Academia – Eating Research

Table Grapes: A hand-selected future of work

asda van with grapes

The supermarket delivery van that appears as if by magic is driven by a worker. The picture of table grapes, succulently drawing us into the marketing of this retailer, were almost certainly picked by a person, not a machine. Yet machines and artificial intelligence are involved too. Understanding the ways in which humans and machines are placed in relation to one another in the workplace is a complex challenge. Addressing it are social scientists who consider human interactions, critical management scholars who try to understand the organisation of work and finance, and legal specialists who are attempting to establish frameworks for the governance of the present and future of work.

A new working paper published by the University of Bristol’s Faculty Research Group for Perspectives on Work brings scholars from these fields together to ask: what is the future of work? Is it something characteristically different from the past and present? Or is it ultimately just a continuation of workplace dynamics today? Just capitalist relations of production and profit in different dress? In the paper, my colleagues and I do not dispute that shifts are occurring in the organisation and lived experience of work. However, we argue that these shifts are contingent on the present relations between capital, workers, technology and the social and ecological contexts within which work takes place. The future of work is therefore one that we know very well, even if the wolf has changed its clothes.

Our paper takes a broad view of how work has changed, and will change. Many significant changes in recent decades relate to the spatial reorganisation of work. Consider for example that 83 per cent of the world’s manufacturing workforce now live in the Global South. This indicates a tremendous shift in the places and types of jobs available in different regions of the world. Alongside this has occurred perhaps an even greater shift in the world’s working relations as services have become the largest global sector for employment accounting for 51% of workers, overtaking agriculture which now employs just 26.4% of the global population. As recently as the 1990s it was agriculture that was the major employer with services very much behind.

These changes have been accompanied by an overall trend towards urbanisation as, at the turn of the millennium and for the first time ever, more people lived globally in urban rather than rural environments. This broad perspective allows us to consider the changes in work. To begin with, as evidenced by the ever-increasing volumes of global trade, work now increasingly occurs in the context of political and economic relationships that are global in scope.

We are reminded by Noah Zatz and Eileen Boris, that when thinking about ‘work’ what is “at issue is not only what is being done, but also by whom, for whom, and why”. Therefore, as important as thinking about what jobs are around, is to think about who does such jobs for whom. Here, we consider mobility again, but this time not the movements of things through trade, but the mobility of people. Labour markets are fragmented and segregated and who does what often relates to individual and collective histories and status, leading the work of some to be recognised with honorific titles and the work of others to go unrecognised or undervalued.

These abstract questions can be very difficult to engage with and so in the paper we take on two case studies, that of care work and agri-food work. These case studies are ones which are closely associated with the future of work as they involve jobs which are poorly remunerated and can be arduous, as well as often of low-status. Many fall into the category of the so-called ‘3D’ jobs: Dirty, Dangerous and Demeaning. These are also jobs associated with labour migration as high numbers of migrant workers often occupy these roles.

The interesting thing about both care and agri-food work is that there are clear reasons in both cases why the people in these jobs are unlikely to be replaced by ‘robots’ in the short term. In the case of care work, the needs of those being cared for are complex, changeable and require emotional responses from carers – paid or unpaid. Furthermore, care is tied to the places in which those who need to be cared for are based. As captured in the concept of Global Care Chains some of these roles are highly dependent on migrant workers leaving others to care for their own families. These ‘others’ are both workers and family members. So even if there is persistent inequality in the way care jobs are organised, it seems likely that migrant workers and non-migrant workers are likely to continue working side by side in these roles, even if some robotisation also occurs. Whilst it is likely that more tasks may be mechanised, perhaps leading to fewer workers, the fact that people need to be involved at some stage is relatively non-negotiable.

In the case of farm work we recognise that the long history of farming, as in other sectors, has involved the successive replacement of workers for increased mechanisation. However, there are still many tasks in modern food systems that require people. Ironically, like the grapes in the photo above, it is precisely many of the emblematic fruit and vegetables advertised in supermarket adverts as immediately available and fresh, that require careful hand picking. While it is possible to mechanically pick crops such as tomatoes and grapes, this renders the crops good only for processing, such as canning and ketchup for tomatoes. Those delicious looking ‘fresh’ products that draw us into the stores and websites still require hand picking.

A further point to make is that by overemphasising the degree to which ‘everything is done’ by a machine, it can be difficult for workers to gain visibility, good remuneration, as well as respect and status in the labour market. Workers in these sectors are not doing unskilled tasks easily replaceable by machines; they are doing jobs that require skill, dexterity, fast responses to changing conditions as well as complex strategies for negotiating difficult labour markets with often undesirable working hours.

There is a need to re-valorise work and workers, to recognise not just where robots are replacing jobs – their replacement by technology – but also where people in jobs are working under increased pressure or insecurity due to their increased relationship with technology. We understand the common use of the word robots here to really refer to a range of automated systems from computers such as the automated check-out tills to platforms such as Deliveroo. Both of these examples require many people for them to function.

What we mean by ‘work’ – when someone works and does not – is increasingly important in order to value not just the worth of an individual who may not have their work recognised as a traditional ‘full time job’ but also to inform our legal systems and social systems which struggle to keep up with the evolving reality of the present as well as the future of work.

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This piece is based on the Perspectives on Work Faculty Research Group Working Paper #1: The ‘future’ of work? A call for the recognition of continuities in challenges for conceptualising work and its regulation.

The choice of table grapes was inspired by the visiting PhD student Miguel Angel Sanchez who has been based at the University of Bristol as a visiting student from the University of Murcia, Spain, and who is researching quality standards in table grape production.

This post was originally published in the Futures of Work on-line magazine, Issue 4.

Watermelon work

Watermelon pieces

Did you eat any melon over Christmas? Or a strawberry? Have you seen a watermelon since the summer, maybe cut up in pieces in a boxed-up plastic ready-to-eat fruit salad? If so, that will help you relate to the dilemma for Spanish farmers and the workers they employ that I wrote about in an article called “Misconceiving ‘seasons’ in global food systems, the case of the EU Seasonal Workers Directive” published in the European Law Journal [1].

In this journal article, I essentially analyse a law, a European Law, but one that now governs the conditions under which seasonal workers from outside the EU can come to Europe to work in agriculture (and other ‘seasonal’ sectors) [2]. It also outlines their rights while they are here, making it both labour law and migration law [3]. This is brought together in an attempt to meet the needs across Europe for workers that pick the counter-seasonal crops such as strawberries, raspberries, melons and watermelons, as well as those summer vegetable crops that I have written about in the past.

A central theme in my work is about the disconnections of modern food production. But it is also about work. Labour, work, people, people who move, people who stay still. You can’t have workers without people. We are, and they are, one and the same. Yet law after law, country after country, policy after policy attempts to do just this by limiting the rights of workers when they come to host countries to work. The EU Seasonal Workers Directive is a recent version of this attempt to disconnect the rights and needs of people who migrate to work, from their status as workers. Although the UK played a large role in its negotiation, they ultimately opted out of its adoption, and then, as we know, opted out of the EU altogether. Yet, this doesn’t mean that the influence of this directive stops at the UK border. The workers that pick many of our out of season crops in countries such as Spain and Italy, are governed by it. Furthermore, the UK is looking for options post-Brexit for how to govern seasonal work by migrant workers and this could give an insightful suggestion of what that might look like. This blog then, brings out a few elements of the article, which looks at the directive from the lens of a case study in Southern Spain: where our watermelons come from.

The farmers that I interviewed in Southern Spain work within the law. They ensure that they produce to the highest health and safety regulations, that they are registered, and work with certified exporters. These exporters (sometimes called co-operatives because they began as farmer cooperatives) then do an extensive quality selection in which they throw away much of the fruit and vegetables which do not meet the standards that you, your mum or your Grandparents might want for your year-round desert of prepared fruit salad.

Due to the very low wages and hard working conditions, not many people want to work picking these fruit and vegetables. The labour market is therefore dominated by migrant workers who have fewer language and transferable skills to find better paid and easier work elsewhere. Most people have all the legal requirements to work. However, for various reasons, the most vulnerable do not. They may not been in the EU long enough to regularise their status, they may not have employers to support them in doing this, their papers may have been rejected, they may not have had the money or the contacts to get a visa, they may have escaped distressing situations, made arduous (planned or unplanned) journeys towards the EU, some may also be refugees. In any case, these individuals also suffer from the need to work in order to live, and are some of the most vulnerable in the labour market. Furthermore, farmers generally do not want to hire them because they risk a €10,000 minimum fine if they are caught employing workers who do not have legal permission to work. So what happens?

The European Union want to solve the seasonal need for fruit pickers by offering temporary visas for people to come for a few months at a time to European countries (where most of your strawberries, tomatoes and watermelons are produced). In theory this is a model of carrot and stick – the carrot, the incentive, for prospective workers in countries like Morocco or the Ukraine is the temporary visa. I will ignore in this short blog the contradictions of the idea of ‘circular’ migration although I’ve covered this in the article. In short, it is not as advantageous as it seems at first glance. The main ‘stick’ or disincentive is increased border control that has been happening in the same context as the development of this directive, and the increased marginalisation of undocumented migrant workers who are already within the European Union but who are not given any options under this new directive.

Although this may sound logical, the EU Seasonal Workers Directive, in fact, is created in a context of false divisions and it therefore creates several more problems. Firstly, as we have explored, seasonal agriculture, in a context of intensive production, follows the time periods of when you like to eat melon, as opposed to when melon (etc.) is naturally in season. That means more than a few months of the year. So farmers like workers who are already in the country, who they can hire in person and work with over a steady period of time, building daily working relationships with.

Under temporary work schemes such as the EU Seasonal Workers Directive, migrant workers have reduced rights, therefore facilitating the creation of a legally mandated second-class tiered labour force. Temporary workers are also highly vulnerable to falling outside of the terms of their visa. Such seasonal work visas link their visa permission to their employers, something that makes them highly dependent on them and vulnerable to abuse [4].

Finally, seasonal migration is simply a form of temporary migration, aimed at avoiding the creation of a long term ethnic community in the host country. Historically, wherever host countries have attempted to invite ‘guest workers’ yet avoid settlement of migrant workers, this has failed. So the EU here, is criticised as still wanting to import ‘labour’ and not ‘people’ [5].

Let’s return to the watermelons and the farmer who intends to play it by the book. Unfortunately, this famer’s ultimate buyer doesn’t care much for the rule book. What they care about is ensuring that you get your summer fruits, cheaply, regardless of the season and regardless of who picks it and how protected they are or not. So the farmer is placed into a very difficult position which seems to sum up the tensions between our year round demand for cheap food and the just-in-time immediacy and demands that this puts on the people that produce it. A small farmer in Southern Spain described the situation in this way:

Once they were going to come [the export cooperative], we were arguing about the watermelons, whether we should pick them or not and in the end they said to me; “alright, this afternoon we pick them” and I said, “this afternoon I don’t have any workers” and they said; “either we come and get them this afternoon or we don’t come”. So I said, “Well, come” and when they come to pick the watermelons, I need a lot of workers, four people, and so I say, “where am I going to find those people? I can’t get…” so I went to the garage in El Ejido and there were four Africans just there.
[cited in 1].

The ‘watermelon dilemma’ of this farmer therefore demonstrates the final reason why the EU Seasonal Workers Directive, and other similar laws ultimately do not answer the problem of seasonal work: much seasonal work does not require workers for three or five or nine months, but a couple of days. In small scale production, you could perhaps ask family to help, but not on this scale. In these ‘enclaves of production’ at the European border, where everything is orientated so that it can provide cheap food to Tescos, Waitrose or your local greengrocer, the most vulnerable workers will always be needed to take this work. If they need the scarce work they can get without papers, while this work exists, they will probably be ready to take it. Yet the EU regulators prefer to simply ignore these watermelon pickers. By not offering them a route to legality this work will also condemn them to ongoing poverty and precariousness. In the process of drafting the EU Seasonal Workers Directive, an option was proposed to allow such migrants to apply for a seasonal workers visa (which would be fitting as they are the real ‘seasonal’ workers), yet this was rejected, leaving the watermelon pickers in an ever more precarious situation, dependant on the ever more scarce and desperate farmers whose lack of profits push them to take the risk to hire the people in most need of work.

There are many problems with this directive. However, in my opinion, the biggest problem that it represents, is the disconnection. This is the disconnection between a society that is happy to eat cheap food but that does not want to accommodate the workers that produce it with the same rights as they enjoy. Should the UK come up with similar legislation in the upcoming years we should be very careful indeed to pay attention to the underlying assumptions and disconnections and their impacts on the people that might come to do seasonal (or un-seasonal) work and on those who are already here doing it. In the meantime, this directive is up for revision in 2019.

References

1. Medland L (2017) Misconceiving ‘seasons’ in global food systems: The case of the EU
Seasonal Workers Directive. European Law Journal, 23(3-4), pp.157-171.

2. European Union (2014) Directive 2014/36/EU on the conditions of entry and stay of third-country nationals for the purpose of employment as seasonal workers. Official Journal of the European Union L 94/375.

3. Fudge J and Olsson PH (2014) The EU Seasonal Workers Directive: When Immigration Controls Meet Labour Rights. European Journal of Migration and Law 16(4): 439-466.

4. Rijken C (2015) Legal Approaches to Combating the Exploitation of Third-Country National Seasonal Workers. International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations 31(4): 431-451.

5. Zoeteweij-Turhan M.H (2017) The Seasonal Workers Directive: ‘… but some are more equal than others’. European Labour Law Journal, 8(1), pp.28-44.

Let them eat sherbet

Sherbert Fountain

Let’s be honest, some academic events are a real waste of time. I’ve been to so many recently that I may as well put on a name badge as I get dressed. Although, where cutting edge research meets cutting edge research, I have to believe that the alchemy of ‘new knowledge’ creation is possible. More often than not, what clinches success to me is how well events stimulate the latent knowledge in the room. A recent one that stands out for its provocation of the attendees was the aspirationally named, Eating Well.

My University, or more specifically the Brigstow Institute, wanted to bring together all the academics working on food, and push them a bit harder to work together. Quite right. So what did they do? Did they invite us to listen to 15 power-point presentations, organised in order of hierarchy? The keynote professor, then the cutting edge lecturers, a couple of post-docs, and finally the PhD students and perhaps the odd Masters student? No, they did not. They invited us to lunch.

The intention was clearly to provoke. With food, you don’t just bring your professional self to the table, you unavoidably bring your body, mind and palette. You bring your learned and culturally and socially developed preferences for salty and sweet, dry or greasy food. You bring your hang-ups or your calorie counting, your religious or cultural prohibitions, your awareness that you need more iron, less sugar, or perhaps a random allergy. Many of us also brought our brains, questioning what had come from where and how it had travelled, who had picked it or what animal lived to die for it.

The organisers began as good cops. We found our place at the tables by looking for our favourite childhood sweet. I’d told them, in the confirmation e-mail, that mine was a sherbet fountain. It awaited me. So there we were, directly talking history, taste, health, production, family life and taste-buds. Both I and the sherbet fountain had changed since I had braces and it was 12p in the corner shop. The sherbet fountain had gained a plastic cover and ingredients in different languages. I had gained several allergies and two front teeth. Elsewhere on the tables were flying saucers, cola bottles, lemon drops, curly wurleys, and pretty much everything you can remember in corner shops 20 years ago.

Then they got serious. No, there would not be a choice of menu, and no, we would not be able to negotiate the ingredients. We were back at school: the food was served on school dinner trays. As academic guests we then had to look at our place mats and attempt to figure out the nutritional value of the meal. The grams of fat, sugar, protein and all other such components of the meal were listed on the tablecloth-workbook. They’d also gone to the effort of listing the place of origin for all the ingredients and we were challenged to work out food miles using the maps provided.

I say challenged because we did not succeed. Perhaps one of the learning points of this was to realise how incredibly complex these kinds of calculations are. While I am constantly making judgements based on lists of ingredients and where they come from, I’m not used to calorie counting or working out how many grams of each ingredient I need to reach a Recommended Daily Allowance. Hence, eating well, is not as simple as it seems and was in itself a provocation of all those who think they know how to.

To begin with, I was up for the challenge. I worked out where my salad came from, calculated its nutritional content, estimating weight, looking at origin. But there was no second course for me because in the effort to simplify the exercise the directive had been not to provide alternatives. I hadn’t thought I needed an alternative, because there is usually some bread, potatoes, pasta or rice which has been uncontaminated by the dairy products and nuts I’m allergic to. Ironically, this ultra-aware event brought us back to ground. We’re in the South West, they didn’t say it like this, but essentially the message was, we are eating what’s here. So it was butter and cheese galore and there were no veg without cow-products.

This was extremely interesting, because at this point on our table we had an in-depth and personal exchange about the dairy industry. My neighbour had grown up on a dairy farm and revealed a trove of information about the manipulation of calving for milk production. If we’d been given the option of alternatives, many vegan options would have arrived at our table, but we were in school dinner mode. The lactose intolerant reluctantly tolerated a bit of butter and some vegans became vegetarian. The allergic people went to check out the chat on the other tables: class, global inequalities, childhood nutrition.

Returning to no more trays with forks, I was pleased to find the anorexic’s solution, instead of substance I could have sweets for lunch: my sherbet fountain was allergen free.