Indian man awarded almost £30,000 after UK employer failed to provide work

The charity Work Rights Centre said: ‘We’ve seen case after case of migrant care workers sold a dream in Britain, leaving their careers and families behind, only to find destitution and abandonment by their employer and the state.’ Photograph: Who Am I/Alamy View image in fullscreen The charity Work Rights Centre said: ‘We’ve seen case after case of migrant care workers sold a dream in Britain, leaving their careers and families behind, only to find destitution and abandonment by their employer and the state.’ Photograph: Who Am I/Alamy Indian man awarded almost £30,000 after UK employer failed to provide work Tribunal orders company to pay Shabin Shaji for care work he was not given after coming to UK, in landmark case An Indian citizen who came to the UK to work as a care worker through the post-Brexit visa scheme has been awarded nearly £30,000 in a landmark case, because his employer failed to give him a single day of work for a year. An employment tribunal ordered the care company Swan Care Solutions Ltd to pay Shabin Shaji wages for the work he was “ready, able and willing to do”. Believing there was a “major shortage” of healthcare workers in the UK, Shaji emigrated from Kerala to Stafford, England , bought a car for the job and undertook online training in 2023. He told the tribunal that before arriving in the UK, he had sought advice from a YouTube influencer on securing work in the UK. She connected him with agents whom he paid £17,000, before he was interviewed for a role at Swan Care Solutions on WhatsApp, the tribunal heard. Shaji was then given a certificate of sponsorship, entitling him to live and work in the UK with Swan Care Solutions as his Home Office-approved sponsoring employer. But the computer science graduate, who had previously worked in healthcare in India, ended up in destitution after his Staffordshire-based employer did not give him any shifts, despite his repeated pleas. His sponsored visa prevented him from working for anyone else for more than 20 hours a week. He eventually managed to secure sponsorship from another employer in April 2024 – a year after his arrival in the UK – but he later returned to India in ill health. The 33-year-old won his pay claim after seeking help from the employment justice charity Work Rights Centre, which said “thousands of people” had paid money to recruiters, “only to arrive in the UK to be ghosted” . Dora-Olivia Vicol, the charity’s chief executive, added: “We’ve seen case after case of migrant care workers sold a dream in Britain, leaving their careers and families behind, only to find destitution and abandonment by their employer and the state. “The skilled worker visa must be entirely reformed to make it easier to change employers when rights or contracts are breached.” The tribunal heard that Swan Care Solutions’ staff suggested Shaji take cash-in-hand jobs and use a food bank when he said he was struggling, telling him they would be in touch when it was his “turn”. At a hearin