Do you know who you are working with?
Finding your next staff member is not an easy job, they need to fit the profile of your salon, fit in with your other staff and be good at what they do.
You advertise, sift through resume’s, go through interviews and ask personal questions, but are we digging deep enough to ensure that the people we are sharing our daily lives with are who they say they are?
In December 2016, over 280 Salons in the UK were raided resulting in the arrests of 97 illegal workers and this year, individual salons are being targeted for the same reason.
Immigration Enforcement officers served warning notices to a salon in Blandford in Essex and two salons in Merseyside, one for employing an illegal minor and the second for employing an illegal worker with an expired Visa.
These salons will face a £20,000 penalty unless they can produce the documents that these workers are required to hold by law.
In February, Channel 4 aired a documentary showing a raid on a nail salon in Scotland where a 16-year-old Vietnamese worker was found to have entered the UK illegally. The owner of the nail bar was later convicted of trafficking and sentenced to 12 months in prison.
You can be sent to jail for up to 5 years and pay an unlimited fine if you are found guilty of employing someone who you knew or had ‘reasonable cause to believe’ didn’t have the right to work in the UK
Gov.uk website
What can you do?
If you are unsure of what you need to check, then look at the information available from the GOV.UK website https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work, those extra few minutes of background checks could save a lot of trouble in the future.
In 2012, BABTAC started our Qualified, Verified, Insured campaign as a verification and reassurance measure for clients and the public. It provides your potential clients with the opportunity to validate your commitment to excellence and is publicly promoted by us to encourage consumers to select a BABTAC member. As an insured member, your qualification certificates are verified by an experienced member of the membership team both for your insurance policy and as part of our consumer campaign.
The original objective for the Qualified, Verified, Insured campaign was to provide quality and safety assurance in an unregulated industry. It has however, also supported our work to campaign against human trafficking. Ensuring that our members are fully qualified is the first step to ensuring that they are working legally. BABTAC believe that with the correct document checks in place and by working together with and educating Salon owners and consumers, that the number of Illegal workers in the UK can be drastically reduced.
