The decision to import Eastern European workers, particularly from Romania, to work on farms and pick fruit was greeted with outrage. This use of foreign labour despite the epidemic was something else entirely from its use in the NHS, being akin to naked exploitation.
It is certainly true that the fruit-pickers would not be well-paid. Moreover, their accommodation during their stay would almost certainly be uncomfortable and overcrowded. The work they would do would be hard and possibly back breaking. It is certainly not the kind of work I should want to do myself, though I might have thought of it as a bit of an adventure for a couple of weeks to earn some pocket money when I was nineteen. But the Romanian workers are not coming for a bit of youthful adventure: they are coming because they are poor and need the money to live.
The fruit season is short. If the fruit is not picked, it will rot where it grows. Prices are such that farmers cannot offer high wages, and it is surely a good thing that fruit is available at a price that everyone can afford. There have been appeals to the British unemployed (in whose numbers there has been a sudden and great increase) to do the work, but they have not responded. The wages are not such as to attract them, and their economic situation would probably have to be considerably worse before the wages did attract them — and if their situation were to worsen to such an extent, they might choose crime, riot, disorder and looting rather than fruit-picking as a means of getting by economically. As for coercing the unemployed to take the work that is theoretically available to them, for example by withdrawing their social security unless they agreed to do it, the political repercussions would be too terrible to contemplate. It is easy to see in the abstract how our system of social security distorts the labour market, such that we have to import labour to perform such unskilled tasks as fruit-picking, but now is not a propitious moment at which to try radical reform. In politics as in life, you are always starting out from where you are, not from where you should have been had your past conduct been wiser or more prudent.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Contradictions of Labor”, New English Review, 2020-05-05.
Update, 26 July: Original link replaced. Link rot is sadly real.
