During a four-month trip around North America, a 28-year-old British backpacker was handcuffed, taken to a detention facility in Washington state and handed a pair of orange scrubs.
Before that moment, it had been the trip of a lifetime for Rebecca Burke, a graphic artist from Monmouthshire. She had been sightseeing in New York, stayed with a host family in Portland, Oregon, and been to Seattle.
After being denied entry to Canada and sent back to the US, Burke was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on February 26 and detained at the Tacoma Northwest Detention Facility. According to her father, she has remained there ever since and is “living in horrendous conditions”.
What exactly Burke said at the US-Canada border that landed her in this position has yet to be determined. According to her father, the authorities told Burke she had “violated” her tourist visa and should have applied for a working visa.
But a close look at the company that arranged Burke’s accommodation in Canada suggests this nightmarish experience was an accident waiting to happen.
Burke had booked her accommodation in Vancouver via a website called Workaway, where, for a yearly fee of £49, travellers can stay with local people free in exchange for performing volunteer work. This might involve painting a fence or cleaning a hostel.
Workaway claims to have more than 50,000 hosts across 170 countries. Its website warns about visas (its “frequently asked questions” page states: “Remember you will need the correct visa for any country that you visit”) but, among Workaway users, it appears there is an unspoken rule — one which Burke perhaps got wrong.
I joined a Facebook group with 25,000 members offering Workaway information and asked if anyone had run into visa issues. “Any volunteer work should not be discussed. Going through the border without mentioning volunteering? Most of us have done it,” one user responded.
This tactic of ambiguity reflects a deeper confusion about what exactly counts as work.
While Workaway’s website states that “generally you will be expected to help around five hours per day in exchange for food and accommodation”, the lines between “helping out” and fulfilling the role of what would usually be a paid job easily become blurred.
When Jodie Emery, 34, and her boyfriend travelled to Thailand in 2017, they decided to save money by finding accommodation through Workaway.
“We stayed with a British lady in Pai [a small town in northern Thailand], who owned holiday bungalows,” said Emery, a communications executive from Surrey. “In exchange for a bed, we would work four to five hours per day cleaning the properties. Breakfast was meant to be included too, but that never happened.”
Overall, Emery enjoyed her travels. She was in a beautiful location, saved money on accommodation and met new people. Her experience with Workaway, though, wasn’t entirely as expected.
“The host wasn’t very friendly and we had a tiny room, only with a bed. We were allowed to use her kitchen and bathroom, but we weren’t allowed to sit on any of her chairs,” Emery said. “Workaway never checked how many hours we were working and we often did more than what had been advertised. It felt like free labour.”
On the Facebook group, “volunteer” work advertised includes everything from cleaning, gardening and home maintenance to caring for children and pets, performing “massages or other healing body works” and “helping out on reception”. One advert, from a host in Turkey who claims to be bed-bound due to a car accident, seeks “help with personal care”, including “washing etc”. Another in Wrexham, north Wales, is looking for “bartending and customer service”.
So does all this count as work or not? Interpretations will vary according to the country and how the information is presented to border officials. But the name of the company, Workaway, is suggestive.
In the UK, for non-EU travellers on a visitor or student visitor visa, volunteering is not allowed. Since Brexit, someone from the EU can volunteer in the UK only for up to 30 days, and only with a registered charity. The US, particularly under the Trump administration, is not an ideal place to explore this grey area.
Ioana Hyde, a UK-based immigration lawyer specialising in US law, says that while it “has always been clear that a visitor to the US cannot work, there’s also a prohibition against engaging in things that look like work”.
“In grey areas such as these, you’re at the mercy of that particular [immigration] officer you’re facing on that day,” said Hyde. “If it appears to them that you are entering into activities that would usually require employment, it’s a matter of discretion. There are no clear written rules about this, so that discretion can be used against you.”
Workaway itself is also rather elusive. The company’s registered address is in Jersey, there is no trace online of its founder, David Milward, and the company’s “emergency help” page leads me through an endless stream of FAQs, web pages and 14 bullet points setting out the rules for contacting emergency help, with no clear way of how to actually do so — though I did receive a message back from the online contact form within 24 hours.
As with companies such as Airbnb and Uber, providers and users rely on getting good reviews from one another to increase their appeal, though many travellers complain of negative reviews being deleted from the website.
Some Workaway users undoubtedly have a wonderful experience, making friends with hosts and staying in dream locations free. It can facilitate travel that might otherwise have been unaffordable.
But the potential for things to go awry is also clear. Isobel, a 24-year-old waitress from the Lake District, used Workaway in April last year. A frustrated graduate unable to find full-time employment and living at home with her parents, she wanted to travel cheaply. She found an opportunity at a holiday guesthouse in Granada, southern Spain, cleaning rooms and turning over beds for four hours a day, six days a week.
“The rooms would often be quite dirty, so it would take a lot of time,” said Isobel, who was sharing a bedroom with another Workaway volunteer. “The guesthouse supervisor was living in the apartment with us too, so it felt like I didn’t have a life separate from work. I was extremely stressed, not enjoying myself and not even getting paid. I felt exploited.”
Isobel left the guesthouse six weeks early and rented a room in an apartment nearby instead.
All of this, however, pales in comparison to Burke’s dystopian experience. “She’s in this orange prison outfit,” said her father. “She feels so isolated and desperate.” He is confident his daughter will be released soon. “We are nearly there,” he wrote on Facebook on Wednesday.
So does Workaway plan to change its protocols in the wake of Burke’s experience? I emailed them to ask. A spokesman reminds me of the two visa pop-up warnings they have in place and says the company is “saddened and concerned” to hear about Burke’s situation, but that they “are not party to the agreements made and do not arrange stays”.
“This would have been arranged directly by Becky,” they added.
