Acid-burned hands and sleeping four to a room: The horrors of your local car wash

Targeting slavery: officers from the police, Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, and Revenue and Customs visit a car wash in east London.
Alex Lentati
Eleanor Rose11 October 2017

Exploitation is rife in the city’s hand car washes, an Evening Standard investigation found as horrified Londoners demanded action.

Today, Bubbles Car Wash in Bethnal Green is boarded up, its cheerful red-and-white painted sign fading, the workers long gone. “When you saw them they were smiling and happy, talking to the customers,” said a former regular who asked not to be named.

Neighbours were therefore shocked when Romanian employee Sandu Laurentiu-Sava, 40, died, electrocuted in the shower in a rat-infested flat behind the business. The electricity meter had been bypassed to save cash.

The tragedy lifted the lid on growing horrors taking place in London’s car wash industry. While some are legitimate businesses many of the capital’s several hundred hand car washes are hotbeds of exploitation ranging from minimum wage infringements to extremes of coercion and injury.

Victim: Sandu Laurentiu was electrocuted in a dangerous shower which had no earth electrical connection.
Met Police

At the Old Bailey in January, car wash boss Shaip Nimani, 52, pleaded guilty to manslaughter over the death of Mr Laurentiu-Sava in 2015, and was jailed for four years.

Nimani did not face slavery charges but Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner Kevin Hyland called the case “one of the worst examples of modern slavery to be seen on the high street”.

Squalid: Inside the living quarters of Bubbles Car Wash, where Sandu Laurentiu-Sava died (Met)

Authorities have since struggled to address escalating abuses in car washes across the country. The Standard visited seven in London and saw obvious indicators of exploitation.

Hand-cleaning car wash services are offered for as little as £5 — often a sign that something is amiss, according to Alexander Trautrims of Nottingham University, who has developed a computer model to help police identify slavery in the industry.

“What we figured out — and I think it’s also the gut feeling of people who use the car washes — is that it’s pretty much impossible to run that as a business and pay your staff sufficiently,” he said.

Staff the Standard spoke to at two sites — mostly Romanians and Albanians — confirmed they were paid as little as £3 an hour. One said he had no passport or bank account and felt trapped.

Mr Trautrims said the industry was fragmented and lacked regulation: “Staff often don’t even have rubber gloves. They put bare hands in buckets of cold water and chemicals.” One student who shook the hands of workers rapidly developed a “red raw” rash. At all but one of the car washes visited by the Standard, jeans or tracksuits were worn with trainers, and protective gloves were rarely seen.

London is also a hub through which slaves often pass on their way to exploitation up and down the country. Mihai, too frightened to use his real name, said he came here from Romania by bus on the promise of a good job.

He then took a bus to Cumbria where he worked 11 hours with no breaks for £30 a day, paying £40 of that per week to the car wash boss to stay in a house with up to four men to a bedroom.

There was no gas for heating or hot water so they were forced to queue in the kitchen to warm water on an electric stove to wash. “It was similar to how people live in prisons in Romania,” Mihai said. Men he worked with claimed that they had been bought like cattle from traffickers in eastern Europe, and that bosses held onto their IDs. He felt frightened and tricked and conditions at work were dangerous.

“Have you seen the movie Ben Hur, when one of the women had leprosy and her hands were destroyed? That’s how the guys’ hands were — burned by the shampoo and acid,” said Mihai.

Eight months and three police visits later, Mihai was rescued and taken to a safe house. Victim support charity the Medaille Trust helped him find a job paying above the minimum wage.

He knows he is lucky to have escaped a fate like Mr Laurentiu-Sava.

At Bubbles Car Wash, neighbours called on police to act before another tragedy occurs. “Nobody should be forced to work like that,” one man said.

Mr Hyland said exploitation ranged from minimum wage and health and safety breaches to threats and violence. “Poor and unsafe working conditions are crimes in themselves, as is not paying the minimum wage, and these can often be the first step to further exploitation and vulnerability,” he added.

He said agencies such as the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority must work with the public, who should report signs of slavery: “Work should bring dignity, not abuse. There must be a concerted effort to ensure venues where rights are abused no longer exist.”

Detective Chief Inspector Phil Brewer, who heads the Met’s 80-strong Modern Slavery and Kidnap Unit, said: “If we can get out there and do more visits, it will hopefully gives people the confidence they need to come forward.”

The industry is notorious among the Romanian and Albanian communities. Adverts are posted on social media and community websites by bosses and jobseekers, often young people desperate for work and unaware of the danger. One Albanian wrote a stark warning to another seeking car wash work on Facebook: “Get out of that zone, mate.”

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