A Green and Unpleasant Land

The Agricultural Wages Board was the only wages board to survive the abolition of wage regulation by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. This was because even the Thatcherites recognised how "sweated" agricultural work was, namely, it was exceedingly low paid, dirty, dangerous and often seasonal, and thus merited some basic form of regulation. It has now been abolished.

The national minimum wage covers only minimum hourly pay rates (categorised by age) and nothing else.But under the Agricultural Wages Act 1948, the AWB enforces much more through a legal instrument called an agricultural wages order. So among the terms of the orders – which are reviewed and raised annually – is a raft of allowances including:
• Accommodation (where living at or on the work premises is necessary)
• Overtime (at time and a half)
• Sick pay
• Food and care for dogs (where a dog is needed to do the work)
• Rest breaks of 30 minutes for every five and a half hours of work
• Bad weather payments (so that workers are not penalised for not being able to work because of the weather)

On top of this, the orders set minimum hour wages by grade rather than just by age. So the 2009-2010 national minimum wage is £5.80 for an adult over 21 years of age while the rates for those above compulsory school age range from £5.81 to £8.64 under the AWB. For 2010-2011, the national minimum wage will rise to £5.93 while those in agriculture are due to rise to between £5.95 and £8.88.
Furthermore, the method of enforcement is far more lax under the national minimum wage than the AWB, and there are still loopholes by which employers can avoid paying the minimum wage.

With market forces now more fully unleashed, farmers will do away with many of the compulsory terms and conditions that the AWB provided for. They may do this because they are greedy and capricious. If they are not, they may still do it because gangmasters (despite some minimal regulation) can provide workers more cheaply than they can or because the big buyers of agricultural produce such as Tesco decide to ask for ever tougher terms in supply contracts.

The abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board will be damaging to the industry, All-Party Parliamentary Gardening & Horticulture Group (APPGHG) secretary Brian Donohoe has warned. "People on the lowest wages will suffer..."

The decision does not affect the Scottish Agricultural Wages Board, with a government spokesperson stating: "The Scottish Government reviewed SAWB as recently as last year and decided to retain it, with a further review in 2011. This position is unaffected by Defra's decision to abolish the AWB in England and Wales."

The REAL Illegal Immigration problem

The front page story of the Independent is featuring three Florida fruit-pickers, held captive and brutalised by their employer for more than a year, finally broke free of their bonds by punching their way through the ventilator hatch of the van in which they were imprisoned. Once outside, they dashed for freedom. When they found sanctuary one recent Sunday morning, all bore the marks of heavy beatings to the head and body. One of the pickers had a nasty, untreated knife wound on his arm. Police would learn later that another man had his hands chained behind his back every night to prevent him escaping, leaving his wrists swollen. The migrants were not only forced to work in sub-human conditions but mistreated and forced into debt. They were locked up at night and had to pay for sub-standard food. If they took a shower with a garden hose or bucket, it cost them $5.

A week after the escapees managed to emerge from the van in which they had been locked up for the night, police discovered that a forced labour operation was supplying fruit-pickers to local growers. Court papers describe how migrant workers were forced into debt and beaten into going to work on farms in Florida, as well as in North and South Carolina. Detectives found another 11 men who were being kept against their will in the grounds of a Florida house .The men had to pay to live in the back of vans and for food. Their entire pay cheques went to the Navarettes and they were still in debt. They slept in decrepit sheds and vehicles in a yard littered with rubbish. When one man did not want to go to work because he was sick, he was allegedly pushed and kicked .
The complaint reveals that the men were forced to pay rent of $20 (£10) a week to sleep in a locked furniture van where they had no option but to urinate and defecate in a corner. They had to pay $50 a week for meals – mostly rice and beans with meat perhaps twice a week if they were lucky. The fruit-pickers' caravans, which they share with up to 15 other men, rent for $2,400 a month – more per square foot than a New York apartment .

Their story of slavery and abuse in the fruit fields of sub-tropical Florida threatens to lift the lid on some appalling human rights abuses in America today.

Between December and May, Florida produces virtually the entire US crop of field-grown fresh tomatoes. Fruit picked here in the winter months ends up on the shelves of supermarkets and is also served in the country's top restaurants and in tens of thousands of fast-food outlets. But conditions in the state's fruit-picking industry range from straightforward exploitation to forced labour. Tens of thousands of men, women and children – excluded from the protection of America's employment laws and banned from unionising – work their fingers to the bone for rates of pay which have hardly budged in 30 years.

Fruit-pickers, who typically earn about $200 (£100) a week, are part of an unregulated system designed to keep food prices low and the plates of America's overweight families piled high. The migrants, largely Hispanic and with many of them from Mexico, are the last wretched link in a long chain of exploitation and abuse. They are paid 45 cents (22p) for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes collected. A worker has to pick nearly two-and-a-half tons of tomatoes – a near impossibility – in order to reach minimum wage. So bad are their working and living conditions that the US Department of Labour, which is not known for its sympathy to the underdog, has called it "a labour force in considerable distress". Florida has a long history of exploiting migrant workers. Farm labourers have no protection under US law and can be fired at will.

A campaign has been under way to improve the workers' conditions. After years of talks, a scheme to pay the tomato pickers a penny extra per pound has been signed off by McDonald's, the world's biggest restaurant chain, and by Yum!, which owns 35,000 restaurants including KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. But Burger King, which also buys its tomatoes in Immokalee, has so far refused to participate, threatening the entire scheme.

Burger King will not pay the extra penny a pound that the tomato-pickers are demanding he said. "If we agreed to the penny per pound, Burger King would pay about $250,000 annually, or $100 per worker. How does that solve exploitation and poverty?" the vice-president of Burger King asked. Indeed it would not but improved wages could ameliorate their condition a little .

Whole Foods Market, which recently expanded into Britain with a store in London's upmarket suburb of Kensington, has been discovered stocking tomatoes from one of the most notorious Florida sweatshop producers. Whole Foods ignored an appeal by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to pay an extra penny a pound for its tomatoes. So much for their much vaunted claim to be "committed to supporting and promoting economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable agriculture" and supporting "the right of all workers to be treated fairly and humanely."

Little has changed since 1960 when the journalist Edward R Murrow shocked Americans with Harvest Of Shame, a television broadcast about the bleak and underpaid lives of the workers who put food on their tables and famously stated

"We used to own our slaves but now we just rent them,"