Why Are The Lazy English Not Picking Our Fruits And Vegetables?

triathlon

HPC_Ghuol_Hunter wrote: »

I thought Brexit was all about jobs for the English? If so why after so many EU workers have left are there masses of vacancies for fruit and vegetable pickers going unfulfilled? Who will pick the vegetables post-Brexit? :j:beer::money::T:rotfl:

And then coming on here crying because of the shortage of housing or expensive rents

AlexMac

Expectations have changed. Rewind only two generations to the 1950's, and you'll find that both my and my wife's parents did precarious low paid jobs, in factories, warehouses, on the land picking fruit, hops and potatoes and in hotels & catering, moving around the country to where the work was.

But then, we were prepared to put up with crummy accommodation; a caravan for a couple of years, sharing as lodgers, tied accommodation and short-term hostels... often without even basic facilities (my mum used to tell the story of cooking an egg on a candle). She thought we were in heaven when we finally got a Council flat in a walk-up tenement block.

Fast forward 60-70 years- to my grand daughter's current move into a first rented flat... and she'd be horrified at the idea of not having a fitted kitchen and IKEA TV cabinet...

OK, social mobility has ground to a halt, and the "flexible labour market" keeps widening the wages gap to levels unimaginable to my parents, but we're not going to wind the clock back.

And as Eastern European economies improve, some migrant workers may decide not to bother putting up with the conditions my mum and dad did?

Maybe we're just gonna have to pay a bit more for our fruit!

lisyloo

And as Eastern European economies improve, some migrant workers may decide not to bother putting up with the conditions my mum and dad did?

Maybe we're just gonna have to pay a bit more for our fruit!

Some EU workers (the article I read was rommania) are going home because of a combination of the £ falling (which means they get less in their local currency), plus they can now get good jobs back home as their economy (romania in this case) is booming.

Malthusian

toby3000 wrote: »

You'd have be a particularly stupid student to actively choose to spend your summer doing manual labour and camping in a field in the middle of nowhere when you can earn the same money standing in Top-Shop (within an easy commute of the house you have to pay rent on anyway), or considerably more money if you take a job at any restaurant.

Students don't always have to pay rent over the summer. I never did - first year was halls, second year was a private rental, third year was a work placement in a different city and therefore fourth year required a new rental.

I agree with your point but not all students have the personal skills for restaurant or shop work (even if there are always bad restaurants willing to employ surly staff), stupid or not.

Not all students come from urban areas. Sometimes we hayseeds will manage to practice our letters on tree bark for long enough to pass our A-levels. In the summer we go back home and fruit-picking at a nearby farm may be as good an option to earn some money as any.

AlexMac wrote:

OK, social mobility has ground to a halt, and the "flexible labour market" keeps widening the wages gap to levels unimaginable to my parents, but we're not going to wind the clock back.

Social mobility has decreased precisely because of the increase in standards and expectations you describe. Social mobility is inversely proportional to social equality.

Suppose we lived in a dog-eat-dog society with no social welfare at all. This would be a very harsh place to live, but it would also be extremely socially mobile. If a long-term unemployed person living under a bridge and surviving off discarded food managed to find himself a paying job as an unskilled labourer, he would be able to rent a cheap room and experience an immediate uplift in social standing. (The same is of course true in reverse.)

Now suppose that we have a social welfare system that guarantees that unemployed people don't have to live under a bridge and can all have a cheap room and the same social standing as an unskilled labourer. It is now no longer sufficient for a long-term unemployed person to improve their social standing by getting a job. This will leave them in the same position they're already in. To improve their social standing they have to go beyond this, by gaining a qualification or experience and entering the ranks of the semi-skilled. Obviously this can be quite a remote prospect for a long-term unemployed person.

The higher the standard that society guarantees for everyone, the bigger a push it takes for anyone to lift themselves off the artificially raised bottom ("artficially" is not used pejoratively). Social mobility decreases as equality increases. In the UK, where 40% of the population receives a higher standard of living than they could earn by themselves, the prospect for a long-term unemployed person of lifting their earning potential to the point at which they self-determine their own socioeconomic level will seem very remote.

This would of course not necessarily be the case under a Universal Basic Income system, but as no country does yet, what matters is how it works under a means-tested system. In a means-tested system the taxpayer guarantees a minimum level of social standing and anyone who wants more than this has to work up to the point at which they can earn a higher level than this minimum. Until they have worked up to a higher level, their higher earnings are means-tested away.

POPPYOSCAR

AlexMac wrote: »

Expectations have changed. Rewind only two generations to the 1950's, and you'll find that both my and my wife's parents did precarious low paid jobs, in factories, warehouses, on the land picking fruit, hops and potatoes and in hotels & catering, moving around the country to where the work was.

But then, we were prepared to put up with crummy accommodation; a caravan for a couple of years, sharing as lodgers, tied accommodation and short-term hostels... often without even basic facilities (my mum used to tell the story of cooking an egg on a candle). She thought we were in heaven when we finally got a Council flat in a walk-up tenement block.

Fast forward 60-70 years- to my grand daughter's current move into a first rented flat... and she'd be horrified at the idea of not having a fitted kitchen and IKEA TV cabinet...

OK, social mobility has ground to a halt, and the "flexible labour market" keeps widening the wages gap to levels unimaginable to my parents, but we're not going to wind the clock back.

And as Eastern European economies improve, some migrant workers may decide not to bother putting up with the conditions my mum and dad did?

Maybe we're just gonna have to pay a bit more for our fruit!

Best post in the whole thread IMO.

kabayiri

lisyloo wrote: »

Some EU workers (the article I read was rommania) are going home because of a combination of the £ falling (which means they get less in their local currency), plus they can now get good jobs back home as their economy (romania in this case) is booming.

You sort of answered your own point.

These people are EU workers. Not Romanian or Polish or British.

Their marketplace is the EU. It's entirely reasonable to expect them to move to differing countries depending on conditions.

Expecting them to be loyal to one location, as we seem to expect here, is simplistic. You can't base labour policy on a transient set of individuals.

toby3000

Malthusian wrote: »

Students don't always have to pay rent over the summer. I never did - first year was halls, second year was a private rental, third year was a work placement in a different city and therefore fourth year required a new rental.

Not all students come from urban areas. Sometimes we hayseeds will manage to practice our letters on tree bark for long enough to pass our A-levels. In the summer we go back home and fruit-picking at a nearby farm may be as good an option to earn some money as any.

I don't know where or when you went to university, but I've never known a student let with less than a 12 month contract.


I'm actually from the countryside, and I still managed to get a temping job as a kitchen porter for the solitary summer I returned home - though the part of the country I'm from is completely unsuitable for growing fruit, so the demand for seasonal labour is almost nil. But I still suspect there are very, very few British people who fall into that category of wanting/needing a job desperately enough to become fruit pickers, are physically able to pick fruit and for whom the best possible job option is fruit picking.



Though actually - I have considered fruit picking. But only picking grapes in France!

Thrugelmir

toby3000 wrote: »

Though actually - I have considered fruit picking. But only picking grapes in France!

Growth of retail outlets (plus longer opening hours etc) , fast food restaurants all offering similar levels of pay has changed the landscape. Landscape appears to be changing again. Resulting in some people needing other types of work to earn additional income.

sevenhills

AlexMac wrote: »

Expectations have changed. Rewind only two generations to the 1950's, and you'll find that both my and my wife's parents did precarious low paid jobs, in factories, warehouses, on the land picking fruit, hops and potatoes and in hotels & catering, moving around the country to where the work was.

They interviewed an employer in the construction sector on radio four; he was saying that young people today don't want that type of job.
His youngest worker was 30 years old, he was basically saying that young people these days dont like exercise/hard physical jobs.

kabayiri

sevenhills wrote: »

They interviewed an employer in the construction sector on radio four; he was saying that young people today don't want that type of job.
His youngest worker was 30 years old, he was basically saying that young people these days dont like exercise/hard physical jobs.

There is a lot of new building going on in Manchester centre, and one boss was saying they struggle to get brickies.

One young lad we know is going through the training right now, and he knows exactly what the day rates are. If the returns are widely known, then young people will follow the money I reckon.

Longer term, machines will plug the gap. They currently have limitations, but can lay bricks a lot faster than people.