Snowflakes picking cabbages

[Skustew]

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5351133/Eastern-Europeans-10-times-faster-farm-work-Brits.html#comments-5351133

Aibu to question the motives of this?

People that aren't used to manual work or working outdoors during winter are much slower on their first day compared to people that have been doing the job day in day out. I fail to see the actual story

The URL gives away the full story pretty much!

Australia gets lots of it picked by Indonesians, I worked in a picked onion factory in Australia while traveling there many years ago. It wasn't great pay and certainly wasn't a option to do that for a few years then return home to oxford and buy a house outright. Was barely enough to live off cheap bread and travel.

Are there many farms that offer year-round employment for pickers? Or would people have to move with the jobs to have a regular income?

Btw, a Cambridge student can be as good at picking cabbages as anyone else. Doesn't require any special skills. Or being a hardened peasant. DF spent two summers, as a Cambridge undergraduate, working on a mushroom farm

Those from Eastern European countries, and my mum is from one, tend to have a hard life, and know what real poverty is like, they are greatful for any work opportunity they get. Usually these countries are poor and do not have a social care/benefit system, so people have to work to survive. Much like it was before the health and social reform, 70 years ago.

Like many, I grew up during the time when most fruit & veg was picked by hand, mostly by women and their kids along with students (that's the reason for the long summer holiday). As a teenage I could get work for a week or two, and then if there was nothing going, sign-on the dole and receive it within a week. That's all changed now, firstly because many farmers use gang-masters or agencies for their staff as they just don't have the time for all the paper-work, and secondly because you can't just switch in and out of work/benefits as easily as you could.

Relatively speaking, you could earn good money picking if you were prepared to put in the hours and effort, more than, say, retail work. The same holds true now from what I see, but's a lot harder then just turning up at a fruit farm at 7 am, signing in and getting out to work for the day, and getting paid cash at the end. I suspect most growers have to go via agencies etc in order to meet the daily quotas issued by wholesalers and supermarkets, rather than the older method whereby stuff went of to a market on a daily basis and sold at the going rate.

Btw, a Cambridge student can be as good at picking cabbages as anyone else. Doesn't require any special skills. Or being a hardened peasant

They CAN. But they're not, really. And hardened peasant is prettty offensive to the people you are talking about you know.

And yes, we should pay 4xs as much for a cabbage so that people picking them can have better wages and shorter hours

Only if you are going to give the people buying the cabbages (and everything else) better wages and shorter hours, because if you qudruple the price of fruit and veg you are going to have some starving children in your back yard.

We harvest from July to March or April and put crop in from March to July so there is work all year round (the odd quiet week here or there but we have to carry that not the employees). We have never had an issue with any staff unhappy with pay or conditions. The main reason for leaving is either migrants going home or locals tend to move to other manual labour jobs such as building or else go self employed such as landscaping, often when they have young dcs.

ShutYoFace

It's a pity you didn't read the rest of my post - you'd find out that I was being extremely sarcastic and reacting to the very racist and patronising posts about the Eastern Europeans who are supposed to be all used to hard manual labour and extreme temperatures.
That, of course, is bollocks. I am from the almost that corner of Europe. I grew up in a three-bedroom apartment in a big city, studied at the university and my encounters with hard manual labour were sporadic. We used to help my GPs when small and picked berries and apples and helped them feed small animals. I only ever picked beans in hot summer and I wouldn't know how to pick cabbage properly if asked, you'd have to show me.
As for the cold, I'm usually the one with at least four layers on in winter and wouldn't last without a thick winter hat and gloves. But the snotty racists just assumed that all Eastern Europeans are born to be farmers and we walk to schools in thick snow bringing our own coal or wood for heating in winter (if we go to schools at all, of course).

I remember the Evan Davis documentary set around Wisbech, where it was "proved" that native Brits were less competent than East Europeans.
Well, if you're going to pick a fat racist, a boy with learning difficulties, a couch potato gamer and a woman with dyslexia you can prove anything. Given that most journalism starts with the lie and looks to back it up, it was hardly surprising.

So shocking that people starting a totally new job will take time to get accustomed and match experienced workers! Reminds me of the cunty customers who sneered at me the first time I ever operated a checkout because I took too long. Just because a job is low skill doesn't mean it doesn't have a knack.

Exactly Blurry. New skills take time. Imagine if a news outlet aimed at young people did an article where they stuck some 70 year olds in front of a computer and sneered at their incompetence and lack of skills. The cries of ageism would be deafening.