You have to laugh

[mojomonkey]

10 minutes ago, Ďouglas Peel said:

Its a shame if strawberrys rot in the fields,however farmers have gone for cheap eastern European labour that was done for decades by school kids and others fit enough locally,Often these workers live in substandard old caravans provided.The Romanian and Bulgarian workers have created more problems in local shops in Scotland ,by being a tad dishonest ,but nobody says it for fear of being called.......you guessed it " a racist"..A Farmer in rural Perthshire was fined thousands of pounds for paying less than the minimum wage.So whether you are on the side of the farmer or not,what i find is, a tin of pineapple chunks does the same job as some strawberrys.

When was it last done by school kids and others fit enough locally though? Probably many years ago. The price of strawberries and wages ceased to correlate many moons ago, cheap labour was the only way to satisfy the market and farmers were very happy to use it. Finding labour for these jobs is going to be problematic.

[doc.fixit]

Just read that over 30,000 UK folk have already volunteered to work on the farms but only 125 have been placed so far. It all sounds as though money talks more than safety. I wonder if the visitors are being tested before they get to the Uk?

[Uhtred]

11 hours ago, 2112 said:

The Romainians and Bulgarians are prepared to work and they earn good money, doing back breaking physical work, unlike some English people who don’t wish to get out of bed sadly. Come to think of it, there are some IOM locals like that!

Big missed opportunity here - they could have brought in Farage, Widdicombe, Banks and Rees-Mogg as team leaders. They always had a lot to say about immigrant labour.

[immortalpuppet]

I heard one worker trying to justify the move by saying those being flown in were already trained and can go straight out to work.

I have never done the role but I wouldn’t have thought there would be a need for extensive training or anything more than a safety brief, possibly food handling/hygiene cert and some background info about the crop.

[PaulJ]

10 hours ago, Roger Mexico said:

It must be one of the few groups of words which has three valid spellings: Romania/Rumania/Roumania and similarly for its derivatives. Romania seems to have become standard in recent decades (possibly because it is the native spelling) but the other two used to be more common than that.

 

10 hours ago, Neil Down said:

Bet you wished you’d bothered with an education eh...

 

[The Lurker]

1 minute ago, immortalpuppet said:

I heard one worker trying to justify the move by saying those being flown in were already trained and can go straight out to work.

I have never done the role but I wouldn’t have thought there would be a need for extensive training or anything more than a safety brief, possibly food handling/hygiene cert and some background info about the crop.

I've done a bit of fruit and veg picking, admittedly about 25+ years ago and there's a bit more to it.

The pickers not only have to harvest the crop in a way that doesn't damage it; they often have to grade the produce and pack it.

Admittedly it is not rocket science but it does require a degree of skill that takes a bit of training and experience and requires supervision.

On top of that it is generally back breaking repetitive work that the many (British) people simply aren't used to anymore. 

I've often thought that University terms should be altered to start later in the autumn to provide a work force for harvest time. 

[TheTeapot]

Hopefully those Romanians will be going straight to Norfolk.

[Non-Believer]

1 hour ago, Uhtred said:

Big missed opportunity here - they could have brought in Farage, Widdicombe, Banks and Rees-Mogg as team leaders. They always had a lot to say about immigrant labour.

Don't forget Francois.

[Andy Onchan]

1 hour ago, doc.fixit said:

Just read that over 30,000 UK folk have already volunteered to work on the farms but only 125 have been placed so far. It all sounds as though money talks more than safety. I wonder if the visitors are being tested before they get to the Uk?

There must be money in growing and selling produce to allow for the cost of chartering an aircraft. Or, alternatively the retailers are dictating what price they're going to buy it at and the growers left with Hobson's Choice. Either way, it's a sad day when/if the above happened.

[ecobob]

1 hour ago, The Lurker said:

 

I've often thought that University terms should be altered to start later in the autumn to provide a work force for harvest time. 

That used to happen in the schools in the 1950’s. So many children did not turn up at school because they were taken by their parents to the ‘tattoo howkin’. In the end the schools relented and put back at admission date.  

[ecobob]

18 minutes ago, TheTeapot said:

Hopefully those Romanians will be going straight to Norfolk.

There won’t be a bottle of Dettol left on the shelves! 

[Non-Believer]

24 minutes ago, Andy Onchan said:

There must be money in growing and selling produce to allow for the cost of chartering an aircraft. Or, alternatively the retailers are dictating what price they're going to buy it at and the growers left with Hobson's Choice. Either way, it's a sad day when/if the above happened.

The woman on Sky News I referred to in the earlier post also said margins were too thin to allow her to train UK workers to do the job...clearly cheaper to charter planes and put Eastern Europeans up in a barn with sleeping bags.

[Andy Onchan]

49 minutes ago, ecobob said:

There won’t be a bottle of Dettol left on the shelves! 

Or Wright's Coal Tar Soap! 

[Andy Onchan]

31 minutes ago, Non-Believer said:

The woman on Sky News I referred to in the earlier post also said margins were too thin to allow her to train UK workers to do the job...clearly cheaper to charter planes and put Eastern Europeans up in a barn with sleeping bags.

I would call her out on that one. She's making good money out of 'leasing' cheap labour.

[Uhtred]

3 hours ago, Non-Believer said:

Don't forget Francois.

I'm trying to...