Why have eastern europeans do the work instead of the normal workers? It's not like eastern europeans have any special resistance to corona, nor are their lives worth less.
You can keep having affordable fresh fruit, or you can pretend you can pay laborers local prices, driving up the price dramatically, reducing the total size of the market (because nobody's going to be able to afford the new prices), and having even less produce being made, further driving up costs as economies of scale become less effective.
If our modern economy is so weak we cannot afford fruits and vegetables we should confront and overcome that weakness rather than conceal it by importing an underclass.
I assume Ukraine does as well.
Worse, this policy effectively conceals the problem rather than addressing it. If fruit was too expensive for most people to buy, that would be a problem our society would need to solve. If we can pretend things are working fine by exploiting the poor, we don't have to face or solve that problem for a while.
I also don't believe your summary. It's an easy excuse to pretend that allowing the poor to come slave away in demanding conditions to provide you with low cost goods and services is actually for their benefit. Their original countries are deprived of their economic energy and the poor in the richer countries are forced to compete with a vast influx of workers.
The corollary of higher fruit prices is that the fruit workers get more money, more breaks, better benefits, and improved conditions. That's a worthwhile trade.
Germany has the exact same problem with asparagus.
We can't be everywhere with our low wage expectations.
To try to illustrate, I'll switch the analogy to my own country, which is Canada, where we fly in Mexican labour to pick crops.
If we didn't fly in migrant labour, we'd have to pay Canadians, who are generally a spoiled, lazy, picky bunch (at least compared to the sort of Mexicans who fly here to work, who obviously are not lazy nor excessively picky). This would drive up the cost of fruit, which is perhaps fine. It would also drive up the cost of unskilled labour in other areas, perhaps construction or retail, because there would be less competition for those jobs. That's good news for the unskilled workforce in the rich country. Great.
Of course, not only do prices go up, but actually just less food will get produced. You could argue that that's good, or bad. Fine.
However, now all those Mexican labourers don't have foreign work, so they compete for work at home. That drives down the price of unskilled labour in Mexico, and if there's a minimum wage then it drives up unemployment. The industrious folks who were savvy enough to get the Canadian jobs will take the next-best jobs, displacing slightly-less-hard-working Mexicans from their jobs, and so on. Of course, this is also foreign cash that is no longer coming into the country, so it has effects on the balance of trade, i.e. on the ability of Mexico collectively to import nice things that they aren't making internally. That's probably bad news on a decade-long timescale, but it might eventually lead to a more robust manufacturing economy, I don't know.
So, in summary, suppose Canada stops using Mexican farm labour (or Britain stops using eastern European farm labour). What are the consequences:
All Canadians get more expensive food.
Unskilled Canadians get more pay, probably offsetting the more expensive food for those people.
Less food gets grown in Canada overall, probably, or at least less luxury food.
Unskilled Mexicans are fucked over hard, especially those who are most vulnerable.
Rich Mexicans can hire poor mexicans at even more exploitative rates.
In the medium to long term, Mexico might have a worse balance of trade, but then again maybe that results in positive industrialization in the long term.
> 11) Actions at the sharp end resolve all ambiguity. Organizations are ambiguous, often intentionally, about the relationship between production targets, efficient use of resources, economy and costs of operations, and acceptable risks of low and high consequence accidents. All ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system. After an accident, practitioner actions may be regarded as ‘errors’ or ‘violations’ but these evaluations are heavily biased by hindsight and ignore the other driving forces, especially production pressure.
Those workers aren't necessarily unskilled. Those who come from my country(Poland) at least are often college graduates.
How do they end up there? Well, the pay is obviously better - especially for a seasonal worker. After all, the GDP per capita difference between the UK and Poland is close to 3x.
The unemployment rate here is(or was before the virus) considerably lower than the EU average, so had they not gone there those people would've found jobs and contributed to the local economy.
Instead we have this weird brain-drain in which the brains aren't utilized to their full potential.
Ironically I'm currently a "seasonal worker" myself, only I work as a software engineer, not fruit picker, or any low-skilled labourer.
Aside from that the coronavirus showed that this approach you present is unsustainable. Like I said before, currently there is so much demand for workers from eastern Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Belarus) that there's simply not enough people to fill all the positions.
Also we have our own fields with fruit to pick - all that is going to go to waste. That's definitely "less food produced" - just somewhere you don't see it.
That's a shame it is still the case, as the promise of entering the EU was for wages to normalise across the Union. I guess it will take further integration for that to happen.
It's a lengthy process, but it's happening.
Ireland joined in 1973, but didn't really become "rich" like the rest of Western Europe till the turn of the millenium.
In the mean time poor countries will start planting their own trees with their own people and appropriate prices for their country. And Mexico will have their own corporation making money.
Someone else posted that around 10% of what you pay for fruit and vegetables goes to the farmers, so maybe that's where we should start to fix the issue.
In contrast to the exploitation narrative this is actually mutually beneficial. The food is produced at low cost which is good for consumers (in particular poor ones who would otherwise not have access to expensive vegetables), and the workers who earn higher wages than they otherwise would have.
My comments in this thread have had some pretty wild score swings, I guess I stepped on a live rail. I'm not familiar with British agriculture politics.. I was thinking only of companies temporarily replacing a sick workforce with another (who would presumably themselves then become sick.) My comments were not intended to be commentary on British immigration, which I have no reason to care about.