While a Home Office van tours the London borough of Brent telling illegal immigrants to go home or face arrest the food suppliers to our most ” ethical “supermarkets are going out of their way to encourage low paid immigration to Britain to pick the strawberries, raspberries and blackberries now on sale in Waitrose and Marks and Spencer.
The most prominent is run by Marion and Joe Regan. She is one of the leading lights in the fruit growers world and she supplies strawberries to Wimbledon, Waitrose and Marks and Spencer.
Look at the website more closely and you will find it is in English, Polish, Romanian, Bulgarian and Russian The reason is Hugh Lowe Farms are desperate to recruit labour and are targeting workers from these countries to come to Britain. The Bulgarians and Romanians – though not allowed to come here until next year – can come through a government seasonal workers scheme run, yes, by the Home Office – the very ministry behind the offensive vans.
Why Russian you may ask. Well, believe or not, fruit growers are worried ( Nigel Farage of UKIP please note) that when the Romanians and Bulgarians get the freedom of the whole EU, they won’t want to come here. Why? Because the UK under the Tory and Liberal Democrat coalition – is now being regarded as such a low wage economy and so expensive to live in – that they would rather work on farms in other EU countries.
So the fruit growers want to RELAX immigration control further and get the Home Office to approve a seasonal workers scheme for Ukrainians from next year to pick their fruit. The reason Ukrainians are even poorer than Romanians – and can’t get access to the EU.
One might have a smidgeon of sympathy for the growers need to attract workers if it were not they are also the leading lights in abolishing from the end of September the Agriculture Wages Board – which guarantees slightly higher wages than the minimum wage and the supermarkets, while officially neutral, are aiding and abetting them.
This allows lower wages from British workers recruited for the next season – a group as you can see, the fruit growers have great difficulty in recruiting already or they wouldn’t be chasing people abroad.
Waitrose can be directly implicated in the move behind lower pay – since one of their leading women executives, Heather Jenkins sat on the Farming Better Regulation Task Force – the very body that recommended its abolition. Waitrose say her role was independent, but I presume they gave her time off to do it.
Lord Currie, chair of Leckford Farms, ( more in a separate blog about him later) a major supplier to Waitrose and having opened the company’s first farm shop, is hysterical about abolishing the board.
So when you next shop in Waitrose or Marks and Spencer just remember the fruit on sale there from Britain is most likely picked by foreign workers whose suppliers are keen to get rid of a board that provides a minimum standard for workers in an already low paid industry.
Of course Waitrose and M & S deny to me that want to cut wages, so does Marion Regan of Hugh Lowe Farms in Kent- promising to put them up. But Marion Regan’s company was so lax in checking its own website – that until this week it was advertising for foreign workers on its foreign language sites at last year’s rate of pay – a full 11p an hour lower than the legal rate.