2023 PhD Project
About The Project
This project centres on advancing community-led knowledge on the lived experience of labour market coercion, exploitation, and the potential for modern slavery, with an explicit emphasis on locally sourced and locally relevant research where the findings will demonstrate how community relevant needs underpin the proposal in two ways.
Firstly, it is often the case that those in enforcement agencies and regulatory bodies have no first-hand engagement with the lived experience of those subject to coercion, exploitation and modern slavery. This proposal will use a place-based methodology to explicitly emphasise the locally relevant basis of the research; in turn, this will inform, impact on and give voice to local communities of migrant workers and local organizations that work with young and vulnerable people to enable them to identify, interrupt and refer labour market coercion, exploitation and potential modern slavery. This grounded community collaborative approach will illustrate that current policy and strategy formulation are abstracted and not grounded in or informed by community experience, but rather political imperative.
The second strand centres on different experiences of the lived experience of coercion, exploitation and modern slavery. Those who experience these are vulnerable indigenous workers, documented or undocumented migrants, young people (16-18) and children. Nottingham local organisations who work with these groups, those who investigate such incidents have no voice that feeds into policy formulation and strategy. Again, a place-based approach will assemble community knowledge feeding this into policy and strategy forums both locally and nationally. For example, our research demonstrates that abstracted intelligence-based strategies override compliance and deterrence-based strategy at community and workplace levels effectively leaving communities and workers therein subject to coercion and exploitation for ‘bigger picture’ reasons (Clark et.al. 2020, 2022*; Clark and Colling, 2018).
This project has been co-created and is supported by researchers from Nottingham Trent University, the University of Nottingham and partners at the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority.
Project Aims
This project aims to understand the lived experience of coercion, exploitation, modern slavery in the envelope of Labour Market Non-Compliance at community level across Nottingham. It seeks to do so through addressing the following research questions:
- How can a critically informed understanding of the lived experience of labour market coercion, exploitation and modern slavery improve policy and strategy in labour market regulation?
- In what ways do enforcement officers, regulators and those subject to labour market coercion, exploitation and modern slavery have differentiated lived experiences?
- How can new knowledge on the differentiated lived experiences feed into improved regulation of labour market non-compliance and provide better voice to the different parties?
The Project Team
- PhD Candidate: Nidhi Sharma, NTU
- Lead Supervisor: Prof Ian Clark, NTU
- Co-Supervisor: Professor Alexander Trautrims, UoN
- Co-Supervisor: Rich Pickford, NTU
- Community Supervisor: Darryl Dixon, Gangmaster and Labour Abuse Authority