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Recent political stuff:
- The vote to see if Britain should adopt Alternative Voting has failed.
- Lib Dems lose lots of councils and councillors, whilst Labour make the majority of the gains in England.
- The Scottish National Party do really well in the elections.
A link to the BBC politics page containing relevant information.
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 3rd 2023 at 11:15:30 AM
>If the ag companies want their food picked, they'll have to pay people enough to attract them to the job.
It's a double edged sword. If the wages to produce food go up so too will food prices. (This isn't an issue unique to Brittan either.) The economic shocks of that would be potentially unpleasant in their own way.
I don't know if there is a good answer other than figuring out how to mechanize harvest and that's something that for a long time has eluded us for many products. We would be talking advanced robots with the processers to recognize ripe produce and manual dexterity to pick it without damage. These technologies currently exist in the lab but not in the market.
Speaking from a country where we have the same issue, the answer is no. It's not just a matter of the low pay, it's that you can't find working-class Americans or Britons to do the work at all. We're talking backbreaking physical labour in the fields - in America, under the hot sun, in Britain in July and August, you have two very rainy months if my knowledge is correct. We pretty much need immigrants because nobody else is willing to work that kind of hard labor (unless you want to rely on chain gangs).
We don't yet have robots who can do the work, let alone more cheaply than human muscle. (And when we do, that still won't make low-skilled jobs. :P )
I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.
I don't agree. Agriculture - in Canada as well - is one of the few industries that's generally exempt from minimim-wage laws (pay is per amount picked), and pay for fruit-picking is very low unless you've done a lot of it and are very fast.
I remember looking into it as a summer job when I was in high school/undergrad and calculating I'd probably make $10-15 a day. Per day, not per hour.
There are lots of people who take summer jobs involving heavy physical labour - landscaping, construction, and (in Canada) tree planting for the forest industry are very popular. One of my first summer jobs was working on a (government agricultural research) farm, planting, weeding, and picking crops, and I quite liked it - but I was making $13/hr, not piecework.
My mom did fruit-picking as a summer job in high school, and that was in an economy where jobs were much, much more abundant than they are today. (One where - after she finished high school - she could, with zero higher education, quit her well-paying office job every summer to travel, come back in the fall, and be sure of finding a new job almost immediately.)
Youth unemployment is hitting record highs. I find it very hard to believe they wouldn't do agricultural work at any price. Honestly, in terms of the actual work petformed, it beats the heck out of working a Mcdonalds or Subway.
I think you're massively underestimating what people will put up with - and, currently, have to put up with - for employment. A friend of mine had about a dozen different minimum-wage or near-minimum-wage grocery/fast-food/sales jobs, and was sexually harrassed in nearly every one of them, before she finally got decent work.
edited 7th Aug '17 4:37:33 AM by Galadriel
A procrastination in of itself
If wages go up however the people buying food with have more money to spend on said food, if the agriculture industry in the UK is so poorly run that it can't surviving paying a reasonable wage then that seems like a problem with the agriculture industry.
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Supermarkets constantly trying to undercut each other and still maintaining an air of "all vegetables must conform to normal sizes" makes it hard and generates massive amounts of waste. Go look at how much money farmers actually make off milk, too.
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It's a lot more complicated. Wages would have to go up for not only agricultural workers but every other part of the country and you have a problem if they don't; poorer countries that get food exported to them may not be able to afford more expensive exports, food production may get shifted altogether to countries with lower wages or might exploit prison labor in countries where that's a thing.
Agricultural supply chains are a big house of cards. There's no answer that completely avoids screwing somebody over and several that would threaten global food security. Investing in technology is probably the best one in the long term however.
edited 7th Aug '17 8:11:21 AM by Elle
That's exactly what's being said by the experts in the UK who have spent years studying the patterns and problems of attracting workers to pick produce in the fields. There are some parts of the country where picker wages are £10-£15 per hour, competing very favourably with other kinds of per hour work in the local area. Even when it's at the best hourly rates for the local market, not enough people will take up the work in the volume required to actually bring in the crops: not even strapped-for-cash students are attracted in enough quantities to bring the produce home. It's because of the type of work that it is: hours of repetitive, boring, back-breaking work while being constantly exposed to the elements.
The most successful farming businesses for attracting workers is the non-seasonal area of the meat industry, but it's still having to make up a short-fall of 44% with immigrant workers. In the fruit and veg industry - the most laborious, monotonous, back-breaking and seasonal area, they attract only 10% at max. The short-fall made up by immigrant labour is 90% plus.
edited 7th Aug '17 2:17:35 PM by Wyldchyld
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't "unpleasant working conditions by necessity" be an argument for offering better than average wages to offset the undesirability of the job compared to other jobs?
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It is considered a job for unskilled workers. That isn't quite correct, because you have to be quite skilled to reach a decent wage - this isn't exactly a job where you are paid by the hour, but by how much you manage to achieve - but then students usually lack the skills to deliver enough for a higher pay. There is certainly a discussion to be had if they should raise what the people get for each "delivery", but it wouldn't solve the problem because "summer job" helpers would still get a pretty low wage due to their inability to keep up with the one who do this regularly.
I've found some recent survey results reported in the press:
Farms hit by labour shortage as migrant workers shun 'racist' UK
Fruit and veg farmers facing migrant labour shortages
The answer is straightforward for Beverley Dixon, from G's Fresh, which employs some 2,500 seasonal workers growing salad crops across large areas of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, as well as other farms dotted across the UK.
"We operate in areas of such low unemployment, so here in Cambridgeshire, it's less than 1.5%," she said.
"So there simply aren't the people available to do the work, added to which UK people tend to want permanent year-round work and this is seasonal work.'
There has also been a UK government decision that's hitting the industry hard right now as well — a decision taken by the Home Secretary a few years ago. (Theresa May.)
But in March, the immigration minister, Robert Goodwill, told M Ps: “We do not believe there is sufficient evidence to justify a seasonal agricultural workers’ scheme in 2017.” The NFU’s concerns about food rotting in the fields due to a lack of workers were “a little bit of a scare story”, he said.
A government spokesperson said: “We are determined to get the best deal for the UK in our negotiations to leave the EU, not least for our world-leading food and farming industry, which is a key part of our nation’s economic success.”
Hardman said people who thought the shortage of farm labour could be filled by UK workers were “delusional”. He said: “There is no appetite in the UK labour pool for seasonal agricultural work.” The hospitality industry was more attractive for temporary work and unemployment is low in key areas, like Kent, he said.
Hardman said he understood why the government has not committed to a new migrant worker scheme: “Firstly, it’s political suicide and secondly they are working on hard historical data. Eighteen months ago we did not have an issue, but the tide of shortages is on its way.”
Areas being hit by loss of migrant workers aren't just unskilled roles, but skilled ones as well:
Access to migrant workers vital to more than half of rural businesses
edited 7th Apr '18 11:50:47 AM by Wyldchyld
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.
Apologies. I'm putting this in a separate post because it's long, but it's a bit of research that was done in August 2016 about the subject of who picks fruit and veg in the UK.
Reading the article in full is useful because it often links to studies and research reports published on the subject to show where it's getting its information from.
Who picked British fruit and veg before migrant workers?
There were a number of reasons for this shortage of labour. From the end of the 18th century until the mid-19th century, labour requirements in agriculture were increasing, due to more labour-intensive crops, such as turnips and potatoes, and the adoption of a new crop rotation system. At the same time, the number of full-time farm workers was shrinking, as they were either pulled towards jobs created by industrialisation, or pushed out by mechanisation. On top of this, groups who could have previously been relied upon to help out at harvest time, such as those working in rural textile industries, began to move away from rural areas towards factory work in towns.
This power shift largely transformed agriculture as an industry, rapidly moving away from farming as a “culture” to a more intensive industry. Where technology has not stepped in, many farms have had to extract greater efficiency from their workers, at a lower cost, just to survive. This has resulted in a move away from the more paternalistic role of farmers to their workers, to one that is more distant and bureaucratic, further dissuading locals from wanting to do the work.
Migrant workers are less likely to perceive the work as “dead end” and rather see it as a temporary step allowing them to earn an income that has more worth in their home country.
Schemes to encourage British workers back to the land have largely failed. Where they have tried, some farmers state that after several days of work, many do not return. But question marks hang over rhetoric arguing that Brits are too lazy, unavailable, or incapable of doing the work, or that they have an inferior work ethic to overseas workers.
The use of technology so far has proved challenging in the harvest of fragile soft fruits and vegetables, but it is likely that the future will see a gradual move towards the use of robots. Until then, unless food prices change or new systems emerge encouraging domestic workers to pick our fruit, British farms are likely to remain highly dependent on overseas workers.
edited 7th Aug '17 2:34:40 PM by Wyldchyld
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If only 14/13,400 workers are British, there's more than just how attractive the job is at play. That's ~0.1%.
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The big problem is that it is seasonal. "Unskilled but also unpleasant" usually can find people at a manageable 15 dollars or equivalent. Recycling stations dont have person-power shortages.
But.. well, random unemployed people look at the job listing and go "So I would figure out how to fit this job into my life and routine, learn how to do it well, and then it goes away?" and go no-thanks.
This is why the future of this is robotics. Because a robot wont mind if you put it under a tarp for nine months out of the year.
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I presume there's also an issue if most of the jobs are located in areas of relatively high employment like the aforementioned Cambridgeshire example—it's not only seasonal but few people nearby need one, it's trouble.
But to the extent that only 1/1000 jobs were filled without immigration? That's definitely a confusing one.
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Yes, observations about the some of the issues have been made in the articles. Including the observation that British people tend to turn first to the hospitality sector when looking for seasonal work (which also has a struggling migrant workforce issue since both Theresa May's removal of the seasonal worker scheme and since the Brexit vote).
Also, there's the issue that regions of high unemployment do not tend to coincide with the regions that need migrant field workers, so automatically recruiting unemployed British people for seasonal work is an issue, too, given that relocating British people for seasonal work does not have the advantage for the worker that it does for a relocating overseas worker (that the overseas workers will tend to work in the countries where their salaries will translate more favourably into their native currency).
edited 7th Aug '17 2:42:56 PM by Wyldchyld
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.
Oh, bother.
Jeremy Corbyn condemns ‘violence done by all sides’ in Venezuela
He however refuses to specifically condemn Maduro, in an impressive display of bothsiderism. Guess he is still unwilling to condemn a government he once praised.
Disgusted, but not surprised
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It'll get turned against him no matter what he says, here.
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Trained, experienced diplomats have observed on a number of occasions that, in these situations, Corbyn has a tendency to react more like a diplomat than a politician. In truth, this isn't an unusual behaviour for British politicians if you go back through time. Note that Theresa May's spokespeople are mostly using the same sort of language as Corbyn, and are being treated as statesmen-like for doing so.
edited 7th Apr '18 11:51:56 AM by Wyldchyld
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.
Oh, bother.
I guess for some it's due to holding Corbyn to higher standards. Or it's due to his previous praise of Chavez and Maduro. Or it's due to certain elements of the British media trying to make Corbyn look bad again.
Why do the Tories think people care what Jeremy Corbyn says about Venezuela?
You can see at first why CCHQ thinks this is a clever idea. President Nicolás Maduro is a socialist, and Corbyn and other left-wing British politicians have spoken positively about him and Hugo Chávez’s preceding administration in the past – prior to this crisis.
The Tories are using this to try and scare voters into thinking a Corbyn-led Britain would experience the political and social turmoil of Venezuela, while at the same time criticising the Labour leader for his silence about undemocratic and violent activity. They are targeting both socialism as an ideology and Corbyn as leader: a double whammy.
Yes, the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has made an official statement (and some freelance remarks), but so has his opposite number Emily Thornberry, who expressed concerns about Maduro’s “increasingly authoritarian rule”. Labour also released this official statement from shadow foreign minister Liz Mc Innes on Monday:
edited 7th Apr '18 11:52:19 AM by Wyldchyld
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.
Oh, bother.
Oh that is absolutely why the Tories are pushing this angle. And I'm also not too surprised that May herself hasn't said much on the issue. She's a coward when it counts.
I still think Corbyn is making a mistake in equivocating the violence on both sides.
Disgusted, but not surprised
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And open himself to catching flak for changing views and not condemning all the violence? There's not a good way out.
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I imagine he's probably hedging his bets for when Maduro ends up against a wall and Venezuela ends up as a right-wing dictatorship instead. Which does look pretty likely, given the composition of the opposition.
What's precedent ever done for us?
edited 7th Apr '18 11:52:48 AM by Wyldchyld
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It doesn't help when they're mostly relying on agency workers in the first place. Given the somewhat... troubled record of agency workers recently even before the immigration mess, it doesn't seem ideal.
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