The number of migrant workers seeking help after being dismissed by UK farms has shot up this year, according to a new report.
A total of 61 workers contacted civil society group, the Worker Support Centre, with dismissal-related issues between January and July 2024.
Between June and July alone – at the height of the picking season – the WCS saw a doubling of cases and enquiries (47) related to dismissal as compared to the same period in 2023 (22).
The Scotland-based organisation released a new mid-year report outlining risks experienced by migrant workers working on 53 UK farms via the Seasonal Worker Visa scheme, which was re-introduced in 2019 in response to a Brexit-driven labour exodus.
The key challenges raised by workers employed through the government’s migration scheme also included unsuitable living conditions, health and safety violations, and inaccessible transfers away from different employers.
Twelve workers were dismissed for not meeting productivity targets, which is part of a “larger, more concerning trend” of high-productivity targets, the WSC said.
Sixty-three workers raised concerns about their productivity targets and “frequently” reported they were penalised for not having picked enough.
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“At the Worker Support Centre we regularly hear about workers being given very high picking targets and threatened with dismissal for not reaching them, as early as their second week into the job,” said Caroline Robinson, a human rights consultant at the WCS.
“Most workers incur debts to travel to the UK on the seasonal worker visa, a visa on which it is not possible to just leave the farm and find alternative work.
“The risks when workers lose their jobs are often so high that some will endure extremely difficult working conditions.”
In addition, 73 workers contacted the organisation due to pay issues, and 44 claims were related to workers being paid for what they picked rather than the time spent at work.
“Many workers raised the issue of not being paid when travelling between fields, or having to wait for others to finish work before they could go back to their caravans, even if they were sent to their caravans for not meeting productivity targets,” the report noted.
“Generally speaking, WSC has found that workers’ understanding of their pay is in relation to what they pick rather than the overall time spent at work.”
Under the terms of the seasonal workers scheme, workers are guaranteed a minimum of 32 hours’ pay for each week of their stay in the UK, regardless of whether work is available.
“Yet in practice it is hard for workers to understand whether this is implemented,” the civil rights group said, with cases reported to WSC suggesting this guidance is not being met.
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The organisation also engaged with 81 workers across 16 different farms on issues related to their housing between January and July this year.
Issues raised included damp, black mould, cold and draughts, holes, broken furniture, a lack of sanitary facilities, and “extremely small” rooms shared with strangers.
This adversely impacted workers’ physical and mental health, the WCS noted.
Additionally, more than 30 individuals raised health and safety concerns, most often around the type of equipment they were forced to use, which in some cases caused injuries, they claimed.
A large number of workers (204) also contacted the WCS in the first half of the year in relation to transferring employers. Many lacked knowledge on how to request a transfer, and 89 workers claimed their transfer request had been refused by their Scheme Operator – a government licensed company that helps recruit overseas farm workers.
The report highlighted concerns regarding workers’ limited ability to change employer and freely move to another place of employment.
The WCS research included data from 417 individuals. The main nationalities of workers who contacted the organisation, when declared, were Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik and Uzbek, and the majority of workers whose gender was declared were men.
Seasonal workers have previously told a House of Lords probe of the “appalling” conditions facing many people within the fruit & veg sector.
They outlined their experiences of being referred to as a number in many UK farms, and described the experience of working there as akin to “slave labour”.
Read more: Seasonal workers are at risk of abuse. Regulation needs to catch up
Meanwhile, almost half of UK growers plan to walk away from a key industry audit scheme, claiming new requirements from the Supplier Ethical Data Exchange (Sedex) to pay for the recruitment and transportation fees of the seasonal workers they employ are “unworkable”.
WSC is working with the Seasonal Worker Interest Group to ensure workers on the government-sponsored visa scheme and all others on temporary visas are afforded basic individual rights, which include rights of protection against unfair dismissal, in the forthcoming UK Government Employment Bill.
The group is also recommending that the government commission research to inform a new UK-wide Fair Work Agency and the Scottish Agricultural Wages Board about how productivity rates are being used and what their practical impact is on workers, in order to provide direction to the regulation and enforcement of standards in the sector.
WSC is seeking new housing standards for temporary caravans on agricultural land that address the exemption of seasonal worker housing from regulation, and for labour market enforcement authority to inspect and enforce such standards.
It also recommends that the UK government should establish “an independent, centrally managed transfer pathway for workers, separate to the visa sponsor or the employer, to receive representations and make decisions on transfer requests”.
The WCS said its team was experiencing “their hardest season of work yet, with more daily contacts for assistance than at any other point in the history of our service”.
Despite the human and labour rights concerns, seasonal workers have returned in higher numbers this year, The Grocer reported in April.
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