End the Exploitation: Standing with Migrant Workers is our region’s flagship campaign for 2025-26
Our Regional Council AGM agreed that End the Exploitation: Standing with Migrant Workers would be our priority campaign for the year ahead. Your Regional Council Officers will oversee the campaign in partnership with the Regional Migrant Workers network & other key stakeholders.
The aims of the campaign are:
- Fight for change – work through our regional structures and with the rest of the union to lobby for improvements to the sponsorship and immigration system for social care workers
- Increase visibility and participation – Celebrate the contribution of migrant workers to London’s public services and encourage union participation of migrant workers in our region
- Negotiate and support – Help branches to ensure members can access appropriate help on visa, immigration and exploitation issues
The campaign will have different strands of activity within our political, organising and employer-facing work, with this web page used to highlight the current priority campaign action.
What can your branch do?
- Make End the Exploitation a priority
- Add the End the Exploitation campaign as a standing agenda item at your Branch Committee meetings. This creates a regular space to plan and discuss meaningful initiatives, activities and events that your branch can lead or support. As a first step, identify whether the employers you cover are sponsors for international recruits and review requests for assistance on related issues.
- Amplify the voices of migrant worker members in your branch
- Encourage migrant worker members to join the Migrant Workers Network. The network seeks to build connections between migrant worker members across different sectors, support members to uphold existing rights and campaign for fairer rules and treatment.
Priority action – fix the visa sponsorship system
UNISON wants the sponsorship system in social care improved because it makes workers more vulnerable to abuse.
Our campaign will contain a number of political activities, building towards participation in UNISON’s mass lobby of parliament at the end of the year.
As a first step, we are asking you to email your MP to call for improvements to the current sponsorship system for international workers on care visas.
- Join the campaign for fair visa sponsorship in social care
- Take action to fix the broken sponsorship system in social care and encourage your branch members to do the same. The campaign seeks to shift visa sponsorship away from individual employers and into the hands of a public body. This change would give migrant care workers greater freedom to change jobs and escape exploitation. The current system allows unscrupulous bosses to abuse their power. We cannot allow this to continue.
