Fruit picking Jobs

[billysboy]

With so many Fruit Picking Jobs available aibu to think that a few of the people already in this country would want to take them up

It feels as if we are paying 1m to stay at home rather than take up this work
Its hard work no doubt but also pays £10-15 an hour is it beneath too many people?

@DrMaryMalone

Agricultural wages boards have had to set rates precisely due to farmers wanting to pay the absolute minimum for workers. As PP have said, some gangmasters and farmers are exploiting workers - certain things maybe "illegal" but as a worker from say Romania who desperately needs that 6 months work, who maybe unsure of the law and always worried about his job (many farms have a "plenty more want your job" culture) is unlikely to rock the boat.

The charged accommodation is often bad. Several former agricultural workers I know always mentioned the inadequacy of cooking and washing facilities for the number of people on site - after a long day, waiting ages for a "turn" cooking or shower.

For 2020 rates, four guys will have to pay just under £250 each for a spot in a poor four person caravan or bunks in a porta cabin type building. The accommodation is NOT worth that.

What are farmers plans for next few years? Say there isn't the same large amounts of eastern European workers who will accept current terms, either they are more restricted (brexit) or other EU countries offer better t&c's and they don't come? Farmers who moan about "lazy brits" are going to have to change their attitude, get training people and seriously think about the wage AND conditions they offer.

... so many posters saying they are their children have applied & not had a response or been selected. ( including my 2 student sons who are used to farm & festival work!)

The lazy Brits is just nonsense , the employers I’m sure could get a lot more Brits but don’t want them. Instead happy to Use the media to push the Brits are too lazy message to support their arguments for European labour.

This is really interesting reading the comments about benefit and bills and normal everyday household occurrences, schools etc.
It doesn't fit with the work of a picker. People can't just up and leave responsibilities, that's why it was the work of British Romany, and now the work of eastern European, mainly Romanian Roma.
You need very little money when you prefer to work for the bare minimum in life. Or in the case of Eastern Europeans a little to take home. But this little to us is huge to them and will pay for water and other utilities to be installed. often they are hill dwellers.

The lazy Brits is just nonsense
I agree, we are just the same as the Romanians, willing to work hard if the price is right and the and conditions suit. For Romanians who have the right skills taking this work is a rational decision. A British person weighing pros and cons comes to the conclusion that in order for it to be a rational decision for them the pay would have to be far higher

(obviously I'm not talking about people who have been coerced trafficked or enslaved into this work)

My lovely nana was a British Romany and picked fruit as a child and into her teens and twenties during the Great Depression. She had a trade but was always let go in the summer to pick fruit. We ‘middle class’ now but I remember her telling me how picking put food in her belly when there was nothing else. Her mum died of Spanish flu when she was aged 9. She never moaned, never claimed benefits, read The Express and voted Tory. What a life.

I don't understand why they are saying they need to fly in people. When I looked the places had had vast amounts of applications. I couldn't do it as furloughed.

Thousands of brits have applied.

I get the impression the farmers and gang leaders do not want them because brits will actually speak up about the awful and quite possibly illegal work and pay conditions.

Most of the migrants stay in basic accom provided by employer which they deduct a cost from their pay, this makes them even cheaper to hire (as the price they charge js a lot cheaper than it costs to provide a few portacabins etc) and they just get on with it no dramas.

Fundamentally they could take on only brits, pay proper minimum wage and maybe a bit of a productivity hit, resulting in higher prices of the produce in the stores. But then there would be threads here complaining thay punnet of strawberries has gone up a quid since last year...

Queen

My mam, grandma and all the family would stay in a particular village where they registered with a post office. They always got a letter from the farmer and were hard workers. They talk about it with such fondness.
Kids worked too as they didn't go to school, weren't registered anywhere.
It was a place for whole families to meet up, and a big part of their culture. Then came the major law changes in The Caravan Act 198/9?.
It's still happening Pritti Patel already had travellers socially isolating in November and trying to rush through changes in the law, to reduce our culture even more. Increasing Police powers to confiscate homes.

I'm knackered excuse me.

The 1968/9 Caravan Act.

twitter.com/lisaocarroll/status/1251432362115768321?s=20

I can imagine that they prefer men to women.

I would imagine the early 5am starts is because the fruit don't ripen only between 9 and 5.
It's the same in the veg garden -suddenly you've got lbs of ripe peas/ beans to pick and freeze.

There is a promotional video here:

Even in that short video the work looks incredibly hard...

Rosehip10 are you in Scotland? Certainly for the a long time we have not had plenty more where they came from. We have always attracted less seasonal workers than down south in part due to the fact we are seen as the country where it’s always grey and rainy! In more recent years the age of seasonal workers has increased and productivity has gone down and where once those staff might have been replaced they cannot be now as there is not a huge bank of staff looking for jobs, especially as the crops I work with go right through to November when the weather starts to turn.

I have not experienced bad accommodation standards myself but that is probably because my company would simply not buy from anyone not providing up to standard facilities hence our small base of suppliers keep their sites in good condition with proper facilities. We have had the odd nonconformance during accommodation audits by retail customers such as a broken shower screen in one caravan and worn seat upholstery in another both of which we had to provide photo evidence that they had been fixed before we could be approved as a supplier. We would not get away with using ports cabins as living accommodation! Most of the farms around here are caravans with the odd youth hostel type set up or farm cottages. Caravans tend to be replaced on a rolling basis with older ones taken out each year. People tend to think it’s cheap for the farmers but when you consider that a lot of councils view accommodation sites as a separate venture to the farm and charge full business rates on the accommodation it’s not always the case by the time you add in maintenance costs, replacement costs, cleaning etc.

In terms of the future, a DEFRA rep I spoke to last year was pushing the use of prison labour! In my own case, there is continued r&d into automation, with the industry itself investing millions on prototype machinery for planting and harvesting. It will never be an option for some crops such as cauliflower which requires careful handling to prevent damage. People will always be needed for grading and packing that can’t be done by a machine though. We have been pro active since the Brexit process started to encourage regular returning staff to apply for settled or pre settled status through the EU settlement scheme. They will be the skilled workers who can train and supervise new starts who don’t have experience. The SAWS pilot scheme can bring in 10k non EU workers this year but I think they are going to struggle due to closed borders. This scheme worked in the past by allowing a set number of workers in for a limited time and could be implemented again on a bigger scale. Otherwise we need a shift in mentality on a number of issues -

Customers would need to accept higher prices, less perfect produce caused either by less skilled staff or automation and go back to what can be sourced in season
Retailers would need to relax specifications to accept more wonky products and pay more for them
Farmers would need to make the job more attractive to those who are able to do it (either very local or willing to move around the country young people with no family or caring commitments) by increasing pay rates, upgrading staff facilities etc.
The government needs to change the benefit system to make it easier to take a seasonal job that may only last weeks or months without starting new claims at the end - I don’t know enough about UC to say if it now allows this to be handled better or not.
Workers would need to be more flexible about moving for work and step up to the plate to do what can be repetitive, physical work in unglamorous conditions - no fake nails, eyelashes or jewellery allowed!
We could also do with better weather but I don’t think there is much anyone can do about that!

You need very little money when you prefer to work for the bare minimum in life. Or in the case of Eastern Europeans a little to take home. But this little to us is huge to them and will pay for water and other utilities to be installed. often they are hill dwellers.
Fruit pickers in the UK are not necessarily unwashed hill dwellers back in their home country. Actually, I think, the most common population are students and teachers on their summer breaks. When I was doing my degree back home (stem), I think rougly half of our year was spending summer in various European countries on the farms. There are actually bona fide millionaires amongst those people now, many moved on to Silicone Valley etc. A current head of dept in a major SE hospital had spent her student summers in the UK picking fruit, fell in love with the country and returned as a graduate.
But there is no social stigma associated with physical labour in Eastern Europe. I can see that it is somewhat different in the UK.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=bqo-7rtGwOU watch this video on youtube and it will explain why british are not wanted by employers and immigrants are prefered and welcomed. I am an immigrant myself and in my current job my boss had to choose from around 350 applicants - the vast majority in this town are white british and he hired me. Now, 2 years later he keeps saying how he wouldnt expect the same level of hard work from any of his fellow british and how glad he is for hiring me (even though he was one of the people who voted for brexit - he now regrets). I am finance team supervisor and manage my own team of 6 (all british) but I think this whole example proves that british are generally lazy and not as hard working as foreigners, hence are not desirable for some employers. Back to fruit picking, it pays off for farmers to fly the foreigners over here and pay them more (I think 15 quid an hour is a decent pay!) but they know they will get efficient and hard working employees. Not sure whether a lot of people will want to go do the seasonal jobs after brexit next year. I heard Norway and Sweden are paying four times the wages in the UK so people will just go there instead and british will have to pick their own fruit. Or just live without I guess

I thought in the post - BREXIT world ( this was pre -C19 mind) there were plans to source even more low cost f&v pockets on temporary visas from places like African countries (Morocco, Tunisia etc) and China, India, Philippines. this looks to be to push costs down even more and possibly not subject to a UK living or minimum wage. Creating even more of an underclass than we had previously.

Black in the late 1990s I worked in the UK with Indian IT workers who came in on special visas. They worked a 6 day week, worked 10-12 hours a day, compared to my 35 hours a week.They were paid "from India" and they said they were getting about £4 an hour, which was less than UK retail wage for skilled programming work by highly educated people. The typical UK day rate for the IT work at that time was £300-400 a day. TheY lived in cramped terraced housing, sharing rooms that had been provided for them near the office in one of the dodgier parts of town, probably deducted from their wages.
They worked in a totally separate wing of our building to the UK/EU & US staff. They had been "flown in" due to the then shortage of skilled domestic labour issue of that time, the Y2K computer problem that needed COBOL programmers to check & fix our aging computer infrastructure. I spoke with one of the female programmers in that team who I used to bump into in that part of the building and she said they would also get a visa to live and work in Canada once they completed this contract as their incentive. It was she who asked me what the UK day rates were for their work. She was also the one who told me what they earned in comparison.
Different era, Similar exploitation, different sector. Neo-liberal capitalism at its finest eh?

• PICKERS not pockets ffs!

@ThePrettyOneX Sorry, it is not acceptable to say things like "all brits are lazy" "want to sit on benefits" "afraid of hard work" - out of a working population of over 10s of millions

This is no more acceptable then people who say stuff like "Romanians are thieves" or "Poles never integrate and don't want to speak English" for example.

Lots of this "lazy brits" propaganda comes from employers who are, or sail close to exploiting workers and who want to pay the bare minimum and offer the minimum terms and conditions. The last thing they want is people who may question working conditions and practices!

Lots of this "lazy brits" propaganda comes from employers
It also comes from government. Didn't Prity Patel and Dominic Raab write a book saying how lazy British workers are.

I would do it but I have no where to live/stay near the places where the fruit is grown, no childcare and am furloughed so I’m not allowed to work elsewhere. I’d love to be put in the fresh air

Lots of my friends have applied and have heard nothing. Some have been told to reapply in June. It’s all political rubbish again. A lot of British would work for £10 an hour as they are already in supermarkets, Carr homes etc. Difference is that the farmers pay agencies to run the contracts on a fixed fee so they then pay the non UKs a lot less than minimum wage and throw in a mobile home too.

Yy the lazy Brit trope is just so insulting.

I considered it, but I still have ankle trouble after an injury in 2018. So I reckon I'd struggle.