A Cup of tea with Professor Virginia Mantouvalou

In this episode, Professor Judy Stephenson is in conversation with Professor Virginia Mantouvalou, Professor of Human Rights and Labour Law, and Co-Director of the UCL Institute for Human Rights. They discuss the challenges that migrant workers face in knowing and upholding their rights, as well as the struggles that offenders have to overcome to find work on release. Prof Mantouvalou also speaks about her journey into human rights and labour law, and the writers who inspire her.

Prof Mantouvalou co-edited Structural Injustice and the Law with Jonathan Wolff, FBA. This book, available as a free PDF from UCL Press, presents theoretical approaches and concrete examples to show how the concept of structural injustice can aid legal analysis, and how legal reform can, in practice, reduce or even eliminate some forms of structural injustice.

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Season 4: A Cup of Tea With… is your chance to share a tea break with inspiring academics from UCL (University College London). Join Professor Judy Stephenson, Professor of Economic History of the Built Environment, to learn how they got into their field and hear insights from their research. Plus, find out how they like their tea!

Website and transcripts: https://uclpress.co.uk/ucl-press-play/

Judy Stephenson: Hello. Welcome to A Cup of Tea. I'm Professor Judy Stephenson, and I'm going to bring ten questions to our academics about research, about what drives them and about what the challenges ahead are. A cup of tea is a global commodity. It's also a British tradition. Let's get started.

Judy Stephenson: Welcome to A Cup of Tea, where we're interested in how academic research can make the world better. Today I am with Virginia Mantouvalou, who is professor of Human rights and Labor law here at UCL. Virginia, welcome. A cup of tea is a global commodity, but a British tradition. What sort of tea have you chosen and why?

Virginia Mantouvalou: I chose green tea. I like green tea. It's healthy. But I have to confess, I'm more of a coffee person.

Judy Stephenson: How many a day?

Virginia Mantouvalou: A cup? Two. Three coffees a day. Not too bad.

Judy Stephenson: Yeah. Okay. So welcome. The first question for you thinking about your research is if you had 1 million pounds to spend on research today, tomorrow, what would you spend it on and why?

Virginia Mantouvalou: I don't normally say that I don't need that much money for my research. I just like sitting in my lovely office at UCL reading, thinking, writing. So it's just that. But if you're offering 1 million pounds, I can find ways to spend it. I'm really good at spending money. I would certainly find, try to find ways to do more empirical research, to try to understand how the groups of workers that interest me in my work

Judy Stephenson: The groups of workers who are experiencing the structural injustice that you write about, and how you might use research funds to get to them, or-

Virginia Mantouvalou: Yeah, I work on issues affecting domestic workers, undocumented workers, people who are in prison and they work when they are in prison and other marginalized groups. So I would try to find ways, if I had funding to get more people working with me and helping out, or to do interviews, larger scale studies, asking these type of- types of workers how the law affects their everyday life and experience.

Judy Stephenson: So do you think they know how the law is affecting them? How much of the legal structure and its effect on them can they see and can they understand?

Virginia Mantouvalou: That's a great question. This is a question I would try to ask them, to be honest, because I think that very often they don't even know what the law is. For instance, a migrant worker who comes to the UK, they don't know exactly the visa rules that they have to comply with. So a question I would ask them in interviews would be, do you know what your rights are under your visa. So it's not clear to me that they know what the rules are and how they affect them. They learn it when they go to try to find help somewhere.

Judy Stephenson: So are there other groups in society who don't understand how the structure of the law works for them or against them?

Virginia Mantouvalou: You know, I think the workers generally, they don't have to be marginalized workers; we don't often know exactly what our rights are if we are dismissed, for instance, what are our rights? If we use our social media and the employer finds out that they don't like what we post and they dismiss us. So yeah, so there are issues with all of us. Everyone can experience this, but I think there are some groups of workers, that because of other barriers, because they're generally from a disadvantaged background to not as well-educated as others, because they are migrants, they don't speak the language, because they are fearful of the authorities of the law. They are much more, they are much more likely not to know what rights they have and what the law is.

Judy Stephenson: Okay. So if this is really with the field that you're working in is human rights law as it pertains to workers, particularly in migrants. Tell us a little bit about how you got into that field, how you got into human rights in particular, and the law

Virginia Mantouvalou: I was trying to think about that. It all happens gradually. Really. You don't understand exactly. I personally cannot identify a specific moment since I was a child, I was interested in issues of human rights and social justice. I was very passionate about those. I'm sure that my parents, because of their interests and concerns in life, affected the way I was thinking.

Judy Stephenson: But where were they from? Was there a particular- were they working in similar fields?

Virginia Mantouvalou: In legal practice? In legal practice, not in academia, but in, in legal practice. But it was more their general sensitivities about migrant workers and issues that we were discussing, they were discussing at home. That influenced me. That didn't have to do with their work. And then I went to university to study law in Greece, in Athens. And, I like the subjects; the subjects that have had to do with issues of social justice, such as human rights law, labor law. So I got more into that. And then I came here to do my master's in the UK, to London to do my masters and PhD, and I lost the critical thinking that is encouraged here. I loved that, but I also got more and more into issues of human rights, labor rights and social justice. So that's how it happened gradually in my life.

Judy Stephenson: What are the misconceptions in your fields or in another area that matters to your research and how would you like to clear them all?

Virginia Mantouvalou: You know, Theresa May, as Home Secretary had said that someone who was a migrant here, managed to avoid deportation because–. That's what she said, that the courts- that the courts decided that he should not be deported because he had the- And now we know that this was a misconception. So there are a lot of misconceptions that judges can- The politicians create a misconception that there are lots of people here who are using spurious- or, you know, rights that might not really exist as excuses to stay in the country to, to gain, to get make people worried about migrant workers labor law in particularly to encourage us to abolish it all. The problem is that both politicians at times, unfortunately in the tabloid press, unfortunately create all this panic that people are abusing, you know, the system that people who don't deserve to abuse the human rights laws that we have in order to take advantage of our system? And that is just not true. Of course, sometimes, people can use human rights against the human rights law, against what the majority- majorities impose on all of them. But human rights are also something, you know, we all have human rights. Everyone has human rights. One of the entertaining stories I like saying to my students is that someone called Mister Redfern, he was a member, an active member of the British National Party, the BNP, the British National Party are against the European Convention on Human Rights. But when he was dismissed from his job because of his political association and membership of the political party, he went to the European Court of Human Rights and took his case to the European Court of Human Rights. And he won also. So, you know, human rights are for everyone, even for those people whose views we may find disturbing and problematic. Everyone has human rights. So this is a misconception.

Judy Stephenson: But you talk in your research about this idea of structural injustice in the law. Tell me a little bit more about how that affects us.

Virginia Mantouvalou: Yeah. So- so in my work, I talk about the responsibility of the state, the responsibility of the law for injustices that appear to be structural, where no one is responsible is just self-perpetuating. But if we look at the law more closely, we find that laws that appear to be legitimate appear to be failing in reality, perpetually creating further increased vulnerability and disadvantage. How it affects us. We are the ones who gain from this situation in this unjust structure because, you know, we can get cheap, you know, cleaners or, you know, we can get cheap- a cheap labor, cheap clothes for the metropolitan elite-

Judy Stephenson: Who do well out of labor laws that hold-

Virginia Mantouvalou: Yeah, that exclude a lot of workers from rights that we have. In a way, it is not our fault, because it's not a decision that you and I take. Oh, yeah. This jacket may have been made in Bangladesh. It's great. It was affordable. If there were great labor conditions there, it might not have been affordable. Now we can afford this, but this means that there are people at the same time severely exploited. Yeah. And, they're not protected by the law as they should be.

Judy Stephenson: Cool. Thank you. So what are you working on at the moment? And what are the particular barriers you face in actually carrying out that research?
Virginia Mantouvalou: I'm very excited about my new project. It's the first time I'm speaking about this publicly. So, I have worked in the past on working prisoners and how legal rules exclude prisoners from rights that other workers have, you know, people working in prison. First of all, they do terrible jobs, but also often but also they're only paid about even though they may work full time. They're only paid about 10 pounds a week. Or, you know, about 10 pounds a week because they're excluded, for instance, from their national minimum wage. So I've worked on this and now started working on work after prison. What barriers people face after their conviction barriers in accessing work after prison. And I want to look at basically more generally work and prison work experience before prison, in prison and after prison and how all of this creates, you know, how there is a structure of disadvantage, how we may be setting up people to fail, through our legal rules. You know this. How should we conceptualize the question of human rights there? Because for some people, it's really difficult for them to understand that people have committed crimes. They've done their time. They've paid their dues, as it were, and then they are outside of the prison system. What you're saying is that people who are coming out of the prison system, then face prejudice.

Judy Stephenson: What kind of prejudices do you think they face? And how might this matter to the way that they are treated by the law and labor laws?

Virginia Mantouvalou: They have very serious difficulties finding work. And we know that work is extremely important to us because, you know, it's through work that we make friends, we make money, we become part of society again. And particularly important for someone who has been incarcerated and they have been excluded from all of the social relations, but also sources of income. We want rehabilitation. We all want that. We don't want people to re-offend. But this is what happens. People re-offend because they don't have any way out of this cycle. Revolving doors, they call it. So they are stigmatized after prison. They face prejudice by employers because the employers prefer not to take any risk at all. If someone has a criminal record so they don't hire them. With human rights. What? How can human rights help? They do help. And there are a few cases of both domestic courts in the UK and the European Court of Human Rights, where at times the courts say, wait a minute, even though it was a criminal offense, it's something that happened in the past. It is part of your right to private life. The employer should not be able to know any criminal conviction or any offense that someone may have committed when they were like 15, 16 years old. For instance, if now they're 55 years old. Yeah. So this is, you know, this is a way to challenge the law through law again, through human rights law. And it works at times. But it is a very serious issue. So yeah.

Judy Stephenson: So our prisons minister has campaigned for doing exactly what you were talking about, which is taking people who have served time and rehabilitating them through work in- in his company. Do you think that can work in a wider way or what are one of the potential issues?

Virginia Mantouvalou: No. Timpson is an excellent example because it's well known, and I've seen it in- I've read about the business and his work. Offering training and opportunities in prison and then also hiring people after prison. And this is huge that, you know, holding the employer there into account and telling them, okay, you can train people in prison to help them get new skills. But also then when they're out of prison, they have to have work opportunities. And, Timpson, so this is a great example. It's wonderful that he's a prisons minister in that respect. And hopefully he will improve all of these problems in that, you know, there are a lot of problems to address in criminal justice and life after work. It's not a very widespread, very common example, but it's a great example.

Judy Stephenson: Okay. So tell me about the- the scariest thing that you've ever had to do as a researcher?

Virginia Mantouvalou: Meeting my supervisor was really scary, going to his office, but, apart from that, PhD was a kind of a passage you- as a writer.

Judy Stephenson: Why were they so scary?

Virginia Mantouvalou: It was very demanding and critical without being very positive. Initially. So that was but that is or I'm joking a bit more seriously, I think one of the most challenging things I've done is when I interviewed migrant domestic workers who are in the UK with a UK overseas domestic worker visa, and I conducted an empirical study about 20 interviews of migrant domestic workers. And for an academic article, I wanted to understand the effects of the visa- of the UK visa on them. And it was enormously challenging because I met these women, they were typically women who had been traumatized by their experience and were extremely vulnerable because they escaped abusive employers and became undocumented, without realizing they were becoming undocumented. And they were talking to me about their lives. It was very challenging for them, but it was also very, challenging for me hearing their stories-

Judy Stephenson: In terms of it was traumatic for you, or you felt responsibility or something else?

Virginia Mantouvalou: It was traumatic. And, I- would you- faced with situations like this? Are you not also feeling guilty about everything that you have that you feel that you know, I don't deserve this? I'm just lucky I was born in, you know, in a country and with a family that could support me. And so, you know, there are other people who have had such a much- a much more challenging life than I had. And it's but primarily it was traumatic to hear about the, you know, very serious abuse that the- some of them had experienced but also then, you know, thinking about-

Judy Stephenson: Do you think we- that we have a good grip on this sort of exploitation and abuse that are happening in the labor market? Or do you think we are blind to a lot of it?

Virginia Mantouvalou: I think we are blind to a lot of it. First of all, there's very limited funding for labor inspections, so we really do not know what is happening in, you know, there are no labor inspectors really visiting workplaces because of funding issues. But also some of the jobs that interest me are really invisible in the sense that, for instance, domestic workers, they work in private homes. We cannot see their working conditions. In fact, the Health and Safety at Work Act excludes labor in private homes from labor inspections. They care about the privacy of the employer, but not about the working conditions of the worker working prisoners. Again, they are invisible people in agricultural work- agricultural workers again are exploited. We don't see them. We live in these big cities. They work somewhere in the- in the countryside. So we really are blind to a lot of it. We don't see it every day.

Judy Stephenson: Beyond supervisors then. Do you have a favorite researcher or author in research not necessarily in your field but in another who you- who acts as an inspiration for you?

Virginia Mantouvalou: I love the work of and I admire a lot Iris Marion Yang, a political philosopher who is famous for a lot of her work on feminism, but also particularly- I'm particularly interested in structural injustice. And she has written this wonderful book that made the concept of structural injustice very accessible and clear. She says stories and I love telling stories in my work about how people experience structural injustice and the role of the law. In my case. So I find that I find the work of Iris Marian Young extremely inspiring and- and brilliant.

Judy Stephenson: So is it something you read all the time, or is it only when there's a problem?

Virginia Mantouvalou: I have a lot, when- when I want to think a bit more deeply about issues that interest me, I will return to- to her books and try to understand better what she was saying every time; discover every time something else that she said, which is so wonderful. So. Yeah. Yeah. I return to the really good-

Judy Stephenson: I can see why. Okay, so tell me a little- if the- if there's three things, three big problems in the world that your research speaks to, what are they and how can you, how would you like to move on on them?

Virginia Mantouvalou: Workplace exploitation, you know, people being ill treated by their employers. And maybe, you know, more generally poverty, homelessness, these are issues that- I mean, particularly in terms of the workplace, workplace exploitation, there is a sense that there's a renewed interest in this.

Judy Stephenson: But it's as old as the hills, right?

Virginia Mantouvalou: You know, it's very hard to go back to a society where there weren't exploitive relationships within the working-

Judy Stephenson: So what do you think is different about what's happening today?

Virginia Mantouvalou: I think, you know, in a society like- like ours, in Western industrialised societies, we see that- we have our laws that are supposed to be fair. We want to be able to hold the government into account for any laws that are not fair. We don't compel in theory, we don't compel people to work. We have a welfare system and welfare conditionality, which means that people cannot apply for- they get welfare benefits unless they show that they try to find a job. But what we find if we look at these laws, for instance, more closely, is that even though they appear to be decent and legitimately just about encouraging people to work, in the end it may force people into bad jobs and from out of work poverty to in-work poverty. We have laws that appear to be legitimate.And at times we see that these laws create further compound disadvantage. And this is a problem and creates things like in-work poverty-

Judy Stephenson: Thank you. I want you to think now about the topic that everyone's been talking about for, I don't know, it's three years, isn't it? Artificial intelligence, agenda intelligence, the bot for us academic researchers. Is it going to transform our jobs or is it going to take our jobs?

Virginia Mantouvalou: No. Well, it's early days still, and I have used the, some AI generative AI, to, to see what it is about. I find it very basic and, at times wrong. It responds to my questions with great confidence. It cites- it doesn't cite sources at times, but when it cites, it refers to ideas that we have developed as academics without citing us properly. So I find it quite frustrating.

Judy Stephenson: Your own work. What does it say about you? I've done that recently.

Virginia Mantouvalou: No, I've- I've- I've searched myself. Who is Virginia? When it said something nice about me, which was very, very nice and like nice things about me, but it was just very generic, of course.

Judy Stephenson: What do you think it means for students? Both, both undergraduate and more and more, you know, at a higher level?

Virginia Mantouvalou: We have to. First of all, we have to see how it develops. But, I don't want students to use it. I want you to just, you know, learn to read a lot. They say, oh, it can provide easy, quick summaries or so. I can read something else, though. The summaries are inaccurate. And also it's a great skill to read something long and to be able to summarize it. I want them to think I notice that when they have not used it and I read their work, it's so much more interesting and original and thought provoking. So I don't I wouldn't want I mean, I know I want them to know how to use it as we do. But I would discourage them. I- we do discourage them from using it. I don't think it will take our jobs. It will make our jobs redundant, because what matters in our job is imagination- imagination and originality. And I think this- simply repeats what we say, summarises, it puts a lot of things together, but it doesn't have imagination. It cannot have imagination.

Judy Stephenson: What are your hopes and fears for academic research in, in your field and for your own research going forward?

Virginia Mantouvalou: I love universities and I love universities in the UK and, and elsewhere. So I value university. What universities work a lot- I think academic freedom is something hugely important in our work. The freedom to choose the topics that we- that we will examine in our research, to address them in the way that we think is right to discuss them, and with students to be challenged and challenge them and all that, and colleagues and, and others. So I think this is something that is enormously valuable. And this would be my number one concern for the future of our work, academic freedom, because we have seen how it can be eroded in other parts of the world. And I guess when the question arises of funding as well- I was really surprised that you said, oh, I'm able to do lots of research without spending a lot of money. And of course, you know, it's not like running a medical trial or having to, you know, do a deep dive into, you know, documents all over the world. But, you know, it is important to have funding support.

Judy Stephenson: Absolutely. I mean, we are obviously very fortunate to work at UCL and to have a manageable- I have a manageable teaching load because sometimes-

Virginia Mantouvalou: Yes, if you have 20 hours of teaching a week, then you will not be able to do any research. Or another thing that I did, for instance, I have got research funding in the past. For instance, I got a British Academy mid-career fellowship, which gave me one year of funding and it's only thanks to these that I managed to finish, took to write and finish my book. So you do- you do need research funding.

Judy Stephenson: Hopes and fears? So your fears are that we don't actually have the freedom we think we do, or that already in our heads we've inhibited ourselves-

Virginia Mantouvalou: Well, I personally have never experienced that. I never- when I think that there is a pressing thing for me in my mind, a social issue that I want to address in my work, I am always- I always feel that I have the freedom to do it and I do it, and I've never felt that there are reasons not to.

Judy Stephenson: Absolutely not. So there is academic freedom.

Virginia Mantouvalou: Yeah, I know that there are challenges both in the UK and in other parts of the world, but and I think we should really, treasure and protect academic freedom-

Judy Stephenson: Yeah, clearly you're feeling well supported in that, which is nice. So how was the tea?

Virginia Mantouvalou: I haven't tried it yet.

Judy Stephenson: Right now, you get to drink.

Virginia Mantouvalou: It's delicious.

Judy Stephenson: Insights on human rights and labor law. Thanks very much, it was a pleasure.

Virginia Mantouvalou: Thanks for having me.

Judy Stephenson: Thank you.