“She could not bear the stress and fainted”: Seasonal Work on UK Farms

FAWN’s latest guest blog comes from the team at Focus on Labour Exploitation (FLEX), who have produced the largest independent study of the UK’s Seasonal Worker Scheme. They published three linked reports that have revealed deep-seated, systemic issues on UK farms, with evidence of several indicators of forced labour – including deception, isolation, withholding of wages, intimidation and threats.

Many workers in our study reported receiving less hours than expected, impacting their ability to recover their recruitment-related costs and earn a decent wage. At the other end of the spectrum, others reported working too much – up to 70 hours a week, leaving them exhausted and with inadequate time to take care of themselves.

Changing Visa Conditions

The bedrock of the UK’s fresh produce system is migrant workers. Behind every British strawberry, cabbage and pint of beer there is, most likely, the hands of a seasonal worker –  working long hours in hot plastic greenhouses, rainy fields, cold mushroom tunnels and packhouses, often living in crowded caravans, on farms, largely away from UK public life.

There is nothing particularly new about this; some kind of seasonal worker scheme has been in place more or less constantly since 1945. But with the end of free movement following Brexit, visa conditions have changed. In 2019, the government piloted a new visa called the Seasonal Worker Visa, with 2,500 places, almost all of which were used by workers from Ukraine. Today, this ‘pilot’ has grown into a scheme of up to 57,000 workers – most of whom are now making a long (and expensive) journey to the UK from Central Asian nations such as Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

 The visa grants workers up to six months in the UK (if employed in horticulture roles), restricted to working only in certain agricultural occupations, and only on farms that their visa sponsor – a recruitment agent or ‘scheme operator’ – has contracts with. Workers have to pay for flight costs and associated visa fees that are often upwards of £1,000, and often take out loans to cover these costs. Although they should be guaranteed at least 32 hours a week of paid employment averaged over their pay period, there is no guarantee that they will have a job for the duration of their stay in the UK.

Over the past eighteen months, we (Focus on Labour Exploitation, or FLEX) have been working with Rosmini Centre Wisbech, Citizen Advice South Lincolnshire, and the Southeast and East Asian Centre (SEEAC) to collect around 400 surveys and conduct interviews with around 80 migrant workers, plus 15 interviews with actors along the food supply chain including supermarkets, scheme operators and support organisations. This is, to our knowledge, the largest independent study of the scheme to date. What we have found is deep-seated, systemic issues on UK farms, with evidence of several indicators of forced labour – including deception, isolation, withholding of wages, intimidation and threats.[1]

Across three reports, we have documented the issues that workers are routinely facing, alongside industry perceptions of how the scheme is working.

Debt, Underpayment and Superexploitation

Our first report, Bearing fruit: Making recruitment fairer for migrant workers, focused on recruitment. Debt linked to recruitment was a recurrent issue: we found that seven in ten (72%) migrant farm workers took out a loan to come to the UK to cover flight costs, visa fees, and other expenses. Average costs were around £1,231[2], and we also heard accounts of people selling their belongings.

Knowledge about the work they would be doing was also often inadequate. Only three in four reported receiving accurate information about their job roles and tasks prior to coming to the UK. Language barriers were also an issue: although every UK recruit should receive a contract in their first language (as well as in English), only three in five workers reported receiving a contract in a language they understood on or before their first day of work.

The second report in the series is titled Bound to work: Improving access to redress on the UK’s Seasonal Worker Scheme. We found that three in four workers reported earning less than they were told they would earn. Alarmingly, only seven in ten were confident that they would be able to pay back the debts they took on to come to the UK. The rest thought they wouldn’t be able to, or were unsure. No one should be paying to travel to another country for work, only to be left in doubt as to whether their earnings will be enough to – at bare minimum – break even.

Whilst all workers have the right to request a transfer to another farm, our research found that 55% of those who made such a request were refused. We also heard incidents of supervisors denying people shifts as punishment for not working fast enough, talking to colleagues, going to the bathroom or enquiring about basic details of their work, further limiting their ability to earn back their recruitment costs, and contributing to a climate of fear and silencing on farms.

In our final report, Not here for the weather: Ensuring safe and fair conditions on the UK’s Seasonal Worker Scheme, we looked at broader working and living conditions. We found a raft of issues such as underpayment, punishingly high picking targets, constant exhaustion, humiliation, bullying, overcrowded and unsafe accommodation, limited ability to take sick leave and issues accessing basic healthcare.

Many workers in our study reported receiving less hours than expected, impacting their ability to recover their recruitment-related costs and earn a decent wage. At the other end of the spectrum, others reported working too much – up to 70 hours a week, leaving them exhausted and with inadequate time to take care of themselves.

Around one in seven workers we interviewed reported being shouted at or humiliated. Others reported an environment of “constant yelling”. Around 1 in 30 were threatened with being deported. This is an intensely distressing environment to live and work in: as one worker recounted, “There are some supervisors who will pick on you and will give you hard time. Sometimes it feels as if slavery is legal again [...] Supervisors should relax and stop giving us hard time. We had a situation here with a female worker. One supervisor came to her, then another one and she could not bear the stress and fainted.” (Mansur,[3] Man, 32, from Kazakhstan. 5th August 2023).

Overhauling the System

In May 2024, the Government announced that the scheme would be extended for another five years. This is by far the longest extension in the short history of the visa. The Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs conduct their own survey with seasonal workers. The data for 2022 was released earlier this year. In a recent major announcement on government plans to support food supply chains, they cited the 2022 survey results, noting that the “vast majority (over 90%) of the 4,000 workers who responded to the survey had a good experience and were keen to return in future.”

Firstly, this is not true: the data they are referencing does not indicate that ‘over 90%’ of workers had a good experience, as only 85.9% of workers reported having a ‘positive’ or ‘extremely positive’ response. More importantly, when drilling into the survey data, we can also see that over half (53.3%) of people who reported having an extremely negative experience working in the UK also said they would return to the UK again for seasonal work. This ought to tell us that the desire to return does not necessarily come from having a good experience, but rather could be motivated by other things, such as an urgent need to recover debts. For those whose earnings are far less than expected (or those who don’t even break even on their loans), the desire to return could be a case of sunk cost fallacy: the drive to continue an endeavor after investing significant resources, even when evidence and experience indicate that you would be better off abandoning it.

We absolutely welcome the existence of routes to come and work in the UK and earn a decent living, but as we (and other NGOs) have been arguing for some time now, the five-year extension of the scheme ought to have happened in tandem with an overhaul of the route that addresses the very real risks for exploitation. We’ve yet to see a serious commitment to this.

Notes

[1] Based on the International Labor Organisation’s Indicators of Forced Labour.

[2]  Workers we surveyed in this study reported paying between £0 – £5,500 in total to come to the UK to work before even earning a wage, with a median amount of £875 (± 962) and a mean of £1,231 (overall average). As shown by the large standard deviation, there was a lot of variance in the data.

[3] Name changed for anonymity.