionnaires of the precariat in the food manufacturing and food processing sectors. Findings are significant and reveal that equal treatment of the precariat is not applied as a non-unionised flexible workforce is expanded, providing contrived high employment figures at the ONS, as the statutory and functional role of the Home Office led GLAA fails to regulate licensed gangmasters in their remit. An unacknowledged but implicit structural tendency with the Home Office, drives the expansion of an army of flexible labour via open borders, by exploiting the 1973 Employment Agencies Act via gangmaster paymaster Contract for Service and Managed Service Provider/Programme Models within a Centralised Labour Control System. The Discussion and Conclusions provide independent and original revelatory Contributions to Knowledge. The precariat are located as an army of 10 million assembled at the ONS propping up the Financial Services Sector, with licensed gangmasters notedly exempt from HMRC investigations. As the precariat, citizens and the UK economy suffer in a Cost of Living crisis, Critical Realism bridged the gap between government, treasury, finance, agriculture, horticulture, food manufacturing, food processing and economic and social policies.