Back in 1989, I purchased my first house, a charming two-up, two-down terrace (two rooms upstairs, two-rooms downstairs) that had only occasionally been modernized since it was built in the 1830s. I moved into the house in July and early in August, a third of the living room ceiling fell down in one enormous chunk. Luckily my wife and I were at the movies; otherwise we might have been injured. When we walked into the house we could smell the ancient lime plaster, which had been atomized into dust, and when we saw the mess we looked at each other and said the same thing:

"Call Kostya."

Kostya was a Russian friend of ours, married to Helen Womack, a correspondent for the Independent newspaper. Helen had been bitten hard by Russophilia as a student and had moved to Moscow and found work as a journalist and married Kostya, a big, affable Russian roustabout. Kostya was a bit of a poet and folk-singer, a hobo who had been an amateur boxer. He supported himself through carpentry and other home construction skills. The couple spent six weeks every summer back in London and Kostya worked on people's houses. His work gang consisted of buddies from Russia who came to London on tourist visas. Kostya put these guys up at the sparsely-furnished house Helen owned, a 15 minute drive from ours. Kostya was already making us some cabinets so we called him and asked him if he and his gang could hang a new ceiling in our living room. He came over; looked at the situation and offered to do it at a price around 50 percent less than any British contractor might have done it for.

The job took two weeks (some other time I'll tell you about the plasterer whose previous job had been restoring frescoes in Ukrainian churches -- this was the time of Glasnost, when religion was being practiced more openly than at any time since the Soviet Union was founded -- this guy spent hours staring at the fresh plaster drying, imagining the icons he could paint on our ceiling).

We paid Kostya and never asked how much he paid his pals. There were about five of them and they showed up for work late morning, worked like dogs until mid-evening, then, in our case at least, expected a small snack, some vodka and beer and conversation until around midnight, then went back to Kostya's to sleep on the floor. This was the routine seven days a week. Whatever Kostya paid them, they saved. At the end of the summer they took their wages and went on a shopping spree at the electronics stores along Tottenham Court Road. How they got all their booty on the Aeroflot flight back to Moscow I don't know. But Kostya assured me that they would sell the stuff for much more than he paid them. Everybody did well out of the arrangement.

Things today in London are different, although not entirely. The city is full of Polish plumbers who charge a fraction of what British plumbers do (Poland is part of the EU so it's easy now for Poles to come to Britain). And there are plenty of middle class people like me who, when desperate for help around the house, don't care too much whether the person fixing the pipes or hanging a new ceiling is a legal worker. Price and reliability come before legality.

But in researching this story I realized this micro labor exchange puts a human face on an epic problem. Millions of people everyday are trying to get to someplace better, more and more of them are making it through to Europe, but to get here and find work they have to make a deal with the devil and that deal is grotesque exploitation.

We middle class folks happily employ foreigners for a fraction of what native workers cost and there is no stigma to our behavior at the moment because these foreigners are not actually taking work from natives. We laugh and tell our stories about the foreign workers' amusing foibles. But we don't pay attention to foreign workers' travails out in the muddy agricultural fields of Britain. We have no idea of the conditions that the Polish berry pickers live in, or the wages of the stoop laborers making sure we get fresh spinach at a reasonable price at the supermarket. And, we don't ask too many questions about it. The assumption is today, as it was back in 1989, "Everybody does well out of the arrangement."

Except the illegal migrant workers don't.

It was surprising to me how little outrage there is in Britain about the forced labor situation most migrants find themselves in. Picking fruit, or emptying bed pans in care homes, or servicing clients in brothels 12 hours a day, no one seems to care much. Even the advocates for these exploited workers lack passion. The government doesn't even care to count the number of folks trapped in this life, lest public opinion become panicked at this sceptred island kingdom being overrun by foreigners (they take very seriously the fact that they haven't been invaded since William the Conqueror in 1066).

The workers themselves are invisible, up to the moment a tragedy befalls them, like the deaths in 2004 of a group of Chinese cockle pickers in Morecombe Bay. And there is even a lack of outrage amongst the workers, the desperate hope that drives them to the industrialized world turns to embarrassment and self-loathing when they find themselves trapped in debt bondage and forced labor, turned into modern day slaves.

Two ancient memories kept gnawing at me while reporting this story. The first was of a documentary on CBS television back in the early '60s (when networks gave up prime time for serious news investigations. I told you it was ancient history). The program was called "Harvest of Shame" and depicted the life of migrant farm workers in Florida. The facts spoke for themselves as did the cold, moral fury of the reporter that people still had to work in these conditions in America. The other memory is of not eating grapes from California in solidarity with the farmworkers organized by Cesar Chavez.

These memories fed into two questions: How long will it be before there is a comprehensive, unsensational documenting on the BBC of forced labor and migrants in Britain? And how long before an eastern European Cesar Chavez stands up and leads these migrants to a place where they earn the minimum wage and work in humane conditions?