Domestic Servitude: An Investigation of the Risk Arising from the Growth of Home-Based Personalised Care Services for An Aging UK Population 

Rights Lab project lead: Caroline Emberson
Funder:  University of Nottingham (Nottingham Research Fellowship)
Duration: January 2020-September 2023
Programme: Business and Economies 

This Nottingham Research Fellowship is the first comprehensive and in-depth examination of governments’ response to contemporary enslaved domestic work. Domestic work makes up 24% of all forced labour worldwide (3.84 million people of the 16 million people in forced labour, itself a proportion of the 40 million people enslaved which also includes those in forced sexual exploitation and forced marriage). The project takes a case study approach and focuses on developed countries, where the problem of enslaved domestic work is little examined and poorly understood, but which contributes a large proportion of the global figure of 3.84 million slaves in domestic servitude. A rapidly growing sector of concern is home-based personalised care services. The increase in this type of care work may leave workers more vulnerable to domestic servitude. By examining how a specific type of domestic work – care of the elderly by workers who live on site – is overseen by local government, this project will discover how domestic servitude risk is managed in what are known as ‘cash for care’ schemes. These schemes are designed to let those in need of care make their own, personal, care arrangements, but may be vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous agents who deceive both care workers and those for whom they care for their own financial gain. The research will answer three key questions about how managers in the public sector can manage these schemes to avoid domestic servitude risk: What different types of approach exist? How do the approaches in different countries compare? What characteristics lead to one approach being favoured over another? Answering these questions will help governments and public sector workers worldwide ensure that they are using the best approaches for their contexts and will help to ensure that this form of care-work delivers the opportunity of decent work for all.