A common device in the broad-canvassed social-realist novel is to have events throw together people who don’t seem to belong in the same universe, in such a way as to reveal the deeper social reality. Bonfire of the Vanities is a good modern example (why was the film so bad?). Such a real-life even occurred yesterday when an express train hit a minibus in central England. On the train were the Bishop of Hereford and a Tory MP, in the minibus were men variously described as arabs and as Iraqi Kurds. Several of those in the bus were killed and the TV news thought the incident sufficiently serious to send crews to the scene. They interviewed some young women who had east European accents and probably came from Poland or the Baltics.
These people had all been drawn to Worcestershire by the promise of work. The agribusiness that hired them obtained their labour from gangmasters based in cities like Birmingham. Perhaps some of the shoppers who bought their broccoli or cabbages did so because they had a preference for “English produce” over the sugar-snap peas flown from Zambia. Who knows? Anyway, those fields are not tilled by cap-tipping yokels with pieces of straw between their teeth living in tied cottages.
The Times report of the incident blames the supermarkets for forcing low prices on producers. Certainly the domination of the British food market by a very few small chains - Sainsbury, Tesco, Walmart - puts the squeeze on farmers, but the firms who employed these Kurds and Poles would surely be trying to minimize costs anyway. These new migrants are, in any case, just the functional descendants of the Irish who built the railways and roads, the West Indians who drove the buses and the Pakistanis who worked in the textile trade.
I’m surely not writing this to say that it is bad that Latvians and Iraqis are here (though the ways they get treated may often be very bad indeed.) I want, rather, just to notice, that, though yesterday’s incident exposed something of the real workings of Britain and the world, that won’t prevent most of us (me included, unless I think about it) slipping back into a false and illusory view of the English countryside. Afghans, Poles and Estonians who keep us fed are usually invisible - and they will be again.
This is the kind of article that stops practically anyone from a working-class background
identifying with the ‘left’.
The people you wrote about are not ‘invisible’ but actualy the opposite. They are hyper-visible. You cannot pick fruit in the dark. When hundreds if not thousands o foreign workersf people suddenly appear it gets noticed.
It’s the economics that puzzles. One of the men interviewed after the train crash was an Iraqi Asylum Seeker from Birmingham. This means he is recieving benefits plus housing plus health care and legal representation for free. He then works illegally on top of this. Talk about having your cake and eating it.
Also if you know anything about economic history you will know that was a long struggle to get the gangmaster system eradicated. And by the way it is not a coincidence that the gangmasters are Asian. Many ethnic minority ‘entrepreneurs’ do not believe in worker’s rights.The foreign farm workers are paid a pittance but the gangmaster is also paid (aside from ripping them off for ‘tax’ and housing. If they paid the workers direct it would be better all round.
But the real question for left and right is this: just how far can the criminalisation of the British economy go before there is a major political crisis?
PS: believe it or not ethnic minorities are not the only people in Britain who have done or still do, poorly paid work .
Speaking as another person who does not believe in “worker’s rights” (there are only individual human rights), I really do not understand the point this article is making. As it happens I am also in favour of completely open borders to peaceable entry for anyone.
I wasn’t trying to grind any particular political axe, Perry, just making the observation I said I was making about accidents and disasters suddenly revealing what is going on in the world and challenging our unreflective picture of that.
That sounds like an update of Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City. What is interesting is that the economic and political conflicts will be happening, in Worcestershire and elsewhere, whether or not “we” are “aware” of them or not. So is the idea that by learning the “real” state of affairs we should try to keep our hands clean? or that we should engage in consumer choice to exert influence? or that we should be able to use the issues to distance ourselves from and throw into a bad light those who do now know about the “true” state of affairs and do nothing?
Sounds like an update of The Canterbury Tales to me. And why is it, charlie b., that we can’t be aware of what’s real and true without putting those words in quotation marks?
I have no real point to this comment except to say that the Bishop of Hereford is my old college chaplain, who was also a very good slow bowler who used to give me a lift to and from our cricket matches. Funny how such incidents can connect us personally to the reality we knew nothing of.
Or did he become Bishop of Hertford? One letter makes all the difference.
>>This means he is recieving benefits plus housing plus health care and legal representation for free. He then works illegally on top of this. Talk about having your cake and eating it.
How odd to have have working illegally in the farm sector at a poorly paid job made analogous to eating cake.
You are not a son of the soil then, Chris?
Seasonal workers are a product of the largely mechanised nature of modern agriculture. The number of crops requiring hand harvesting, however, is slowly dwindling. When I was young it was popular for students to pick hops in Kent. But the hop industry has been mauled by the fad for lager and, anyway, new dwarf hops are machine harvested. No doubt the day will come when agriculture requires very few seasonal workers. In the interim there is no great moral lesson to learn from them beyond the one that the market is not moral.
Despite the apparent naivety of the premiss (that this situation is hidden: seems like we’re back with the ‘purloined letter’), this post is rather interesting. So this is happening in the UK too. I had imagined that extensive use of undocumented workers was efectively a mediterranean phenomenon - since the arrival of the euro has pushed up ‘official’ labour costs enormously (the so-called harrod-samuelson-balassa effect, god forbid) many mainstream economic activities only continue to survive using undocumented labour.
The textile industry is a case in point. A chinese friend of mine tells me there are about 15,000 undocumented chinese workers in the Barcelona industrial belt. She knows this because she is asked by the courts to work as an interpreter whenever one of the workers has problems with the law. Note that these problems NEVER relate to work. Here there is no control.
Roughly the same is true of a Pakistani community of about 10,000 just off Las Ramblas. We have numbers for all this since the current spanish law gives undocumented workers access to health (for everyone) and education (for children) if you register with the town hall.
I have been studying the same process with the arrival of Bulgarian workers in rural Spain.
http://www.edwardhugh.net/bulgaria.html
It was fashionable in the 80’s in the UK to talk of de-industrialisation. In the case of Bulgaria this has taken a new twist. What we have are highly educated people - schoolteachers, dentists, engineers etc. - coming to work picking peppers and oranges. The reason, in Bulgaria a schoolteacher earns 120 euros a month, while picking peppers on an undocumented basis they can earn 500 euros a month - working ten hours a day in the blazing sun.
Another important detail, this migration is also partly provoked by an important pension reform - pensions are now 50 euros a month - which means they have to come out to send money home. Look out Germany!!!
What seems to me to be important is to understand that this process is not simply incidental. Krugman recently asked why indentured servitude was not being re-intoduced, I argued here:
http://bonoboathome.blogspot.com/2003_06_01_bonoboathome_archive.html#200379589
that it effectively already has been. One of my blog readers astutely made the point that in the absence of a gold standard, what we effectively have - via the globalisation of labour market reforms - is a ‘labour standard’. And we are about to make all the same mistakes as were made in the inter-war years with gold.
À Gauche
Jeremy Alder
Amaravati
Anggarrgoon
Audhumlan Conspiracy
H.E. Baber
Philip Blosser
Paul Broderick
Matt Brown
Diana Buccafurni
Brandon Butler
Keith Burgess-Jackson
Certain Doubts
David Chalmers
Noam Chomsky
The Conservative Philosopher
Desert Landscapes
Denis Dutton
David Efird
Karl Elliott
David Estlund
Experimental Philosophy
Fake Barn County
Kai von Fintel
Russell Arben Fox
Garden of Forking Paths
Roger Gathman
Michael Green
Scott Hagaman
Helen Habermann
David Hildebrand
John Holbo
Christopher Grau
Jonathan Ichikawa
Tom Irish
Michelle Jenkins
Adam Kotsko
Barry Lam
Language Hat
Language Log
Christian Lee
Brian Leiter
Stephen Lenhart
Clayton Littlejohn
Roderick T. Long
Joshua Macy
Mad Grad
Jonathan Martin
Matthew McGrattan
Marc Moffett
Geoffrey Nunberg
Orange Philosophy
Philosophy Carnival
Philosophy, et cetera
Philosophy of Art
Douglas Portmore
Philosophy from the 617 (moribund)
Jeremy Pierce
Punishment Theory
Geoff Pynn
Timothy Quigley (moribund?)
Conor Roddy
Sappho's Breathing
Anders Schoubye
Wolfgang Schwartz
Scribo
Michael Sevel
Tom Stoneham (moribund)
Adam Swenson
Peter Suber
Eddie Thomas
Joe Ulatowski
Bruce Umbaugh
What is the name ...
Matt Weiner
Will Wilkinson
Jessica Wilson
Young Hegelian
Richard Zach
Psychology
Donyell Coleman
Deborah Frisch
Milt Rosenberg
Tom Stafford
Law
Ann Althouse
Stephen Bainbridge
Jack Balkin
Douglass A. Berman
Francesca Bignami
BlunkettWatch
Jack Bogdanski
Paul L. Caron
Conglomerate
Jeff Cooper
Disability Law
Displacement of Concepts
Wayne Eastman
Eric Fink
Victor Fleischer (on hiatus)
Peter Friedman
Michael Froomkin
Bernard Hibbitts
Walter Hutchens
InstaPundit
Andis Kaulins
Lawmeme
Edward Lee
Karl-Friedrich Lenz
Larry Lessig
Mirror of Justice
Eric Muller
Nathan Oman
Opinio Juris
John Palfrey
Ken Parish
Punishment Theory
Larry Ribstein
The Right Coast
D. Gordon Smith
Lawrence Solum
Peter Tillers
Transatlantic Assembly
Lawrence Velvel
David Wagner
Kim Weatherall
Yale Constitution Society
Tun Yin
History
Blogenspiel
Timothy Burke
Rebunk
Naomi Chana
Chapati Mystery
Cliopatria
Juan Cole
Cranky Professor
Greg Daly
James Davila
Sherman Dorn
Michael Drout
Frog in a Well
Frogs and Ravens
Early Modern Notes
Evan Garcia
George Mason History bloggers
Ghost in the Machine
Rebecca Goetz
Invisible Adjunct (inactive)
Jason Kuznicki
Konrad Mitchell Lawson
Danny Loss
Liberty and Power
Danny Loss
Ether MacAllum Stewart
Pam Mack
Heather Mathews
James Meadway
Medieval Studies
H.D. Miller
Caleb McDaniel
Marc Mulholland
Received Ideas
Renaissance Weblog
Nathaniel Robinson
Jacob Remes (moribund?)
Christopher Sheil
Red Ted
Time Travelling Is Easy
Brian Ulrich
Shana Worthen
Computers/media/communication
Lauren Andreacchi (moribund)
Eric Behrens
Joseph Bosco
Danah Boyd
David Brake
Collin Brooke
Maximilian Dornseif (moribund)
Jeff Erickson
Ed Felten
Lance Fortnow
Louise Ferguson
Anne Galloway
Jason Gallo
Josh Greenberg
Alex Halavais
Sariel Har-Peled
Tracy Kennedy
Tim Lambert
Liz Lawley
Michael O'Foghlu
Jose Luis Orihuela (moribund)
Alex Pang
Sebastian Paquet
Fernando Pereira
Pink Bunny of Battle
Ranting Professors
Jay Rosen
Ken Rufo
Douglas Rushkoff
Vika Safrin
Rob Schaap (Blogorrhoea)
Frank Schaap
Robert A. Stewart
Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Ray Trygstad
Jill Walker
Phil Windley
Siva Vaidahyanathan
Anthropology
Kerim Friedman
Alex Golub
Martijn de Koning
Nicholas Packwood
Geography
Stentor Danielson
Benjamin Heumann
Scott Whitlock
Education
Edward Bilodeau
Jenny D.
Richard Kahn
Progressive Teachers
Kelvin Thompson (defunct?)
Mark Byron
Business administration
Michael Watkins (moribund)
Literature, language, culture
Mike Arnzen
Brandon Barr
Michael Berube
The Blogora
Colin Brayton
John Bruce
Miriam Burstein
Chris Cagle
Jean Chu
Hans Coppens
Tyler Curtain
Cultural Revolution
Terry Dean
Joseph Duemer
Flaschenpost
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Jonathan Goodwin
Rachael Groner
Alison Hale
Household Opera
Dennis Jerz
Jason Jones
Miriam Jones
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Steven Krause
Lilliputian Lilith
Catherine Liu
John Lovas
Gerald Lucas
Making Contact
Barry Mauer
Erin O'Connor
Print Culture
Clancy Ratcliff
Matthias Rip
A.G. Rud
Amardeep Singh
Steve Shaviro
Thanks ... Zombie
Vera Tobin
Chuck Tryon
University Diaries
Classics
Michael Hendry
David Meadows
Religion
AKM Adam
Ryan Overbey
Telford Work (moribund)
Library Science
Norma Bruce
Music
Kyle Gann
ionarts
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Greg Sandow
Scott Spiegelberg
Biology/Medicine
Pradeep Atluri
Bloviator
Anthony Cox
Susan Ferrari (moribund)
Amy Greenwood
La Di Da
John M. Lynch
Charles Murtaugh (moribund)
Paul Z. Myers
Respectful of Otters
Josh Rosenau
Universal Acid
Amity Wilczek (moribund)
Theodore Wong (moribund)
Physics/Applied Physics
Trish Amuntrud
Sean Carroll
Jacques Distler
Stephen Hsu
Irascible Professor
Andrew Jaffe
Michael Nielsen
Chad Orzel
String Coffee Table
Math/Statistics
Dead Parrots
Andrew Gelman
Christopher Genovese
Moment, Linger on
Jason Rosenhouse
Vlorbik
Peter Woit
Complex Systems
Petter Holme
Luis Rocha
Cosma Shalizi
Bill Tozier
Chemistry
"Keneth Miles"
Engineering
Zack Amjal
Chris Hall
University Administration
Frank Admissions (moribund?)
Architecture/Urban development
City Comforts (urban planning)
Unfolio
Panchromatica
Earth Sciences
Our Take
Who Knows?
Bitch Ph.D.
Just Tenured
Playing School
Professor Goose
This Academic Life
Other sources of information
Arts and Letters Daily
Boston Review
Imprints
Political Theory Daily Review
Science and Technology Daily Review