It’s an example of why the government were utterly stupid bastards for imposing the additional migration restrictions on Romania and Bulgaria: they both ensure that migrant workers from those countries are fucked, *and* that crooks like S&A use them in preference to British or other EU workers because they can’t just quit and get another job.

Unlimited legal migration, with all workers getting the same rights and protections as each other – that’s what we need.

Are we talking predominantkly about Romanian and Bulgarian workers here? If so, then john b’s point seems strong, this looks like a problem created by regulation and not Tesco or other red-in-tooth-and-claw free traders.

All too common I am afraid. New Labour got into bed and directly sanction these exploiters and forgot about the working conditions of millions of decent people, British and immigrant alike. As far as I am concerned, the Labour Party are little better than slave traders.

This explains why the Labour Party are reluctant to tackle employment agencies and have exempted them from much employment law. They are trying to drive millions of people into poverty.

Personally I would get the entire Party together and give them all a lump sum so they can go and fuck off and live in exile somewhere so as we can organise ourselves into a political movement that seeks to protect the weakest in society from the powerful. Anyone who has a conscience who intends to vote for the Party of shame at the next election needs their head examined.

John B,
that’s where we get on well. Totally agree with your comment.

John Meredith @2.

Nothing excuses this type of exploitation. We would not tolarate such practice in South Africa. What kind of Country allows this type of behaviour go unpunished? This looks like the type of Stalinist labour camps that used to shock us. If there is nothing on the statute books that prevents such outright greed, then there should be.

Given there is no point in contacting the Labour Party to complain about such practices, Tesco does trade with these people, perhaps we should ask them what they think of such practices:

http://www.tesco.com/help/jump.asp?choiceB=4

Sainsbury’s

http://www.j-sainsbury.co.uk/cr/index.asp

Perhaps these multi million pound companies know that the average punter could care less about the plight of these workers.

A rather nasty little scheme I’ve heard of involves making the workers in labouring gangs members of an LLP – which has the advantage of automatically making them self-employed and so avoiding employers NICs for the gangmaster.

Of course, this shafts them on JSA, employment protections, etc.

Yeah but free borders, or opening up to Bulgaria and Romania wasn’t politically palatable was it?

I mean I agree with what John B says but let’s just also accept that this open borders malarky isn’t happening. So what else could have been done?

“Yeah but free borders, or opening up to Bulgaria and Romania wasn’t politically palatable was it?”

I don’t accept that it wasn’t a possible choice to treat Bulgaria and Romania as Poland was treated, but regardless of that, if we don’t advocate open borders it will never be “politically palatable”.

Sunny – that won’t do. The scandal here is the government’s racism. There’s no good reason to accept that “opening up to Bulgaria and Romania wasn’t politically palatable,” unless you accept the so-called reasoning behind the racist agenda being followed by Labour and its “British jobs for British workers” leader.

There’s no reason why the “open borders malarky,” you’re so flippant about couldn’t have happened and the direct and predictable result of it not happening is this horrendous exploitation.

We need to deal with official racism. There’s nothing else to be done about this.

“[F]oreign fruit pickers are paid as little as £45 a week”

“Once all deductions are taken into account, workers are paid as little as £2.37 an hour.”

Eh? They’re working 19 hour weeks?

“While the work may be tough, what angers the migrants the most is that they are rarely asked to put in more than four hours a day,”

Yup, that’s what’s buggering them.

And what Johnb says :”the additional migration restrictions on Romania and Bulgaria: they both ensure that migrant workers from those countries are fucked,”

That they can’t switch jobs to someone who will offer them full time.

Wait a minute here. What these people are being put through is not because they cannot take other employment. What is happening is rogue employers are exploiting the weakest members of society, through various loopholes in the law and ‘blind eyes’ by the Government. The law is supposed to protect these people and give them basic rights. There are supposed to be binding contract access to fair working practices. These are being ignored because the company have no real pressure to comply. Why should they be forced out of a job, just because the employer is allowed to get away with breaking employment law?

This company is acting imorally and almost certainly illegally too.

Worstall, you really are one.

Read things before you muddy the waters with your usual right-wing arguing of the toss. Nice to see though that you side with the gangmasters and the exploiters.
Those migrants were/are enticed with the promise of a job that would pay well.

Not only do they discover that there are hefty deductions, but they also find out that the hours on offer are under 20. Which means bugger all to do all day as they have no cash to spend either. You bet some locals moan that “foreigners” do nothing but hanging around the town centre all day.

Now, it appears that four years ago, the same company were instead overworking those people and for little money.

There is a constant though. Those who keep getting a rough deal are the ordinary workers.

umm, I fear I am about to get shouted at for ‘siding with the exploiters’ but there’s nothing wrong with deductions per se – you could be paid £5.73 per hour and be told to provide your own accomodation and transport, or you could have accomodation etc. provided and deducted from you wage. How much would you have to pay for accomdation – how much is a cheap room to rent? £50 per week? (depends where you are) – obv that’s a fixed cost, so if it’s being subtracted from wages on a short working week, it’s bad news. If there’s only 20 hours of work to do a week, why don’t these employers fire a few people?

[why is it right wing of Tim to point out the implictions in the data, for the hours these guys must be working? how's that muddying waters and siding with gangmasters?]

while I’m here, I do wish newspapers wouldn’t cite data in the form “wages as low as” – and I wish people here weren’t so ready to accept those numbers. If we want to know how the suppliers who supply Tesco etc. are behaving, we need to know average wages, we need to get a representative picture.

Usual lazy farmers. Why don’t they pick there own frigging strawberries.

“Worstall, you really are one.

Read things before you muddy the waters with your usual right-wing”

If you think I’m right wing then you’re even more of a drivelling fool that I thought you were.

“If you think I’m right wing then you’re even more of a drivelling fool that I thought you were.”

Another Tory troll with zero integrity.

This site is fill of them.

Not right of a horse’s arse, not left of a horse’s arse…

Tim Worstall @ 11,
“That they can’t switch jobs to someone who will offer them full time.”

Actually, no they can’t. Anyone from Bulgaria or Romania working over here in this kind of work will have been granted a visa on the explicit condition that they work ONLY for the named employer. If they leave that employment, they will lose their visa

@19
Daisy shows why Worstall speaks out of his backside.

@14
Luis Enrique. Yes, you do side with the exploiters, because you obviously choose to be selective about your reading. Cuz if you wanted to, it’d take you 15 seconds max to find out what the deductions are about. The most ridiculous one is “entertainment”, meaning “internet access”…whereas it has been proved that those poor guys didnt have any…at best their caravans had Jurassic PCs with floppy disks! Etcetera. But you just chose not to look into those things. Hence, in your blinkered view, the boss/gangmaster is right by default. To me that is as right wing as someone with a no.7 printed on their back.

Also…apologies but this is really pissing me off…I cannot stand people siding with bullies…how ON EARTH can you deny these people are being exploited????????

My job, for better or for worse includes travelling around. When that meant “abroad”, my employers would offer a whole flat that I would share with max 1 other person and on top of that a kitchen and a living room. That was fair. Secondly. There were no deductions. They expected me to pay my share of the rent at the end of the month. Which we all did. Which was fair.

Unlike cramped 7 people to a caravans and shared portaloos while having your already meagre wages cut into half for “accomodation”.
Because that would be exploitation. How else would you call it, Luis Enrique? Those Blugarians had not been told they were gonna live 7 of them in a caravan!

Sounds like a case in which this additional regulation is certainly doing no good and possibly doing rather a lot of harm. Of course, it sounds like some sort of fraud has been involved. I am all for people living 7 to a caravan if that is what they signed up for. But that doesn’t sound like it is the case at all. Once again, I’m with John B. What’s happened to me. Have I gone moderate?

You’re amazing Claude.

Tim Worstall says that they’re being buggered because they can’t switch jobs to people who would offer them full time work.

Daisy says that they can’t switch jobs because of their visa restrictions.

Claude says this show why Worstall is talking out of his backside.

Eh? Try a little comprehension with your reading Claude, there’s a good chap.

Sally, anyone who knew anything about me (which to be fair, a lot of political bloggers in the UK do in fact know something about me) would know that I’m not a Tory. Not at all.

Claude,

I don’t know how old you are, but you are conducting yourself like a stupid, self-righteous teenager. You’ve totally misread Worstall, because your in such a hurry to display your virtue in battle against the nasty right wingers. You seem to have identified me as one of those too: you are wrong, and if you didn’t go around making baseless accusations, you’d be wrong less often.

If you’d care to re-read what I wrote, you’ll see I said there’s nothing wrong with deductions per se. And then I wondered what a fair deduction for accommodation might be, and said something about how the combination of a fixed cost (accommodation) and low hours.

Here’s some sums, using a £50 weekly charge for accommodation:
19 hours at £5.74 = £109 – £50 = £3.10 per hour net
40 hours at £5.74 = £229 – £50 = £4.40 per hour net.

My point merely being that the combination of fixed costs and a short working week is bad news for net pay per hour. Others had already identified how the short hours was the main problem – I was just showing how that’s exacerbated by fixed charges.

“A spokesperson for the company said many fruit pickers had reduced hours this year because the weather conditions meant that much of the fruit was picked earlier than usual and that productivity was up 45 per cent on last year.”

So that looks like a combination of mismanagement (hiring too many workers), together with terms of employment that leaves the workers bearing all the risk of hours being short. I’m never quite sure what the word “exploitation” means, but I think it’s fairly applied here – taking advantage of the workers’ weak bargaining position.

Moreover, there is everything wrong with luring workers into the country with false promises, and then once they’ve arrived, stiffing them. Obviously, you should not cram people in seven to a caravan, unless perhaps that’s what you’d told them was on offer upfront, before they got on the plane. If you are charging somebody £2.75 per week for the use of a PC and internet access (on the face of it, not such a bad deal) then you need to ensure that the PC and the internet access works.

The only think I would say in defense of hiring immigrant workers on the minimum wage, provided that charges for accommodation are fair as conditions as promised, and that the workers are protected against the risk of there being not enough work for them when they arrive, is of course that the immigrant workers themselves need the work: “Paraskeva Bukovska and her husband, Asen, came to work for S&A Produce three months ago, along with 70 people from their village in western Bulgaria. Virtually all the adults in the village had to work abroad, she said, because there were no jobs at home” … “But at least 84 per cent of the people we had to let go indicated in writing that they would like to come back next year”

Editors,

If you could cut the first paragraph from the above comment, I would be grateful. Claude, I still think you’ve behaved foolishly, but there’s no need for me to rise to it.

Quit that patronising drivel, Luis Enrique.

Your comment @14, which you may want to read back to yourself, was full of semantic hair-splitting regarding the word ‘minimum’, ‘deductions per se’ and ‘fixed costs’ and ‘representative pictures’. You even started by saying:
“I fear I am about to get shouted at for ’siding with the exploiters’”

So, if there was any sympathy on your part for the Eastern European workers then transparent it was not.

Your last comment @24 makes it a bit clearer. Yet it’s the fact that you clearly choose to read them as “deductions per se” that is alarming. Semantics matter, Luis Enrique, as you are such a worldly and wise person you should know understand that.

The crux of the matter is exactly how ‘odd’, for want of a better word, those deductions look. The fact that you only in passing consider that “you need to ensure that the PC and the internet access works”, while still feeling the need to say that “it’s not such a bad deal”. Then don;t get your knickers in a twist if people say that your statements identify you as a “right winger” or similar.

It’s also interesting how ready you are, as you are in your last comment @24, to take for granted any comment and press release as spurted out by bosses and gangmasters. And “the immigrants need to work”? What a deep, deep statement, Luis Enrique. Now that explains everything, doesnt it? So before you go around calling self-righteous teenagers people who may be twice your age, think again.

** backs away, quietly **

Claude

methinks you protest too much.

Just one thing reveals it: Can’t see any way at all you can be unhappy about Luis’ PC/Internet comments.

Stop making ad hominen attacks, and debate the issue at hand.

“Stop making ad hominem attacks”.

Would this one count as one:
“Claude, I don’t know how old you are, but you are conducting yourself like a stupid, self-righteous teenager.”?

Isn’t there a national minimum wage the giant greengrocer’s have to pay?

I’m not so sure that unlimited open door immigration would solve this problem if employers can then employ people who will work for the lowest pay. It seems better to stop immigration forcing employers to employ British locals at a fair wage as there isn’t anybody else to do the job.

@30,

Well one way of limiting immigration in this type of case would be to more heavily regulate the agencies that are facillitating immigration by directly recruiting foreign workers, often fraudelantly, in their countries of origin.

But this would be to go against the views of the right wing, who regard any form of regulating employment agencies as taboo.

Couple of points regarding some of the posts here.

Exploitation. The restrictions to employment placed on these workers are simply not relevant. Nothing excuses exploitation, least of all ‘market forces’. There is a surplus of labour in this Country, these workers are perhaps not able to find ‘other work’ if we relaxed the restrictions. This company should not be allowed to get away with this type of things, just because it can.

Deductions. These people have been brought here under strict conditions. They are not given a ‘choice’ where to live. By any reasonable standards, the ‘accommodation’, transport and ‘welfare’ provided is part of their requirement for work and should be met by the employers. If they are ‘required’ to live in one area and the employer ‘transports them to another, then that is the employers responsibility.

Regulations. The regulations have not failed, what have failed is the policing of the regulation. We have one of the greediest Parties in modern politics in power. They are simply not interested in the plight of the weakest members of our society, their only concerned with their own inflated expenses.

These people are quite happy to charge everything regarding their ‘welfare’ to their ‘employer’. Yet are quite happy to ignore the plight of people who are charged thirty quid a week for the ‘privilege’ of sharing a caravan with 6 other people. The Labour Government side with the powerful against the powerless, that is a given. Your average Labour MP collects more money for food than these people earn.