FAWN Workshop III: Child Food Poverty and Whole-Food Chain Organisation
The third Food and Work Network workshop took place on 28 April at the University of Sheffield.
Dr Hannah Lambie-Mumford opened the day by introducing Olivia Blake, MP for Sheffield Hallam who welcomed participants to Sheffield. She spoke of the significant increase of food insecurity in the city over recent years but also the significant efforts to organise workers on a city-wide basis to fight against poverty pay.
Children, Families and Food Security
This session examined the impact of food insecurity on children and young people. Dr Megan Blake, Sheffield University, an expert in food security and food justice, argued that the available datasets demonstrated that hunger disproportionately impacted on larger families with two or more children. She drew on her “food ladders” model in evaluating the limitations of the “cash first” model of support, which she argued is grounded in a neoliberal model of food as a commodity. This provides poor families with depleting cash handouts, rather than investing in public assets which sustain capacity.
Dr Gurprinder Lalli, Reader in Education for Social Justice at Wolverhampton University, presented qualitative research on how younger people grow up around food, or the lack of it. He argued that inequalities in “culinary capital” meant that some young people had very limited life experience of being able to cook their own meals or experience food from a diversity of food cultures. Yet those from affluent families could consider this second nature. The education system could address these inequalities in a number of ways; in direct provision of free school meals, and by ensuring the supply of dedicated home economics teachers, or designing eating space to increase inclusivity.
Niamh Sweeney (Deputy General Secretary of the National Education Union) NEU, re-emphasised the importance of combatting hunger and promoting nutrition to maximise the ability of children to concentrate and learn. She made a powerful case for the NEU’s campaign for the universal provision of free school meals in primary schools. Presently, only households earning less than £7400 per year are eligible for free school meals – excluding many children in low-income families, leading to significant stigma.
Exploitation across the food chain
The Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) General Secretary Sarah Woolley opened this session which shifted the focus of discussion to the exploitation of workers across the food chain, and looked at labour market conditions in agriculture and horticulture.
Sam Scott (University of Gloucestershire) argued that whilst the media focuses particularly on the worst exploitation of primary producers (such as those subject to human-trafficking or gang-masters), we shouldn’t become desensitized to “routine” exploitation in this sector which is itself stark. He highlighted the problems remaining with the post-Brexit Seasonal Agricultural Workers scheme, which effectively prevents people from switching to an alternative employer whilst in the UK.
Many of these points were reinforced by Mariko Hayashi, Director and Nova Silitonga, Project Manager of the Southeast and East Asia Centre who highlighted the growing dependence of agricultural producers on immigrants from SE Asian backgrounds, partly owing to Brexit and the war in Ukraine. They showed how headline pay rates are often misleading, due to the extent of pay deductions that workers faced for energy and housing costs. Problems with immigration status are also baked into the system, as it is impossible to make “in-country” applications once short-term visas expire.
Finally, Catherine McAndrew of the Landworkers’ Alliance explained that value extraction along the supply chain was heavily skewed in the direction of the big retailers (supermarket profits) rather than either the exploited labourers in the fields, or workers in food processing/manufacture, logistics or retail.
Organising Across the Food Chain
Ian Hodson (President, BFAWU) chaired the final session, and began by highlighting the damaging impact of casualisation across the labour market, meaning lower pay and fewer rights at work. The BFAWU’s work in organising McDonald’s workers to take strike action, and the Zero Hours Justice campaign, are attempts to respond to the new forms of precarious employment which dominates part of the food industry and beyond.
This set the stage for Ursula Huws to explore changes in the food system towards “just-in time” supply chains and prioritising the “last mile” delivery to consumers. She argued that the flip side of bringing people to jobs (the reliance on migrant labour) is effectively increasing the transfer of work outside of the traditional industrial plant towards where people live. This becomes a vicious cycle producing a crisis in social reproduction. For example, time-poor workers are the most likely to use fast-food delivery platforms. Huws suggested that these trends have implications for how workers organise, with new forms of solidarity required across defined geographical areas to provide a consistent focus, even as low-paid workers move from job to job.
Bob Jeffrey (Sheffield Trades Council) continued with this theme, emphasising the concrete steps that unions had taken to come together on a city-wide basis to demand decent pay and conditions through the Sheffield Needs a Pay Rise Campaign. Organised workers were fighting back and mobilising the support of the wider community to leverage influence over the employer. They have had some significant wins, but these campaigns require resourcing and organising capacity.
The last contributor was James Farrar from the App Drivers and Couriers Union who spoke of the challenges organising workers in the ”gig economy”. Drivers were challenging the platform owners to release the details of their app algorithms to enable them to identify how their fluctuating rates of pay were being calculated. With App-based delivery services now increasingly becoming integrated into the business models of the big restaurant chains and grocery retailers, there are potentially new opportunities for unions to link up their organising efforts.
Thank you
FAWN is grateful to all the contributors, attendees and to the University of Sheffield for hosting the workshop.
Please check our events page for future events, and for other events we think might be of interest.