Listening is a powerful tool

Hey there,

Often, when I tell people I work for an investigative newsroom, their eyes light up. They ask excitedly about undercover stings, dead drops on park benches and funny disguises. (Strangely, they don’t tend to ask about trawling through piles of spreadsheets, filing and refiling freedom of information requests, and fact checks that would put even the most thorough and precise of us to shame.)

And while sometimes investigative journalists do go undercover or use deception in other ways if the public interest permits – like Nellie Bly in last week’s email – one of our most useful and ubiquitous tools is something much more mundane: listening.

Asking the right questions of the right people and listening, really listening, to what they say is a powerful thing.

Vicky Gayle, Emiliano Mellino and other colleagues from my newsroom, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), have interviewed dozens and dozens of migrant workers over the past few years.

They’ve uncovered some shocking things: extortionate fees being charged by agencies in home countries; terrible working conditions, including bullying, sexual harassment and assault; and accommodation that no one would want to spend five minutes in, let alone weeks or months.

Understanding the issues that these workers face before they’ve even set foot in the UK is essential to help unpick the knotty mess of migrant labour here.

In one series of stories, Emiliano and colleagues spoke to people who had travelled to the UK on health and social care visas – that’s the programme for doctors, nurses, carers and other health professionals wanting to work here.

“Listening to these workers it became clear that one of the things that was trapping them in exploitative conditions was how difficult it was to find other work,” Emiliano told me. “Firstly, it is a result of the nature of the visa itself: your employer grants you your immigration status, so if you leave your employer, you lose your visa.”

Second, if you needed to leave your original employer, it wasn’t easy to find out which other companies could sponsor you and allow you to stay and continue working in the UK.

“While the first issue was something that would only change if the government reformed its immigration policy, the second was something we could help fix,” Emiliano said.

So that’s what he and the team did, working with a non-profit called the Autonomy Institute to bring together information on all the companies that sponsor visas in one easy-to-use place online.

This project was a great example of the power of listening in journalism. Emiliano and colleagues didn’t set out with a fixed idea of “Let’s create a database!” They started with a list of questions and the determination to speak to many, many people with real experience of the issue they’re investigating. And they were there to hear the good, the bad and the ugly.

Journalism is at its most powerful when the discoveries, details and stories uncovered by reporters are shared, repackaged and distributed by those that understand what a particular community needs. That’s when change can really happen.

And when the journalists met the number crunchers at Autonomy, both sides listened to each other, unpicking exactly what could be most useful to the people who had shared their stories. Speaking of which… here’s Lukas from Autonomy, to pick up where Emiliano left off.

“The Autonomy Institute started as a kind of thinktank or policy research organisation but has grown into something broader. We do a lot of stuff around the future of work.

How I got involved is that I was doing a PhD in theoretical physics and wanted to enter the progressive sector in some way, but also using the skills I’d picked up studying a STEM [science, technology, engineering and maths] degree.

The data team developed during Covid times and during lockdown we did a lot on the intersection between Covid inequities and work. Now we’re kind of like a mercenary data team. We look for people we can help, and we work with unions and other progressive organisations.

This project with TBIJ recognised that there’s a power dynamic with migrant care workers’ visas because it’s the employer who sponsors the visa that allows the person to work here. This means that if your employer isn’t good then you can’t just quit because you have to find another company that will both employ you and also sponsor your work visa.

~ Lucy here! What Emiliano realised is that there is no easy way to find the companies that sponsor the health and care work visa. While the government provides this data, it’s buried among the companies that sponsor all skilled worker visas in the UK. ~

That’s like a long spreadsheet, and it’s just the names of the businesses. And you know, it’s easy for someone like me, a data guy, to find, but it’s not accessible.

Emiliano and Charles Boutaud at TBIJ had built the first version of a scraper. They came to us to ask if we’d be able to make it a public resource, rather than someone having to download an Excel file from an obscure government page.

We cross-checked the data from the government’s document with that of the Care Quality Commission, to identify which organisations sponsor health and social care visas. I added some location filtering so you can search by postcode. The idea was that if you need to leave your employer you can put in your postcode and see all the other sponsors of that visa in your area.

When it went live it became the most viewed page on our site for a time. We had around 91,000 views in just under a year. We approached the union Unison, which has a lot of migrant care worker members. It agreed to support our work to expand the database to the entire UK, rather than just England.

We are working more and more with journalists, in two ways. Firstly, we might get a lead from a journalist on an interesting data set, for example, but who doesn’t have access to a data team to help them deal with the information. Another way is that we can essentially act as lead generators for journalists. We’re not journalists, so don’t have the patience or resources to delve into a specific lead.

We might generate big data sets that potentially contain loads of leads – like a big haystack with loads of needles in. We might not necessarily have the skills to look for the needles but we’re fairly good at assembling the haystacks.”

I really love Lukas’s metaphor there. Some of us are great at building haystacks, and some of us can spot a needle at thirty paces; together, we accomplish a lot more than we could apart.

Emiliano, by the way, is still working hard on investigations into workers’ rights. You can read about his employment tribunals project (and how you can get involved if you’d like to help!) here, and I hope to have some more to say about it soon.

Until next week,