We document a report from a recent union branch meeting of health and care workers in Bristol.

Trust merger

Members from across the service lines—including theatres, legal, and therapies—raised alarm over the proposed merger involving their trust (NBT) and University (UHBW), which one member characterised as effectively a “takeover.”

Staff reported being “dictated to” regarding fundamental changes to terms and conditions, particularly a move to shift pay dates from the 22nd to the 27th of the month. Union representatives insisted they had not been consulted, with one officer stating: “We told them—take that letter to all the staff and make it very clear the unions have not been involved in this.”

The financial impact on low-paid staff was highlighted, with one member noting that changing their mortgage payment date to accommodate the shift would cost close to £1,000. Others warned that the five-day payment gap could trigger rent arrears and landlord disputes, referencing historical cases where similar changes had caused staff to lose their homes.

Concerns were also raised about “cross-site working,” where staff fear being compelled to travel between distant hospitals—including potential moves to crumbling infrastructure at the Bristol Royal Infirmary (BRI) or as far afield as Weston—without adequate transport provision or insurance coverage for personal vehicles. “Agile working is different from cross-site working,” one theatre staff member explained. “If my manager wants me at the BRI, there would be absolutely no choice in that conversation.”

“Certificate of Slavery” – How the UK Visa System Traps Healthcare Workers in Modern Bondage

The room fell silent as Sherba * began to speak. Three years and four days ago, she arrived in the United Kingdom on a Certificate of Sponsorship (CoS), believing she was stepping into a promised career in healthcare. Instead, she entered what she and fellow campaigners now describe as a system of “modern day slavery”—one that ties migrant workers to single employers through a visa trap that has caused suicides, mental health crises, and “unimaginable” abuse across the care sector.

Speaking at a recent branch meeting, Sherba and fellow activist/member Cirdon* detailed a campaign now reaching Parliament to dismantle what they call the “colonization of sponsorship”—a regime they say ticks every box in the definition of forced labour, leaving thousands of healthcare workers at the mercy of unscrupulous employers who exploit the threat of deportation to strip workers of basic rights, wages, and dignity.

“They Had Their Christmas Carol”

The campaign’s treatment by authorities reached a symbolic low during a mass lobby of Parliament scheduled for the 17th of December 2025. Hundreds of migrant workers had traveled from across the UK—from Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England—booking their presence in Parliament as far back as May. Yet just four days before the event, organisers were informed they would not be allowed into the parliamentary estate.

The excuse given was “security risk.” The reality, Sherba discovered only on the day of the branch meeting, was more insulting: Parliament had prioritised its own Christmas celebrations over the lives of exploited workers.

“We booked it in May,” Sherba told the stunned room. “And then in a week to the event we got told that we were not going to be in Parliament for security reasons… it was four days, not even a week. But I found out today… they had their Christmas carol. I’m like, what?”

The revelation that a parliamentary Christmas party had displaced hundreds of workers who had travelled hundreds of miles—some from as far as Scotland—sparked outrage. “There was no hidden agenda,” Sherba continued. “They knew how many people were coming.” Instead of addressing lawmakers directly, the campaigners were shunted to the Methodist Hall, a venue Sherba described as “not enough” and lacking the strategic visibility of the parliamentary estate.

“They gave us the Methodist Hall which was not enough, it was not strategic,” she explained. “I think it was just their paranoia that made them refuse to give us [Parliament], because it could have been a statement.”

The 60-Day Gun to the Head

At the heart of the system lies the Certificate of Sponsorship, a document required for migrant workers to enter and remain in the UK. As Cirdon explained to the meeting, the CoS ties the worker to a single employer in a relationship of absolute dependency. “For you to come to this country, you need to find an employer that gives you what they call a certificate of sponsorship. It’s that certificate that you take to the Home Office to apply for a visa,” he said.

The trap springs when relationships break down. “If a relationship were to break down between you and your employer today, the employer then informs the Home Office and says, ‘I withdraw the sponsorship of this person.’ And then you have 60 days to either find a new sponsor or go back to where you have come from.”

This 60-day countdown, the activists explained, creates an “imbalance of power” so extreme that it effectively legalises exploitation. “There’s only one person who is the director, who is the manager, who is everything,” Cirdon noted. “They just wake up one day” and terminate the worker’s right to remain.

Cash in Envelopes and the £20,000 Price Tag

The exploitation begins before workers even set foot in the UK. Cirdon recounted the story of one worker who arrived for a shift to find his manager waiting with a demand: “When you’re coming back tomorrow, you have to come with £6,000. Cash. In an envelope.”

The demand was framed as payment for “facilitating” the worker’s entry to the UK—even though, as the worker pointed out, he had paid for his own visa, flights, and recruitment costs. The Home Office explicitly states that sponsorship should be free, yet Cirdon explained how a black market has emerged where “unscrupulous employers… just tell somebody, give me £20,000 and then they issue you this certificate.”

Once in the country, the exploitation intensifies. Sherba testified that upon her arrival on 14 February 2023, she discovered there was no job waiting despite having paid “a lot of money” to agents. Her employer housed her for just two to three weeks in “densely populated environments” before telling her to “go and fend for myself. I’m in a new country. There’s no job. I have nothing.”

“I Worked 110 Hours Per Week”

Sherba’s subsequent employment history reads as a catalogue of labour exploitation across the care sector. After finding her own work in Cambridge and Hertfordshire, she was assigned tasks she had never been trained for—including clinical assessments—while working for an employer who “never paid me” and failed to process tax payments through HMRC, potentially jeopardising her future immigration status.

“I used to work all around,” she told the meeting. “I would work almost 110 hours per week. 90, 70. And all this money would be sent to him in order to generate the pay slip and everything and pay me.” The reality was different: “He never did any taxing. There was no taxation. He was not doing my taxes.”

The conditions forced her into desperate measures. “At some point I had to eat some of the residents’ food. And the fuel was mine,” she said. “And when you talk to him, he talks back trash at you.”

Her second sponsorship, in a Dorset care home, proved even worse. “They would treat us and talk to us however they wish… it was inhumane.” When Sherba stood up for herself and colleagues against the bullying, she became a target. “They targeted me because I was solid in my line of work… They would send very bullish people to come and bully us. And when we reported it, there was no remedy.”

Sexual Abuse and the Silence of Fear

The testimonies revealed how the visa trap enables not just financial theft but physical and sexual violence. Cirdon explained that workers in care homes witness residents being treated poorly but “cannot raise concerns because the moment you raise concerns, your employer fights back and tells you ‘no more peace’.”

The 60-day rule means justice is effectively impossible. While employment tribunals take “two, three years” to conclude, workers have just 60 days to find new sponsorship or face deportation—forcing many to endure criminal conditions in silence. Sherba alluded to “sexual stuff being done on people just because they are on sponsorship,” adding: “These are the things we have brought out. And we have said categorically, we are not going to allow these rogue employers who are out to fish, who are out to make a killing at our expense.”

The toll on mental health has been catastrophic. “There’s too many suicides, there’s too many mental illnesses because of so many things that are happening,” Sherba warned. “And it’s all real.”

Two Hours to Freedom

Sherba’s personal breaking point came on 20 November 2024, when she resigned from the Dorset care home. She received her 60-day notice on 19 June, with a deadline to leave the UK by 18 August. Salvation came literally at the eleventh hour: “Two hours to the lapse of the 60-day notice,” she found a new sponsor—though the “promissory certificate” proved little better than the last.

Her new employer operates through “auxiliaries”—the “worst of the worst” agencies—where “there is no rota. Rota is in the morning. Go here. Go there. I need you here.” There are no off days, no leave days, and no payment for mileage. “She dictates when, if, how, and all the W’s, the five W’s and one H. All of them. And she doesn’t pay some of them.”

Sherba revealed she has been financially ruined by the experience. “If I told you Ade here is just like my bank, you would not believe it. Because he’s been the only person I can talk to… it’s really a bad situation that you can get yourself in.”

From Croydon to Parliament

The campaign against the CoS system began, fittingly, at a union campaigning session in Croydon. “The tutor said, can you think of any issue that you think needs to be addressed?” Cirdon recalled. “And then it happened that there were about three or four migrant workers on that table. And then we started talking about the suffocating of our sponsorship… Lots of people were dumbfounded about how this country has been treating migrant workers.”

Since then, the campaign has escalated through various parliamentary actions, including a debate secured for 22 November 2024 (held 28 November), though the motion was defeated on 22 January 2025. The December lobby—blocked from Parliament by the Christmas carol scheduling—saw three attending ministers, including Alex Norris from the Home Office, refuse to commit to concrete action, offering only that they would “look into it” while remaining “non-committal” on the fundamental demand to abolish the tied visa system.

The campaigners are fighting on multiple fronts: demanding the regularisation of all migrant workers, opposing the removal of the Social Care Visa cap set for 2028, and battling changes to Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) rules that would retroactively extend the qualifying period from five to ten years—a move Cirdon insists is unlawful under existing Court of Appeal judgments.

“An Injustice to One is an Injustice to All”

The testimonies landed with particular force given the meeting’s context: a simultaneous battle against the threatened abolition of the Equality Act by Reform Party politicians, and a controversial NHS trust merger imposed without consultation. Campaigners drew explicit connections between the struggles, warning that attacks on discrimination protections would remove the only legal shields protecting migrant workers from the worst abuses.

The Christmas carol snub became a metaphor for the wider dismissive attitude toward migrant labour—celebrations for insiders, security risks for the workers who keep the care sector functioning. “There was no hidden agenda,” Sherba had noted, describing the exclusion. “They knew how many people were coming.”

“The allowance of injustice in one corner is a threat to justice everywhere else in the world,” Cirdon told the meeting, invoking Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem about the dangers of silence in the face of fascism. “When they came for me, there was nobody else. Because everybody had been taken out.”

For Sherba, the message was simpler: “We are not going to allow these rogue employers… It’s detrimental to our health. It’s detrimental to our finances.”

As the meeting closed, branch officers urged members to support the campaign, documenting their own consultation battles while recognising that the “certificate of slavery” system represents a frontier in the same fight for workplace dignity. “An injustice to one is an injustice to all,” the activists reminded the room—a reality measured not just in parliamentary votes and Christmas parties, but in 110-hour weeks, envelopes of cash, and the 60-day terror of deportation.

*Names have been changed to protect identities