Since arriving in the UK more than two years ago, Julia Quecaño Casimiro has been working hard, but not in the way she expected.
Julia, originally from Bolivia, came to work at a farm in Herefordshire after a recruiter promised she would earn £500 per week picking fruit. But, in her first fortnight on the farm, she was paid £150.
This meagre pay and other poor working conditions pushed her and 90 colleagues to go on strike – the first industrial action of its kind to get UK media attention.
However, without any support from charities or unions, their efforts soon fizzled out. Some returned to Latin America; others ended up in London, homeless and with little money in their pockets.
Julia was compelled to act because of government inaction – more than two years on, an investigation by the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority has yet to conclude – and the apparent indifference of society at large. “I realised that in this country you have to speak out for justice to work,” Julia told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) and openDemocracy’s Beyond Trafficking and Slavery.
In January, Julia and around 10 former colleagues from Haygrove, one of the biggest fruit producers in the UK, staged a protest outside the Home Office.
These workers, all originally from Latin America, set up a campaign under the name Justice is Not Seasonal, which calls for an end to exploitation on farms and the right for victims of modern slavery to remain in the UK.
The group is also part of an ongoing employment tribunal claim against the farm, and has briefed members of parliament about their experiences. (Haygrove denies the allegations and says it ensures high welfare standards.)
Most of this campaigning work has fallen to Julia and her colleagues. She said they have received support from civil society organisations and a small independent union, but she has never spoken to anyone from a large trade union.
This is a common experience among seasonal workers. Despite the role large unions play in protecting workers from exploitation – and the resources at their disposal – there is no evidence of seasonal workers becoming members.
The government recognises the vital role these workers play in keeping supermarket shelves stocked, and issues around 35,000 seasonal worker visas each year. But since 2022, the TBIJ has uncovered numerous instances of mistreatment on farms: from unsafe and unsanitary housing, to wage theft and even physical assault.
Many workers fear repercussions if they protest, but some have taken action that has flown under the radar. Workers have organised collective grievances to enforce their rights, made complaints to authorities, and even gone on unofficial strikes without union backing.
“What would be the point?”
Caroline Robinson, the director of the Worker Support Centre (WSC), which supports hundreds of seasonal workers every year, says some of the centre’s clients had already taken unofficial strike action to protest conditions on their farms.
But because unions are not present on farms, she says, there’s a lack of awareness among workers about the benefits of membership. She said she doesn’t know of any seasonal workers that are part of a union.
“They feel like things have been raised already, and there’s a lack of care about those issues in the UK in general – so what would change?” said Robinson.
The terms of the visa also make organising difficult. Workers are only in the UK for six months at a time, meaning they don’t qualify for full protections against unfair dismissal, which only kick in after two years. They also fear being blacklisted for speaking out. So many continue to seek work on UK farms despite the poor conditions.
Their lives are also more tightly controlled than those of ordinary workers. Government-licensed private recruiters have the power to revoke their right to be in the country. And seasonal workers live on the farm where they’re employed – meaning that their boss is also their landlord.
Robinson says most workers who have approached the WSC for help do not speak English, which can be a further barrier to addressing mistreatment. The centre solves this by employing former seasonal workers, but unions don’t.
The moral argument
Nearly two decades have passed since the last time a major UK union tried to organise migrant farmworkers. In 2006, following media reports of mistreatment of migrant workers at S&A Produce, one of the biggest strawberry producers in the UK, the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) decided to step in. The workers, who came to the UK on a predecessor to the seasonal worker visa, had complained of unsuitable housing, poor pay and mistreatment.
The union recruited workers, submitted 200 individual grievances, organised protests, put pressure on supermarkets and mounted a press campaign. Eventually, the farm agreed to sign a collective bargaining agreement to negotiate on pay and conditions, and gave elected union representatives time off for union work.
Despite the campaign’s success, this was the last time TGWU or its successor, Unite, invested significant resources in organising migrant farm workers.
If we get a reputation as the union that looks after migrant workers, they will seek us out rather than waiting for some awful thing to happen
Ivan Monckton, who was on TGWU’s executive council at the time, said that the union tried to recruit full-time farm staff, and work with foreign unions to recruit seasonal workers before they arrived in the UK. Neither proved successful.
“At the end of the season, obviously everybody left. They went back to Poland, and we had no membership,” he said. “The whole exercise cost the union a fortune, literally thousands and thousands of pounds.”
Steve Leniec, the chair of the agriculture subsector at Unite, said a union will always weigh up the cost of a campaign, its likely outcome and whether it retained members, before committing resources to it. He believes that, despite the costs, unions have a moral duty to “defend” seasonal workers, and that improving their conditions would also help other workers in the UK.
He thinks the union should explore steps to support seasonal workers joining, such as offering reduced membership fees when they are not in the UK, and allowing them to access legal support upon joining – generally only available after four weeks of membership.
“If we get a reputation as the union that looks after migrant workers, then other migrant workers who come to the country will seek us out, rather than waiting for some awful thing to happen,” he said.
“But that's an argument that’s got to be won,” Leniec said. “Not everyone who pays union membership is necessarily in favour of supporting migrant workers.”
A different standard
In 2023, after leaving the farm, Julia approached United Voices of the World (UVW), a small union popular with London’s Latin American community, with experience organising low-paid precarious and migrant workers.
Even though she wasn’t a member, UVW agreed to give her free legal advice so she could bring a tribunal claim.
Petros Elia, UVW’s general secretary, accepts that any union would lose money trying to organise seasonal workers, but says that is the case with many campaigns that unions undertake.
He said larger unions, like Unite, have the resources to invest in organising seasonal workers, and have often spent millions in disputes that, even when victorious, did not result in a financial benefit to the organisation.
Last year, Unite spent more than £2m on strike pay for 500 workers at the food manufacturer Oscar Mayer. After more than 200 days of industrial action, they won a collective bargaining agreement and other benefits for employees.
“Why is there a different standard applied to farm workers than we might in other groups of workers?” Elia said.
A spokesperson for Unite said the union was proud of its work supporting migrant workers in the food sector, including at Oscar Meyer, where they made up the majority of the workforce.
“Where we have the opportunity to support migrant worker members, Unite will never shirk its commitment to totally back its members…although grassroots organisation is always vital,” they said.
Since people on the seasonal worker visa can stay in the UK for at most six-months “there is no way of preserving the workers’ membership or developing activist structures,” the spokesperson said.
They added that due to these barriers Unite was “looking at alternative methods of recruitment and support” for seasonal workers, but could not provide further details.
Unions in other countries have found ways of supporting migrant workers on similar visa programmes. In Canada, a major union has support centres across the country that serve both unionised and non-unionised workers. Meanwhile, in Germany, temporary migrant workers can get flexible union memberships, and a support network does outreach on farms during harvest season.
Elia believes it is possible for British unions to organise migrant workers effectively, but it would require a process of trial and error. He pointed to other groups of workers previously considered “unorganisable”, like outsourced cleaners and Amazon warehouse workers, who have mounted unionisation campaigns, including with large unions.
He believes the union movement has an obligation to organise those workers.
“Wherever you've got such extreme levels of exploitation taking place…it's an indictment of the union movement that [it] persists,” he said.
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Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam - How Wages for Housework sparked an international solidarity movement
Jake Hall - ‘An indictment of the trade union movement’: Why no one is organising seasonal workers
Emiliano Mellino - How one case made unlikely allies of police and sex workers
Alex Andrews - As drug users, solidarity isn’t just important – it’s survival
RATS (Radical Acts to Survive) - Why can't anti-trafficking be more radical?
Sophie Otiende and Chris Ash - A bizarre new alliance is coming after sexual freedoms. We’re ready
Maya Linstrum-Newman - Clover in South Africa: where workers’ rights met Palestine solidarity
Maya Bhardwaj
Emiliano Mellino is a senior reporter at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism specialised in migrant and worker rights. His investigations have uncovered widespread exploitation of gig economy, care and seasonal agricultural workers, as well as the failure of the state to enforce employment rights.
