“
Increasing the number of seasonal visas by 10,000, including 2,000 for the poultry sector, will do nothing but perpetuate a broken system without serious improvements to the labour market. Unite fights and wins for the sector’s workers work- place-by-workplace and company-by-company because direct action is the best course to improve jobs, pay and conditions
objectives for English Agriculture, the environment and net zero”, the union said it lacked any detail or concrete measures to incentivise sustainable agricultural practices such as soil regeneration.
Bev Clarkson Unite National Officer ”
white paper that it would “commission an independent review to assess and ensure the quantity and quality of the food sector workforce”.
Unite questioned how ‘independent’ the review would actually be given the total lack of consultation with trade unions on any part of the government’s food strategy to date.
While Unite broadly welcomed the government’s pledge to publish a land use framework by next year, which, the white paper said, “will reflect all our
Unite has long argued that the UK needs to produce more of its own food in a sustainable way – rather than relying on imports – to achieve climate goals. But the government’s white paper said that it intends to “broadly maintain” food production domestically alongside “continued, and in some cases, increasing, imports from a diverse range of countries”. Unite believes a stronger emphasis on imports could hit UK jobs as well as compromise efforts to both tackle climate change and maintain high animal welfare and food standards.
Commenting on the government’s
food strategy, Unite national officer Bev Clarkson said, “Unite is the voice of agriculture and food workers and we see first-hand why there is a labour shortage. Lousy pay, terrible working conditions and a supply chain built on exploitation.
13 uniteLANDWORKER Summer 2022
“It was no surprise that government’s food strategy contains nothing to fix the poverty pay and awful working practices that are at the root of the sector’s endemic staffing problems,” she added. “Ministers are not interested in addressing these things. If it were, they would sit down with Unite, which represents many thousands of workers from farm to fork.
“Increasing the number of seasonal visas by 10,000, including 2,000 for the poultry sector, will do nothing but perpetuate a broken system without serious improvements to the labour market,” Clarkson went on to say. “Unite fights and wins for the sector’s workers workplace-by-workplace and company-by-company because direct action is the best course to improve jobs, pay and conditions,” she continued.
“If the government’s proposed independent review into providing long-term workforce security for the food industry is to bear any fruit at all, these three things need to be its focus,” she concluded.
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