The cost of picking fruit such that it being affordable is not coherent with the cost of living of Britain. Such is the case in a lot of places in the first world.

You can keep having affordable fresh fruit, or you can pretend you can pay laborers local prices, driving up the price dramatically, reducing the total size of the market (because nobody's going to be able to afford the new prices), and having even less produce being made, further driving up costs as economies of scale become less effective.

People should pay more for fruit and food if more money is required to fairly compensate laborers. The solution shouldn't be importing a disadvantaged population to exploit for cheap labor.

If our modern economy is so weak we cannot afford fruits and vegetables we should confront and overcome that weakness rather than conceal it by importing an underclass.

Interestingly, it's a shift-by-one kind of situation. I.e. while British or German crops are picked by Poles, Polish crops are picked by Ukrainians... It seems that agriculture everywhere relies on underpaid migrant labor. I wonder if even Ukraine imports some migrant labor for this purpose.

Since we can't turles-all-the-way-down with this, where does the chain end? What do they do there?

They have children.

Russia does, from the former Soviet 'Stan republics.

I assume Ukraine does as well.

Russia even had North Koreans logging.

Ukraine does not. Russia is easier to get in and pays more.

Another solution is increasing the susidies to food production, which would shift part of the cost to people with higher income. This has some disadvantages (the market is distorted by subsidies and resource allocation may be suboptimal) and some advantages (a healthier diet is available for a larger proportion of the population).

I agree that there are many potential solutions and I think society should figure out a good combination. Importing people to do hard work for low pay and poor benefits seems like a bad solution.

See Big Corn in the US.

So the solution you propose means higher consumer prices (which hurts the lower class the most) and to prevent poor people from other countries the opportunity for a higher quality of life

The solution I propose is to fairly compensate people for their work, give them high quality benefits, and tolerable conditions. I don't think that standard is being met by importing disadvantaged people who will work difficult and demanding jobs in harsh conditions for low pay.

Worse, this policy effectively conceals the problem rather than addressing it. If fruit was too expensive for most people to buy, that would be a problem our society would need to solve. If we can pretend things are working fine by exploiting the poor, we don't have to face or solve that problem for a while.

I also don't believe your summary. It's an easy excuse to pretend that allowing the poor to come slave away in demanding conditions to provide you with low cost goods and services is actually for their benefit. Their original countries are deprived of their economic energy and the poor in the richer countries are forced to compete with a vast influx of workers.

The corollary of higher fruit prices is that the fruit workers get more money, more breaks, better benefits, and improved conditions. That's a worthwhile trade.

As an eastern European I think the British should pick their own fruit and pay the appropriate price if they like it so much, otherwise the market is artificially inflated.

Germany has the exact same problem with asparagus.

We can't be everywhere with our low wage expectations.

I think that probably that would make you and your countryfolk worse off.

To try to illustrate, I'll switch the analogy to my own country, which is Canada, where we fly in Mexican labour to pick crops.

If we didn't fly in migrant labour, we'd have to pay Canadians, who are generally a spoiled, lazy, picky bunch (at least compared to the sort of Mexicans who fly here to work, who obviously are not lazy nor excessively picky). This would drive up the cost of fruit, which is perhaps fine. It would also drive up the cost of unskilled labour in other areas, perhaps construction or retail, because there would be less competition for those jobs. That's good news for the unskilled workforce in the rich country. Great.

Of course, not only do prices go up, but actually just less food will get produced. You could argue that that's good, or bad. Fine.

However, now all those Mexican labourers don't have foreign work, so they compete for work at home. That drives down the price of unskilled labour in Mexico, and if there's a minimum wage then it drives up unemployment. The industrious folks who were savvy enough to get the Canadian jobs will take the next-best jobs, displacing slightly-less-hard-working Mexicans from their jobs, and so on. Of course, this is also foreign cash that is no longer coming into the country, so it has effects on the balance of trade, i.e. on the ability of Mexico collectively to import nice things that they aren't making internally. That's probably bad news on a decade-long timescale, but it might eventually lead to a more robust manufacturing economy, I don't know.

So, in summary, suppose Canada stops using Mexican farm labour (or Britain stops using eastern European farm labour). What are the consequences:

All Canadians get more expensive food.

Unskilled Canadians get more pay, probably offsetting the more expensive food for those people.

Less food gets grown in Canada overall, probably, or at least less luxury food.

Unskilled Mexicans are fucked over hard, especially those who are most vulnerable.

Rich Mexicans can hire poor mexicans at even more exploitative rates.

In the medium to long term, Mexico might have a worse balance of trade, but then again maybe that results in positive industrialization in the long term.

I worked one summer doing migrant labor in agriculture harvesting blueberries in Maine. I migrated with my sister from elsewhere in the US. We were doing it because we wanted money and we were curious about the experience. Alongside us were poor people from Maine -- Native Americans and poor European Americans -- and migrant laborers from south of the border. There was a solidarity among all the groups, and strangely, between all these groups and our overseers against the land owners and Wyman Foods, our ostensible employers. One thing I saw was that the Hispanic laborers were in a lot better shape and in better practice than the other groups. Another thing I saw was that the people who got ahead disregarded the rules we were set. There was a particular technique in raking the berries we were to employ which would maximize profits for the landowners and minimize waste but which was much less efficient per hour. There was another technique, called sweeping, which would maximize the amount we harvested per hour at the cost of many more berries dropped on the ground, so less profit per acre. An advantage the migrant groups had on top of their greater fitness and experience was that they felt less solidarity with the landowners, so they were more willing to break the rules for their own gain. The overseers were cool with this, generally. My point is that this may be a pattern repeated across the globe. It isn't just that the migrants are cheaper and you can cheat them with less consequence. It's also that various parties in the arrangement can shift the burden of harvesting to their preference under the table. I'm not saying that anyone is wrong -- though my preference is that there be less waste -- but that there's something people prefer in having labor from away with different alliances. I'm not certain this is true, but in my particular experience it certainly was. To elaborate still further, I'm not saying this is necessarily wrong. The landowners still made out well, and they were earning profit without labor. The spilled berries went to the birds and insects. I'm just saying there was a non-obvious incentive for the overseers to hire people from away.

> https://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Sy...

> 11) Actions at the sharp end resolve all ambiguity. Organizations are ambiguous, often intentionally, about the relationship between production targets, efficient use of resources, economy and costs of operations, and acceptable risks of low and high consequence accidents. All ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system. After an accident, practitioner actions may be regarded as ‘errors’ or ‘violations’ but these evaluations are heavily biased by hindsight and ignore the other driving forces, especially production pressure.

I think there's one thing missing in your picture:

Those workers aren't necessarily unskilled. Those who come from my country(Poland) at least are often college graduates.

How do they end up there? Well, the pay is obviously better - especially for a seasonal worker. After all, the GDP per capita difference between the UK and Poland is close to 3x.

The unemployment rate here is(or was before the virus) considerably lower than the EU average, so had they not gone there those people would've found jobs and contributed to the local economy.

Instead we have this weird brain-drain in which the brains aren't utilized to their full potential.

Ironically I'm currently a "seasonal worker" myself, only I work as a software engineer, not fruit picker, or any low-skilled labourer.

Aside from that the coronavirus showed that this approach you present is unsustainable. Like I said before, currently there is so much demand for workers from eastern Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Belarus) that there's simply not enough people to fill all the positions.

Also we have our own fields with fruit to pick - all that is going to go to waste. That's definitely "less food produced" - just somewhere you don't see it.

> After all, the GDP per capita difference between the UK and Poland is close to 3x.

That's a shame it is still the case, as the promise of entering the EU was for wages to normalise across the Union. I guess it will take further integration for that to happen.

It was 6x back when Poland joined the EU in 2004, so a lot of progress has been made already.

It's a lengthy process, but it's happening.

Even if that approach was to work, it takes a long time.

Ireland joined in 1973, but didn't really become "rich" like the rest of Western Europe till the turn of the millenium.

You are missing the market here. If you pay Canadians high wages and you set high prices for fruits you cannot sell them in poor countries. And this means that the profits for that Canadian corporation will be cut in half. And the rich people at the top will suffer.

In the mean time poor countries will start planting their own trees with their own people and appropriate prices for their country. And Mexico will have their own corporation making money.

The problem isn't just cost of living, it's that these are seasonal jobs. You will be out of work for 3-6 months of the year, so although these jobs typically pay slightly more than the minimum wage, it's not enough to survive the rest of the year. Plus a lot of these farms are in remote places which aren't that desirable for young people to live (compared to cities).

Someone else posted that around 10% of what you pay for fruit and vegetables goes to the farmers, so maybe that's where we should start to fix the issue.

What are you even trying to say here? So many words for so little coherent meaning.

nobody has to do the work, the work is voluntary. Eastern Europeans do the work because the wages are still higher than in Eastern Europe, so it makes financial sense for them to move to the UK.

In contrast to the exploitation narrative this is actually mutually beneficial. The food is produced at low cost which is good for consumers (in particular poor ones who would otherwise not have access to expensive vegetables), and the workers who earn higher wages than they otherwise would have.

Time to get the "they're stealing our jobs" crowd out in the fields picking.

This farm labour shortage would have happened in the UK no matter what - once Brexit had been finished if the UK followed through on the immigration promises they made to restrict inflows from EU. Don't know how representative it was but most of the "stealing our jobs" crowd was people who don't work from a sampling of interviews they showed on the BBC.

Maybe the "stealing out jobs crowd" are the ones competing for the lower wage jobs. I got the impression that Brexit voters were often towards the lower and of the earning spectrum. While I am for staying in the EU myself I can see why these people don't feel like they get much out of EU membership.

I guess Eastern Europeans were the normal workers until now.

Oh, well if that's the status quo that makes sense. I assumed the normal workers were unavailable due to quarantine/etc.

No, the 'normal' workers (you mean I guess local) were unwilling to do the work for so little, while intensively supporting this situation by their shopping habits.

I mean whoever was doing the work last year.

My comments in this thread have had some pretty wild score swings, I guess I stepped on a live rail. I'm not familiar with British agriculture politics.. I was thinking only of companies temporarily replacing a sick workforce with another (who would presumably themselves then become sick.) My comments were not intended to be commentary on British immigration, which I have no reason to care about.

Low cheap food chain in general is sustained by cheap labor worldwide. Now that borders are closed the chain is in part disrupted, so it doesn't work.

Except, it is the same in Germany and France.