English In 2023 the LWA, in conjunction with economists, representatives of labour, farming, and migrant organisations, and former seasonal farm workers, wrote Debt, Migration, and Exploitation, a report which explored drivers of poor working conditions in the Seasonal Worker Scheme (SWS).
A year on from its publication, essential reforms have yet to be made and workers continue to be exploited. In this article, Catherine McAndrew, coordinator of the Migrant Worker Solidarity Project, explores the issues facing workers in the 2024 growing season, and the efforts of the LWA to tackle debt bondage.
The Seasonal Worker Scheme: An explainer
The Seasonal Worker Scheme (SWS) is a migration scheme which governs the arrival of up to 45,000 farmworkers to the UK. Under the scheme, six recruitment agencies (known as Scheme Operators) are licensed to recruit workers from abroad. These workers can stay in the UK for a maximum of 6 months. The scheme operator is the worker’s visa sponsor, and places them on farms which they have contracts with. Scheme operators are also responsible for ensuring worker welfare requirements are met and workers do not overstay their visa.
The UK government enforces these responsibilities through the threat of licence withdrawal. If a scheme operator loses their licence, their associated workers also lose the right to stay in the UK. The scheme has been hit by Ethero’s loss of licence for allegedly being unable to guarantee the minimum number of hours. This has left hundreds of Uzbekistan workers unable to come to the UK, and those who are have been issued with a notice to leave in 60 days.
Workers recruited by Ethero have paid hundreds of pounds in flights and administration fees. To access the scheme, farm workers must pay a visa application fee of £298, along with fees for medical checks. For Uzbek workers, these costs represent several months’ wages. These costs are incurred prior to earning in the UK, and research by Focus on Labour Exploitation found that 72% of workers arriving on the scheme had incurred debts to meet these costs.
Debt and Dismissals
In June, five Indonesian workers were dismissed from their jobs as pickers at a farm belonging to Haygrove ltd in Hereford, England. Haygrove alleged workers did not meet a target of 20kg of fruit harvested per hour. According to the workers, this target became difficult to fulfil because of a decreasing amount of fruit available. They had been in the UK for less than 6 weeks and not earned enough to cover their recruitment costs of £2,000, further magnified by illegal fees of up to £1,100 charged by ForKom, an organisation which claimed that it could get workers to the UK quicker. While 2 workers were provided with alternative work after the intervention of migrant rights specialist Andy Hall, 3 returned home following pressure from their recruiters in Indonesia. The workers had sold possessions, land, motorbikes, incurred debts to family, friends, and banks in order to meet the cost of coming to the UK.
The Worker Support Centre has been inundated with cases of dismissal this season. The WSC notes that dismissal is often used as a threat against workers who speak out about labour rights violations, and has a chilling effect on workers’ ability to advocate for themselves. As it stands, SWS workers are not able to claim for unfair dismissal, which is only available for workers after 2 years of employment. The new government plans to introduce dismissal rights for workers from the first day of employment. These rights must include farm workers.
The Fight for ‘Employer Pays’
For this reason, the International Labour Organisation, the United Nations labour body, advocates for the Employer Pays Principle, the idea that no worker should pay for a job and employers rather than migrant workers should bear these costs. Several major supermarkets have committed to the implementation of the principle in their supply chain by 2026.
In May, Sedex, who are responsible for formulating the SMETA auditing methodology which UK supermarkets use to assess conditions on farms, added the Employer Pays Principle to their criteria. This was met with a storm of criticism from growers, stating that meeting these costs would add an additional £2-4m of costs to farms and threaten the viability of UK horticulture. UK government commitments to the principle have been weak, with the recent review of the scheme stating that the government should “give consideration” to the principle, and a study has been commissioned by Defra to explore its feasibility. In the meantime, workers continue to bear the costs of recruitment.
In light of this, the Landworkers’ Alliance is campaigning for supermarkets to meet the costs of recruitment in UK horticulture. In 2023, work conducted in conjunction with the New Economics found that supermarkets receive 54.4% of the value of produce from a case study farm. UK supermarkets should follow the example of the Fair Food Programme in Florida, where large buyers pay a small premium for tomatoes to fund wage increases, and meet the costs for improving conditions for migrant farm workers.
The Landworkers’ Alliance will continue to campaign for farm worker justice, and will soon be launching a new Farming the Future funded project alongside the Worker Support Centre to hold supermarkets and leading buyers to account for working conditions on farms in their supply chain.
