Migrant farm workers fight for justice in Britain

Thousands of workers come to Britain every year and put food on our tables, from summer strawberries to Christmas turkey. Seasonal worker visas mean they face exploitation that can amount to modern slavery. But now workers have taken strike action and are fighting back. Colin Wilson reports.

Migrant farm workers staged a lively protest outside the Home Office on Friday, with support from their union, United Voices of the World, Unite agricultural workers and campaigning organisations including the Landworkers’ Alliance. They were there to demand justice for 88 migrant workers who took part in Britain’s first ever strike by workers on seasonal visas in July 2023.

Julia Quecano Casimiro was recruited in Chile, where she was told she could earn up to £500 a week picking fruit in Britain. But in her first week of work for Haygrove farm in Herefordshire she was given no shifts or pay, and in the second week her pay was less than £150.

Julia is from a farming family and is used to this kind of work. She and her fellow workers say that they were expected to work without proper safety wear, enough drinking water or toilets on site. In a preliminary decision, the Home Office has decided that she could have been a victim of modern slavery – but has still to make a final ruling.

Speaking through an interpreter on Friday, Julia explained her and her fellow strikers’ demands – ‘We were abused, we were treated as anything but human. We don’t want our rights trashed just because we don’t speak the language, because we are foreigners. We’re tired of just words. We want justice.’

The workers also report that they had to get up at 4am, leave the caravans where they were housed, take a two hour coach journey to work in fields on the Welsh border and then another coach journey back. The final straw came when they were told they must repay £1,500 for the flights which had brought them to Britain, even though in many cases these had cost a lot less.   

Catherine McAndrew, Migrant Solidarity Campaign Coordinator for the Landworkers’ Alliance, told the protest that ‘this is not just one isolated case. Everything these people have experienced, I’ve seen before.’ Catherine co-authored the report Debt, Migration and Exploitation, published in 2023, which highlighted the risks of exploitation which are part of the Seasonal Worker Visa scheme.

Up to 60,000 seasonal workers are needed each year in the British agricultural sector, almost all of them recruited overseas. Some 29,000 workers pick soft fruit like cherries and strawberries, and 2,000 come here each autumn to process poultry including Christmas turkeys. The scheme was initially introduced in response to labour shortages after Brexit, and has rapidly expanded since, from 2,500 visas in 2019 to 57,000 in 2023. In 2019, nine out of ten visas went to Ukrainian workers, but since the Russian invasion of Ukraine only one in five workers are from Ukraine, with more than one in three travelling from Central Asia and others from as far afield as Latin America and Nepal.

The report highlights the many ways exploitation is built into the scheme. Workers are responsible for the cost of coming to Britain and going back home – debts to their employer may make it impossible to leave work despite exploitative conditions. Many workers report being on zero-hours contracts, though these are officially banned on the scheme, and others report being penalised for failing to meet unrealistic targets.

Workers’ visas depend on their keeping a job with the same employer, so they are often reluctant to report issues. The authorities that are supposed to protect workers don’t do so in practice. The Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority is still looking into the Haygrove case, 18 months after workers took strike action, when workers’ visas only allowed them to stay in Britain for six months.

While they wait for a final result in their case, Julia and her comrades are not allowed to work and depend on food banks. Meanwhile it’s the supermarkets who benefit from their exploitation, with Tesco making £2.9 billion profits in the last financial year. The government could impose a windfall tax on those profits – and toughen the inspection regime for employers of seasonal migrant workers, where inspector numbers currently fall well below international standards. Labour’s hostility to anything holding back “growth” means that won’t happen. Meanwhile, the Haygrove farm workers and all other migrants deserve our solidarity.