Have you ever heard someone ask this Q about why Brits won't pick fruit and veg? @JudithREvans
& I have a story which sheds some light. It's about the experience of some Russians & Belarusians coming to pick UK fruit on a new visa pilot (Thread) ft.com/content/11e49a…
They expected hard work, long hours, and the minimum wage. But the problem the faced was the opposite of too much work: the ones we spoke to were being deprived of it for not meeting productivity targets.
They were on zero hour contracts, which do not guarantee any work. Here's a clause from one contract we saw.
In 2019 the immigration minister said in a written parliamentary answer that zero hour contracts would not be permitted on this "seasonal worker pilot" scheme. But we have even seen a contract that is literally titled "Terms and conditions of zero hours employment".
Under free movement these unhappy workers could move jobs. But under the seasonal visa pilot, they can only move with permission of their recruiter, & some are being refused transfers. Some are also in debt back home, to pay for the £244 visa & travel.
An NGO called @FocusOnLabour, which has researched workers' experience on the scheme in Scotland, found that some workers were resorting to buying boxes of picked fruit from the fastest pickers, just so they could be allowed to keep working.
Now this is just a snapshot of a small no of workers - others might well be on better conditions, or happily meeting targets. But the experience of these workers highlights how a combination of piece-rates, zero-hours contracts, & strict visas without the right to move farms...
...risks leaving people feeling trapped, unable to move, with debts to pay back home. It also, I think, sheds some light on how these UK picking jobs have intensified over the years. It's hard to see how they work for a local with a family, rent, mortgage to pay.
The two operators of the pilot must facilitate farm transfers "where possible" & it's not clear why they weren't in these cases.
FWIW I don't think this is "slave labour". It's important to use language precisely I think. But it is problematic, & now (while the system is still in the pilot stage) is the moment to fix it.
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Are Brits "too lazy" to do the jobs migrant workers do, like fruit picking? Are farmers "too unpatriotic" to hire them? No and no. Let's start by looking at how the job has changed since Brits used to do it. 1/n ft.com/content/eb5e3b…
Piece rates are still common, but min wage law means farmers must top up the pay of pickers whose productivity is too low. Supermarkets have exerted relentless pressure on price & quality standards. The result is has been a HUGE intensification of this job.
This paper by @rogaly at Uni of Sussex, written almost a decade ago, picked up on the changes by interviewing farmers sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gatewa…
Politicians: cherry-picking the best stats for your speeches doesn't persuade the public all is well, it persuades them they're being lied to ft.com/content/ac72d1… A worked example follows...
Philip Hammond's spring speech 2019 (the last "normal" speech of this kind, I think?) rattles off a string of wonderful stats about the "remarkably robust" economy. All are technically correct. But still...
Fastest wage growth - ok, at that moment, in nominal terms (see chart) but this is hardly the stat that matters most to people, which is real terms wage growth, which had been dire for a decade in 2019 (see chart).
Shame on me, given my job, but only since the pandemic have I really started to understand how threadbare the UK's safety net has become. Take statutory sick pay. The UK is now at the very bottom of all OECD countries. Even Trump's America is doing more.
There's a hard-headed reason to raise sick pay: that otherwise some people won't isolate because they can't afford to (the people reliant only on SSP are disproportionately in jobs that can't be done from home.) Skimping is a false economy.
To let unemployment surge under the cover of allowing the economy to adjust naturally to the "new normal" would be intellectually dishonest and economically dangerous. We won't know what jobs are viable post-Covid until we're actually post-Covid. ft.com/content/f3166a…
Meanwhile there aren't enough new jobs for people to "reallocate" into.
Boris Johnson promised us a New Deal in June, so how about taking a leaf from FDR and creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs? The UK economy clearly needs more care workers, nurses, teachers, teaching assistants & others to cope with the future anyway. kingsfund.org.uk/sites/default/…
The gig economy isn't the future of work after all. In fact, it might not have a future at all. ft.com/content/11e2e1…
Uber and Lyft say they'll have to raise prices by 20% to 120% in California if forced to treat drivers as employees. That's an indication of how much money they've been saving by ignoring the laws that apply to everyone else...
...but even with that labour cost compression, they're still loss-making, and the bigger they get the more money they lose. Their business model is to sell services for far less than their actual value. No wonder customers love them
I don't get this line from the OECD's Stefano Scarpetta. Is anyone on furlough in any OECD country actually banned from moving employers/getting a new job?
Are they even disincentivised, really? Depends on the details of each country's furlough scheme, but if you know they writing is on the wall for your job, you're still incentivised to get a new one if you can. People aren't lazy dummies.
And are businesses really disincentivised from making layoffs? Recent spate of retail redundancies in UK suggests not.