A national evil returns

By Steve Leniec

“It is a national evil that any class of Her Majesty’s subjects should receive less than a living wage in return for their utmost exertions… where you have what we call sweated trades, you have no organisation, no parity of bargaining, the good employer is undercut by the bad and the bad by the worst; the worker, whose whole livelihood depends upon the industry, is undersold by the worker who only takes up the trade as a second string… where these conditions prevail you have not a condition of progress, but a condition of progressive degeneration.” 

So said Churchill one hundred years ago when he introduced the Agricultural Wages Board (AWB).

While our farming industry has morphed into agribusiness and the food trade has gone global, for rural workers life is about to go backwards. Last week, scandalously, without even the courtesy of a debate or a vote, the government whisked through its plans to dismantle the AWB.  Disgracefully, Parliament was disregarded by a government in a hurry to sweep away one hundred years of workers’ rights and a century of consensus around rural living wages and housing standards.

But why should we worry?  Is the Board not simply anachronistic, a relic of a less fair era? Would that this were true.

This week the Sunday Times Rich List revealed that massive personal wealth is alive and doing very well thank you in the UK. Among those luxuriating in extreme largesse are UK food manufacturers, including Morrisons, Sainsburys and Two Sisters (one of the biggest food processing companies in Europe).  Indeed, in at number 80 is Lord Vestey, owner of Stowell Park, a business that lobbied in favour of AWB abolition. These companies have profited handsomely from the tightening grip of retail on our food industry.  For them, the AWB stood in the way of ever deeper profits.

Workers in supermarkets and food processing rarely attract a living wage, and indeed many will be in the 60 or so percent of workers in work yet dependent on benefits to get by.

But importantly, individual employers, as can be seen from the responses to Defra’s consultation, regard the board as a way of steadying wages and conditions across the sector. A majority of those responding to the consultation – around 63% – were in favour of keeping the AWB.

Among those issues agreed every year by the AWB (a tripartite bargaining mechanism) are sick pay, pay for young workers, compassionate leave, rest breaks, maximum deductions for tied housing and an allowance for keeping a working dog. Then there is also a definition of accommodation that is fit for human habitation and stipulations on a bed for the sole use of each individual worker and the provision of wholesome accessible drinking water, and suitable sanitary facilities.

It goes far wider than the national minimum wage because the unique circumstances of this sector require it to do so – and the beauty of collective bargaining is that it facilitates agreement on common standards, not simply pay.

This is an industry with the worst health and safety rate of any and bedevilled by bad practice at the bottom end.  Whether it is the scandals of crop pickers working for a pittance or the terrible tragedy of Morecambe Bay, this sector’s rogues bring dreadful misery.

Through the AWB the industry could work together to hold the line on standards.  Not anymore.

Now an individual farmer or packhouse owner, who could also be a landlord, will be required to undertake wage negotiations every year.  Many simply will not want this task, certainly not in tight-knit rural communities where employees can be neighbours.  Far better for this to be handled by a collective mechanism.

Big business won the day on the AWB.  No 10 acceded, putting the profits of an industry infamous for its danger, low wages and rogue employers before rural communities. Unite is now very fearful about what awaits the 150,000 or so land workers in England and Wales (in Scotland and Northern Ireland, their boards remain).

Communities in the countryside are already hard-pressed. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation found in 2010 found that people in rural areas must spend 10-20 per cent more on everyday needs than those in urban areas, the `rural premium’. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) estimates weekly spending by rural households (£510.50) is more than £50 higher than that of urban households (£458.30), while research from rural insurer NFU Mutual shows inflation in the countryside is twice the national average.

Abolition of the AWB will take nearly £260 million out of the rural economy over the next 10 years, according to the government’s own figures. This is money that will come directly from workers’ wage packets.

With no debate and in the teeth of a consultation that wanted the board retained, this government facilitated the redistribution of income away from some of the most vulnerable workers in the land to some of the wealthiest private individuals in the land.

That is why today’s Opposition debate is to be welcomed.  It must expose the democratic deficit behind this malign move – but it should also take us forward.

Unite has never opposed reform of the AWB, as shown by the amendment tabled in the Lords with cross-party support, but this option was not even on the table.  Mary Creagh and her team, plus the determined peers in the Lords, hounded the government but the sad reality is that with Lib Dem ministers ready to cast aside their previous support for the board, as was the case with David Heath, it never stood a chance.

So today is the day when the fight back begins.  Unite will work within our rural communities to record where and how wages and homes have come under attack since the AWB was scrapped.  The work to establish these vital protections begins now, joining with Labour and all those MPs and peers who spoke up for retention for to keep this campaign alive.

But so too must we warn workers everywhere that their rights are next.  This was not some meaningless `tidying up’ exercise on the part of government – it was them doing the bidding of vested, powerful interests.  We can expect them to come for more.

What Churchill understood one hundred years ago stands sadly true today.  Where we need progress, the government offers only progressive degeneration. A national evil is back.

Steve Leniec is a rural worker and Unite member