Come harvest time, foreign workers are our salvation across many areas in the agricultural sector. This year the government made 43,000 seasonal visas available for agricultural workers via six approved agencies, including the one Krastanova works for, Fruitful Jobs. “What we’d term ‘local’ won’t do it for minimum wage, or indeed any wage that makes using them financially tenable for us as a business,” Cran-Crombie says.
You’re paying too little as against the other options available.
Which tells us soemthing interesting about the past too. We’re told that the proles were driven off the land by enclosure and then they just had to work for The Man in the factories for a pittance.
Whereas something rather more truthful would be that the factories paid – in cash and working/living standards terms – better than the fields. Which is why people flooded from one to the other.
People who used to work in London took their two weeks holiday in August and went with the kids to Kent to pick hops. They had accommodation and were out in the sun and earned a few shillings. Today they would have to earn the minimum wage and their dwellings would all need to comply with onerous regulations.
The imposition of the minimum wage actively made it uneconomic for farmers to employ locals to pick crops. On piece work, the worker is guaranteed payment, even if they produced sod all at the end of the day. There are still plenty that cannot be gathered by machines and it is uneconomic unless performed by foreigners.
The whole thing is one of those literal vicious cycles, solely created by government meddling.
Similarly where I grew up in Yorkshire October half term was known as potato picking week. We didn’t get much and it was horrible work but it provided kids with some income and an insight in to the world of work.
We had a tattie-howkin’ week. If any pupil from the upper streams had dared to take it their parents would have had a wigging from the Rector.
“Today they would have to earn the minimum wage and their dwellings would all need to comply with onerous regulations.”
Any dwelling that houses more than 2 unrelated people is now declared to be a House in Multiple Occupancy (HMO) and subject to stringent regulations, making short term accommodation for lots of individuals ludicrously expensive.
A local farm to me has over 200 caravans with I’m told 6 pickers in each. Fortunately they aren’t classed as multiple occupancy dwellings. The pickers pay quite a bit for the accommodation too. The manager tells me the caravan rental is a surprisingly good earner.
They get minimum wage:
Here, 45,000 of the vineyard’s 340,000 vines are being picked by 32 expert Russian-speaking pickers from Mongolia, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. They are all here as horticultural seasonal workers, on a tier 5 visa, which was introduced in 2019. The pickers pay £70 a week in rent — usually to sleep in shared dorms — and are guaranteed Britain’s minimum wage for the hours they work.
think there’s 2 things:
* Employers prefer biddable foreign labour – locals might have expectations that go beyond picking 500kg of fruit a day for a pittance. Some poor fucker from Tajikistan knows he’d better get out of his sick bed, keep his head down, and never complain or he’ll earn nothing.
This is why our toilets are no longer cleaned by locals. They’re cleaned by imported African men who look at us with hatred in their eyes. This is why your Nan in care is going to be looked after by people from Somaliland and eSwatini, care providers don’t want to hire British people when they can have imported scab labour that’s terrified of losing their job and being deported.
* The British benefits system is consistently outbidding local employers, and incentivises long term “illness” or “disability” because those are the keys to Easy Street on benefits.
We should have a more realistic unemployment benefit system that encourages them to pick up little side jobs where they can, rather than seizing people’s bennies because they did a couple of shifts.
Exactly the case in America. The commies have convinced the public Latinos are hired because they can be paid less. They aren’t paid less. They are hired because they show up on time, work hard, and make no drama – they aren’t going to call EEOC because Juanita looked at them funny.
Federal labor law has made Americans unemployable for lower tier work.
eSwatini
I preferred by old diesel powered Swaziland.
The poor fucker from Tajikistan can earn vastly more picking fruit here than he can at home. His incentive is to work hard. The British picker will have benefits he loses if he picks above the minimum.
As you say, the benefits system creates terrible disincentives to work.
And also his living costs back home in Tajii are such that three month’s scut work here is enough to live on the whole year back home. That’s impossible for locals. Three month’s scut work won’t even pay the three months’ rent on the house back home.
So cut benefits until they are significantly lower than the NMW….And make seasonal work compulsory for the long-term unemployed (non-compliance or bad report from employer means benefit cut). Benefits are a safety net, not a hammock.
Spot on.
As Milton Friedman once observed, the minimum wage is always zero.
Back in the 1980s I did my first software job. I was 17, at college and a shoe sole company wanted someone to do a few weeks of work. A little experiment around calculating most efficient production set up. It paid £1.50/hour. Which in today’s money would be sub-minimum wage.
And I was happy as a pig in shit with that arrangement. I made £60 a week. I think about £5 went on my bus to get there and back, £8 on fags, probably a bit on music, then taking girls out. But it was also training. It got a few months of professional work on my CV.
This is a thing Milton Friedman also used to emphasise, that the best training programme is getting people into jobs. It’s about proving yourself. You’re a trolley boy that turns up on time, collects the trolley and is generally pleasant and seems intelligent, maybe you get onto the till. You are more trusted than a random bloke off the street. We had a lad in to do testing on parking meters. One of the programmers sons. And he was really good. And he liked coding. So, we dug out some low priority, low risk stuff and got him to do them.
And part of what has driven the yooni thing is that companies have to spend more, so want more skilled/qualified people. The problem, as everyone is finding, is that degrees often mean shit. They aren’t like getting an HGV or being a masters of wine. People can qualify based on probably just agreeing with the tre professore.
In my entire flaky creative career I have never been asked for qualifications, and only once had to audition (for Spandau Ballet; could play the parts but my face – probably dress sense – didn’t fit). Everything has been on proven ability, which is the way I choose the people I work with.
That’s not to say I never learnt anything useful in education, but invariably the useful stuff was peripheral and tangential to what I was allegedly studying.
Yes, I did three years summer work at 16/17/18 which paid zero, but gave me access to coding and building computerised medical sensing and reporting equipment.
As a student, I worked every holidays. I lived in London and most of the jobs were in the City. I was a bank messenger, labourer, office clerk all sorts of stuff for three quid an hour. I was always £300 up when I started the new Autumn term and lived quite a comfortable life as a result.
The most lucrative job was painting the floor of an office block where I was on double time overnight.
I had a fantastic summer job as a labourer/gardener for a firm with public sector contracts: mowing lawns, cutting hedges and digging etc. Worked every single day over the summer (overtime on weekends), cleared debts, had enough cash to go out four times a week and got back to university in September with muscles and a tan. Absolutely loved it.
From the age of 12 my summer, Christmas and Easter holiday jobs were working on the farm for my father. Not exactly well paid… At college I had two summer jobs on the heavy gang at St Paul’s Cathedral.
“We’re told that the proles were driven off the land by enclosure”. We certainly are which goes to show that people love opining about enclosure without even bothering to read a book about it – or at least a non-agitprop book.
“Which tells us soemthing interesting about the past too. We’re told that the proles were driven off the land by enclosure and then they just had to work for The Man in the factories for a pittance.
Whereas something rather more truthful would be that the factories paid – in cash and working/living standards terms – better than the fields. Which is why people flooded from one to the other.”
It’s all documented in Villages of the White Horse by Alfred Williams. It’s about all the villages up on the Ridgeway near Swindon, It’s not entirely focussed on the impact of the GWR factory coming to Swindon, but there’s things in there about struggling for the skilled people on the estates because they went to work there.
Industrialisation was also, to some extent, about how good the land was. Which is why the Swiss did it earlier than Italy, were richer per head than Italians long before Orson Welles was talking about cuckoo clocks. It’s not exactly great land up on the Ridgeway clue is in the name. Flat, exposed. Some pig and cattle farming. Also, why Swindon got the railway works. The landowners south of Marlborough didn’t want to sell.
That Whitewick fellow really is brilliant. He explained brilliantly why Didcot became a town. Lord Abingdon didn’t want a railway on his land so the junction to Oxford wasn’t there, and the Brunel gauge necessitated a transfer station where the junction was so that needed infra. Btw, if you can find a Brunel sleeper with the 7 foot markings on it, then that’s a valuable antique – as I don’t think there are any left.
I will add south of Marlborough farmland owners to my informal list of Nimby bastards.
In the real world, if you do something the authorities don’t want you to do, you have to pay someone some money to discourage you from doing it. “Mr Grist, your car was on that bit of road with yellow stripes on for 30 seconds. You owe Mr Gumble Head of Highways £80. So don’t do it again!”
In the world of socialist politics, making evil capitalists pay more for employing people is a good thing! “Mr Grist, you used to employ Mr Catweazle for an hour and it cost you £5. After the socialist revolution to rid England of terrible poverty, employing Mr Catweazle for an hour now costs £15”
“By the way, you can only sell those apples for 10p because the apple price cap is protecting poor consumers from people like you! And you need to pay Mr Miliband £10 for using fertiliser on that tree, thus destroying the planet!”
Growth is…
Oh, there isn’t any.
If you can make 2k working or 1.5k not working – most people are going to choose the 1.5k.
Male the dole less attractive and more will work.
CAN’T AFFORD to do it for minimum wage, not won’t.
Yet another cost to English wine. Most people use machines. But probably not worth it at the scale of England.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBmFH7fNxnA
“Thank God I had a small team of Romanians working on another vineyard, and I moved them over here and they kind of saved the day and mopped it all up.”
Why not just move to Transylvania? Cheaper land, better climate for wine and it’s just you getting on a Wizz Air flight instead of a “small team”?