Intensification of workplace regimes in British horticulture: the role of migrant workers
By B. Rogaly. 2008
193 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In Britain, international migrants have very recently become the major workforce in labour-intensive horticulture. This paper explores the causes of the dramatic increase since the 1990s in the employment of migrant workers in this subsector. It locates this major change in a general pattern of intensification of horticultural production driven by an ongoing process of concentration in retailer power, and in the greater availability of migrant workers, shaped in part by state initiatives to manage immigration.The paper draws on concepts developed in the US literature on agrarian capitalism. It then uses case histories from British horticulture to illustrate how growers have directly linked innovations involving intensification through labour control to their relationships with retailers. Under pressure on 'quality', volume and price, growers are found to have ratcheted up the effort required from workers to achieve the minimum wage through reducing the rates paid for piecework, and in some cases to have changed the type of labour contractor they use to larger, more anonymous businesses. The paper calls for further, commodity-specific and spatially-aware research with a strong ethnographic component.
Subfields: Public Administration, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ce78e9a2370b69749e599f3b234f0ff6f39ec92e
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In Public Administration
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Temporary migration, precarious employment and unfree labour relations: Exploring the ‘continuum of exploitation’ in Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (2017, background): “…recruited into low paid service and hospitality work, agricultural and horticultural labour, the construction sector, manufacturing, and resource-related jobs in forestry, mining and fisheries (see inter alia Buckley, 2013; McPhee, 2012; Rogaly, 2008b; Torres et al., 2013; Wills et al., 2009).”
- International Labour Migration and Food Production in Rural Europe: A Review of the Evidence (2018, unknown): “…employment (cf. Kilkey and Ursi 2017; Mésini 2014; Perrotta 2017). d) Form of remuneration : Workers receiving time-based remuneration (daily, weekly or monthly) seem better off than the piece-rate worker, as the latter seems to be associated with the intensification of work (Rogaly 2008).”