Brexit: playing the man not the ball?
By Pete North - August 9, 2021
I’ve been accused of playing the man, not the ball over Ranjit Singh Boporal’s dire warnings over the security of supply chains. To a point I have, but it’s the remainers who’ve chosen this man as their envoy – when they’ve spent the last five years bleating about labour rights, safety standards and animal welfare. It’s an interesting point to note because there is a huge gulf between what they say and what they do.
But let’s play the ball. 2 Sisters Food Group has warned that Brexit had ‘acutely reduced’ available workers across the food sector. I honestly don’t know if that’s true. Millions have applied for settled status so there shouldn’t be a shortage of workers. The food and hospitality industry are reporting difficulties on obtaining staff but that much is true for the whole of Europe because of the pandemic.
But how much of their wailing should we entertain? The writing has been on the wall for five years now. Though some of us were fighting to stay in the single market, it’d been a hopeless battle for a while. They knew what was coming yet they’ve apparently made zero preparations.
Only now they’re in a panic are they offering an attractive wage and only now are we learning just how bad conditions are in the industry. There have been structural problems in the haulage industry for over a decade which have not been attended to precisely because cheap exploitable foreign labour has been there on demand.
If anything, the ready supply of cheap Polish and Bulgarian drivers, willing to live on the road for months on pay rates not exceeding €5ph has been a disincentive to train. It’s true of haulage and it’s true of much else. One then has to laugh at the naivety of the FT’s brightest and best who in July remarked: “It is ironic that we are only learning just how big a deal European migration was for the UK at the moment we are confronted by life without it”.
Who is this we, paleface? I think she means FT staffers.
“For an insight”, says Sarah O’Connor, “into how the era of EU free movement transformed some corners of the economy, you could do worse than to study the factories that process our food.
This sector, heavily reliant on workers from the EU, was always going to face a reckoning, since the government’s new post-Brexit immigration regime has put a stop to most low-paid migration. But the pandemic has hastened the crunch by prompting many EU workers with settled status to go home (no one knows how many). In meat processing, where EU workers account for more than 60 per cent of staff, employers are complaining of acute labour shortages.
Employers often lament that Britons just don’t apply for these jobs. But a look at current job adverts offers an insight into why. Twelve-hour shifts in food factories are common, often in patterns of “four on, four off”, with workers expected to do a mixture of day and night shifts. One for a bakery worker states: “You will work days or nights including weekends for 12 hours [sic] shift as follows: 6am to 6pm; 6pm to 6am.” Another warns applicants for its 12-hour night shifts (paid £9.12 per hour) that “you will be working on your feet for the duration of the shift”. Many state: “You will be required to be flexible to meet the demands of the business.”
Well no shit, Sherlock! She goes on to say that “It is hard to see how you could manage a job with long and variable hours like this if you had to arrange childcare in advance, or indeed had any responsibilities outside work” – which is precisely what I outlined in this morning’s article.
Food factory jobs “have been manageable for a certain group of migrant workers who came without dependants and lived in shared accommodation”. Nick Allen, chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, says that is why the jobs developed this way. “If we’re honest, the working patterns have evolved around having non-UK labour, their prime reason is to stay for three years, earn a lot of money and go home again.”
He says the location of workplaces has changed too, “from smaller abattoirs spread around the country to a much-reduced group of large ones in rural areas (because it’s easier to get the animals there). “The whole structure of the industry has altered” over the decades, Allen says. “It’s ended up in a particular pattern and it’s probably got to change.”
Well quite. We now find that large EU standard slaughterhouses, as we have pointed out many times, are Covid incubators, and in particular one owned by Singh Boparan. We are of the view that this model is totally unsustainable, not least because of an emerging veterinary shortage.
As we argued in the post-referendum debate on how to leave the EU, much of our trade only exists because of the single market, and the architecture of our supply chains has evolved with in it, and leaving it suddenly would have a profound and damaging impact. We were of the view that a gradual departure would avoid immediate supply chain crunches and it’s why we were so adamant that we mustn’t leave without a deal. That, though, is ancient history. Parliament had its chance to influence the outcome but almost unanimously voted against the EEA Efta option. We are where we are.
Now that we have, we’re experiencing the consequences of building a system on highly precarious variables, realising that if we want people to do this jobs then we have to pay them. The FT finally admits that “the era of free movement affected everything from the rhythm, security and location of work to the prices we have grown used to in the shops”. Ending it means that businesses have to adapt and prices have to adjust. Though it comes with costs, it is already having a positive influence on pay rates for drivers and other workers, and forcing businesses to rethink their approaches.
Just lately we have seen a slew of articles from farmers wailing about vegetables “rotting in the fields” but these are large agriculture firms, many of whom don’t even advertise vacancies on their own social media or even their websites and do zero advertising locally. They went ahead and planted the crops but they didn’t think as far ahead as to who was going to harvest them and merely assumed that mewling to the press would solve their problems.
For a multimillionaire whose company is famous for exploitative shift patterns, low pay, poor standards of welfare and breaking food safety laws to be wailing that he can’t get the staff, having apparently done nothing to adapt, does not elicit sympathy.
If the industry now has to revise its shift patterns and reconsider what it pays and how it teats people then, arguably, Brexit is doing what it is supposed to do. The sense of entitlement among businesses is telling by way of them calling on the army to act as a contingency driver force because they’re too greedy and lazy to adapt their own business models.
Then there’s the question of just how seriously we should take these dire warnings. Remainers have been filling up the Twitter hasthags with pictures of empty shelves but many of them are fakes. They show shelves stripped bare by panic buying at the start of the pandemic. Current supply crunches are not affecting toilet role or cat food aisles. As such I’ve seen little evidence of this supply crunch. There are visible signs of supply stresses in the fresh veg and salad aisles but nothing that could be considered more than a mild inconvenience.
That is not to say the problems could not become much more serious, in which case logistics planners will have to decide whether diabetes medicine matters more than Tesco microwave lasagne. Assuming they’re not sociopaths, we can expect the convenience food aisle to be thinned down for the foreseeable future. This is not, in my view, a bad thing at all.
As ever, the remainer mewling is largely down to the fact that they are marginally inconvenienced and that they might have to pay a little more for their luxuries, and the white hot fury suggests that’s the fullest extent of their concern. When it comes down to it their concern for labour rights and the environment comes a distant second to having full bellies. So much of this is reminiscent of “if we free the slaves, who will pick the cotton?.