Launch of our Workers’ Rights campaign for Romanians in London

STOP THE TRAFFIK are delighted to announce the launch of our Workers’ Rights campaign targeting Romanians in Kensington & Chelsea, Hammersmith & Fulham, and Westminster. The campaign is supported by the three borough councils.

Between January 2022 and May 2023, STOP THE TRAFFIK collected over 400 incidents of modern slavery across the London Boroughs of Hammersmith & Fulham, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and City of Westminster. 14 multi-agency partners shared their anonymous data to build a rich intelligence picture of modern slavery in the three boroughs.

STOP THE TRAFFIK, Hammersmith & Fulham, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the City of Westminster analysed this data collected, and identified a trend of Romanian nationals aged 18-44 being exploited for labour in car washes and construction and recruited via face-to-face false job offers.

We are responding to these issues by running geo-targeted advertisements on Meta, landing on the social media feeds of Romanian speakers in the three boroughs. The campaign equips viewers with information in Romanian about what exploitation looks like, what their rights are in the UK, and where to get support in their area.

The campaign has three main objectives in relation to the prevention of trafficking:

• • Increase the audience’s perception of the risk of exploitation and/or re-exploitation
  • Equip the audience with knowledge about the indicators of exploitation, their rights in the UK, and where to get support
  • Encourage them to adopt preventative behaviour to keep themselves and others safe from exploitation

We recognise the importance of having members of the target audience involved in this work, so we ran an anonymous pre-campaign survey targeting the audience in the same way. Respondents were able to share their journeys and experiences working in the 3 boroughs, which informed the campaign materials. Respondents predominantly reported working in construction and the hospitality sector. Many of them report being denied rest, breaks, and/or annual leave, and being threatened, intimidated, and/or abused at work.

Click here to see the landing page in English, and click here to see the landing page in Romanian.

You can see the English translation of the Romanian video below:

The campaign has reached 30,250 Romanian speakers in the three boroughs, with 1,084 link clicks onto the survey and/or landing page. This represents a click-through rate 3x higher than the industry average.

Further updates may be posted in the coming weeks, so please keep an eye on the STOP THE TRAFFIK website and social media channels.