UK seasonal worker scheme operators have pulled out of Indonesia after its government decided against allowing the direct recruitment of workers in the country.
Agri-HR, one of the official sponsors of the seasonal worker scheme, had been running a trial recruiting workers from Indonesia but paused recruitment in May, after it became aware a third party had been charging workers in the country illegal fees outside normal logistical costs.
The pilot had placed 147 workers on UK farms. Following the pause in operations, Agri-HR had been working with the Indonesian government to make direct recruitment possible again in a bid to avoid potentially exploitative third-party agents.
However, last week the sponsor was told by Indonesia’s Ministry of Manpower that it no longer wanted to support the idea of direct recruitment by any overseas recruiters, including Agri-HR.
The policy change meant it was “the end of the line for Indonesian recruitment”, Jan-Willem Naerebout, director of Agri-HR, told The Grocer. He added the operator would go back to recruiting seasonal workers only where it had an office, in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
“Indonesia is probably now too high-risk to do it in the way we wanted to go,” Naerebout added.
Seasonal worker scheme campaigners had previously raised concerns over the legality of the Indonesia route as there is a law in the country that requires all “plantation worker” costs, such as transport and logistics, to be paid by the employer or farm.
Under the UK scheme, farmers are not paying these costs, which raised questions among human rights campaigners who argued the situation made the pilot from Agri-HR already “problematic from the outset”.
However, according to Agri-HR, the Indonesian authorities classed workers for the UK scheme as exempt from this rule and therefore the so-called Employer Pays Principle did not apply.
There has been significant debate in the UK farming community regarding the Employer Pays principle, which was brought in as part of industry-wide Sedex audits in September. Many farmers have since walked away from the ethical audit, calling it unworkable.
Agri-HR said it was confident it had not broken any laws in either the UK or Indonesia.
And both farmers and workers had been left disappointed by the change in policy, Naerebout said. One of its farming partners in the UK said “not only are they great workers, but they lift the spirits of the farm, which is a lovely thing to hear from the growers”, he added.
But “we want to have a safe recruitment pathway for people, and if we’re not 100% sure about that then we would be mad to take any risk”.
Naerebout stressed the operator still had an excess of applicants for the scheme in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, so it was unlikely UK farmers would go short of labour.
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