Morecombe Bay
At around 3pm on February 5th at least 35 cockle pickers, believed to be Chinese, were armed with waders, rakes and a dinghy, and sent out onto Morecambe Bay. By 1am, 20 would have drowned and 15 had a lucky escape.
The sad fact is that it was good luck that kept these 15 alive, and not bad luck which killed the others.
Morecambe Bay covers 120 square miles and is known for its dangerous and unpredictable tides. Its cockle trade is worth around £6 million a year and picking is free; all you need is labour, and the cheaper the better. Hence the industry is dominated by gang masters, each controlling an army of vulnerable workers. The pay is per bag collected, forcing workers to go out in any conditions for as long as possible. The average wage is just £1 for a nine-hour shift, though gang masters also provide basic food and accommodation, if often in cramped conditions. The workers would have been taken out into the bay and left to work until the tide came in, with no means of return, just like any other day. That they were allowed to work in such inhumane conditions is awful enough; but this group were simply left there to die.
The complex British law does not afford most of these workers any rights at all, and it is this lack of attention which both forces them into the situation in the first place, and then keeps them there. They all knew the time and they all knew the dangers, but they also knew they had only this one way to make a living.
All previous attempts to remove the cockle pickers have been attempts to move them on. This is not the solution: there will always be gang masters as long as there are vulnerable people. There are an estimated 60,000 migrant workers employed by illegal gang masters in the UK. What the Government should do is protect these people from exploitation and give them a means to survive without being exploited. Some have been smuggled into Britain and never recorded by the authorities for fear of being sent home; others have applied for asylum and either been refused or simply had to wait so long that the system lost track of them. If the Government's latest Asylum and Immigration bill is passed, this problem will be made far worse.
Kofi Annan has spoken out against "fortress Europe" and its "dehumanising" policies towards immigrants in countries which go against UN conventions. The UK has yet to ratify the UN International Convention on the Rights of All Migrant Workers, as the Government insists these are already provided for in existing legislation. But the latest disaster hardly serves to illustrate this point, and will hopefully force our Government to reassess its responsibility towards this vulnerable and often defenceless group.
19th Feb 2004