Desperate workers wanted
Why Brexit is driving Jersey farmers to exploit ever cheaper sources of labour
Jersey’s farmers may struggle to harvest their crops this season after a Brexit-driven 10% drop in Sterling left many Poles concluding there may be better uses for their medical degrees than travelling twelve hundred miles to pick potatoes out of the ground. Not content with basking in the warm satisfying glow harvesting our legendary Jersey Royals must surely bring, these deserters “abandoning” Jersey according to a JEP headline now seem rather keen to stay in their homeland where the economy is starting to show signs of improvement.
While Britain is expected to maintain its unenviable position as one of the worst performing economies in the G7 as post-Brexit growth becomes more of an oxymoron than a prediction with every passing week, the European Commission expects Poland’s economy to expand at twice the pace of the UK over the next two years, with lower unemployment being one of the numerous benefits.
With the aforementioned post-referendum plunge in value for Sterling, ungrateful Poles unwilling to handpick our flowers for poverty wages but still pursuing opportunities outside of their home country, are said to be more likely to seek the higher earnings and chance to travel home on a weekend that can be found in Germany.
While the difference between migrants seeking fair remuneration and refugees fleeing war and famine is both obvious and one which now tediously needs to be pointed out every time a conversation around migration occurs, perhaps Germany taking in 30% of all refugees entering Europe in 2017, contrasting sharply with Jersey not even finding room for one, might also give the impression foreigners are slightly more welcome elsewhere.
So having been left in the lurch by the Poles, Jersey’s displeased farmers are forced to cast their net further afield for people prepared to live in a shed while earning the absolute least they can pay them. After presumably drawing up a list of places where people have even worse lives, Africa and Ukraine were nominated as next in line for exploitation.
It’s fair to say the World is not short of people who would almost gladly attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea on a mattress using a sandal as an oar in hope of this kind of opportunity. Although perhaps it’s also fair to say there would be far fewer if 10% of the entire worlds GDP wasn’t stashed offshore while one billion people exist on a dollar a day. The morality of offering ‘favourable’ taxation rates to global corporations is a contentious subject at the best of times but at least it seems to help get our spuds out of the ground at a cost agreeable to our farmers.
Let’s face it, if industry could still get away with slavery it would.
Charlie Gallichan of Woodside Farms says these reinforcements are urgently needed to avoid crops being left to rot in the fields. “There would be quite a lot of red tape to get through before we could start sourcing workers from any of those countries but we need to have ready and able pools of labour”.
Cynics might suggest an alarming JEP headline evoking images of crops rotting in fields coupled with farmers bemoaning government regulation put in place to presumably steer them away from such practises might be a rather unsubtle attempt to curry public opinion into pressuring the States to deregulate the labour market. The fact a quick scroll down the Jersey Royal website reveals a link proudly detailing how they comply with the Modern Slavery Act doesn’t particularly offer the reassurance it’s presumably intended to supply.
Mobilising “pools of labour” might very well be a necessary, albeit compassionless, approach to commerce, and while globalisation allows capital the freedom to ignore borders in search of agreeable conditions yet denies this same opportunity to the labour force there will always be people available for exploitation.
Perhaps questions need to be asked about the viability of a business or industry that seeks to force its workers to subsidise its profits by working for a wage the domestic population and those buying the actual products would deem degrading.
