Landworkers and landowners (a reply to the Landworkers' Alliance)
Is the agroecology movement centring the dignity, respect and rights of workers or is it justifying landowners who exploit workers?
This is a reply to the Landworkers’ Alliance (LWA) recent blog post entitled: Reflections on work-based training; past, present and future. It has been co-authored with Olivia Oldham-Dorrington.
We’re pleased to see the LWA sharing the Solidarity Across Land Trades (SALT) Workers' Inquiry in the newsletter. We have both been members of the LWA for several years — Alex as a farmer and Olivia as a supporter. It’s important that all involved in UK agroecology read the report. We are also glad that the LWA has put a moratorium on advertising illegal traineeships and has been engaged in educating its members on employment law. And we acknowledge the significant challenge and difficulties in rectifying the issues raised by the inquiry and finding long term solutions.
However, we are disappointed by the blog the LWA has written about SALT’s crucial report and the issues it raises. Though this piece is critical, we write in the spirit of constructive solidarity and in the desire to push the movement — which we are part of — to more deeply grapple with what we consider to be one of the most pressing questions it has faced. We hope that those reading will take these critiques in good faith as they are intended, and will continue to engage with us as we work collectively to address and remedy the serious concerns the SALT report brings to light.
Centring the employer
The first thing that strikes us after reading this recent blog post is that it’s pretty much written from the perspective of the employer.
In particular, the blog spends many lines attempting to justify the exploitation, abuse and discrimination that farm workers have faced on agroecological farms. The justifications rely heavily upon the assumption of ‘innocent farmers’ who have engaged in an attempt to provide training in good faith. While we’re sure this is true in some cases, having spoken to many people who have been exploited on UK agroecological farms, we’re not sure this narrative stacks up and it definitely doesn’t do justice to those who have experienced it.
For example, the blog makes no reference to the sexism, racism, classism, ableism, ageism, transphobia, and homophobia that the SALT report brings to light. 70% of those surveyed by SALT had experienced or witnessed discrimination, so this is a widespread problem. This omission is troubling, because in failing to acknowledge these findings the blog presents a somewhat biased perspective rooted in a narrative of farmer innocence (that is, the assumption that if indeed these things take place, it is through no fault of the farmers involved).
As is well-documented, almost every single farm owner in the UK is white (and more often than not, male), and exploitation on farms disproportionately targets racialised people and relies upon gendered discrimination. These moves to innocence are not innocent — they are a smokescreen for ongoing practices and dynamics that cause real harm. Given that the LWA strives to be an anti-racist, anti-fascist and anti-misogynistic organisation, it’s imperative that this central component of racialised and gendered exploitation and accompanying discrimination isn’t overlooked.
Exploitation
Before moving on, we want to make a quick detour to explore some terminology.
Both the SALT report and the LWA blog use the term “exploitation” to describe the experiences of workers, but we think it’s important to be clear about what exactly this means.
There are two main uses of the term exploitation. The first meaning is a more common sense usage based on the standard dictionary definition of the word, which basically refers to one person treating someone else unfairly, to the former’s benefit. The second meaning is used by Marxists like ourselves, and relates to the ‘exploitation’ of wage labour. In Marxist terms an employer ‘exploits’ the labour of a worker as a ‘factor of production’, just like they would ‘exploit’ or use any other resource. A worker tills the soil, plants the seed, and harvests the crops. Without them, the crop doesn’t get grown and value wouldn’t be produced.
This Marxist definition of exploitation has a double meaning, though: it also refers to the fact that workers only receive a portion of the value their labour produces — regardless of the level of the wage they are paid. If you work an 8 hour day, you might spend half of that day working for your own ‘reproduction’ — what you need to afford to live, and what you get paid — and the rest of the day earning profit for your employer. Your employer can aggregate the surplus labour of their workforce, in order to earn a profit: this is the basis of capital accumulation. Perhaps ironically, the very basis for a landowner being able to exploit a worker is the dispossession of workers’ means of re/production, the land itself, through the processes of enclosure and colonialism.
Some labour exploitation goes beyond even this ‘normal’ form. These more heavily exploited workers are not paid enough to even afford the necessary basics of life, and therefore must either go without or find money or sustenance, shelter etc. from elsewhere. SALT’s inquiry found that so-called “trainees” were only being paid an average of £1.41 per hour. These levels of exploitation would clearly leave them unable to pay for their own reproduction — the necessities of life. While accommodation and food are often included in these traineeships, they do not provide everything a person needs to live, let alone to live well. Indeed, this is recognised by the fact that UK law does not allow employers to deduct more than about £10 a day for accommodation from someone’s wages (if they are earning the minimum wage), and does not allow any deductions for food. And while the law should by no means represent the limits of our moral responsibilities, the fact that the law clearly sets this out shows us that these wages are extremely exploitative.
Misunderstanding the problem
The LWA blog takes it at face value that the individuals who have experienced low pay and exploitative and abusive conditions were indeed trainees. Clearly, trainees should still receive at least the minimum wage and other basic, hard-won workers’ rights, as is the norm in other sectors. However, informal research shows that farms were sometimes not actually employing ‘trainees’ (or ‘interns’) but skilled workers with years of experience. Sometimes with more experience and skill than the farm owner themselves. There are cases where these ‘trainees’ were being asked to manage a market garden and yet being paid far less than the minimum wage.
This calls into question the claim that employers were offering good-faith training. Again, while we’re sure some offerings were designed to be purely educational experiences, it is also true that others were opportunistically seeking cheapened labour in order to prop up an unsustainable business.
The problem is not that well-intentioned efforts to implement legal traineeships were technically not legal. The problem is that workers are systematically disrespected, exploited and exposed to poor working conditions. This isn’t unique to agroecology specifically, but is rife throughout agriculture. The strategy of exploitation within agroecology is the same one used by big agribusinesses and in agricultural businesses the world over. The fact that these same dynamics are being reproduced in the agroecological sector calls into question whether we really are building an alternative, or if we are instead just building our own version of the status quo.
Finally, the blog portrays this exploitation not as a material condition experienced by (some) trainees and workers alike, or a behaviour enacted by (some) employers on agroecological farms, but as a ‘feeling’. This framing minimises the material hardship, unsafe working environments, physical and emotional harm, and discrimination faced by the workers who were involved in SALT’s inquiry and beyond.
Class power and “the market”
There is no getting away from the fact that cheap food is a massive barrier to building a world where food producers can live well. This is something the blog recognises. Cheap food is central to the circulation of capital on a global scale, to the imperialist flow of value from global South to North, and to keeping the minimum wage low. If food cost more, workers would need to demand higher wages — resulting in pressure on businesses across the economy. As such, there is a lot of incentive under capitalism to keep food prices as low as possible. These structural factors are undeniable, and dismantling and replacing them is central to a revolutionary agroecology and food sovereignty.
That said, there is an issue within agroecology when we rely upon a flattening of the class power within farming in order to achieve this transformation. In other words, when we choose to ignore the fact that there are those who own land and businesses, and those who have nothing to sell but their labour power. Quite simply, the owner has more control, security and power than the worker. When an owner decides to displace their own financial difficulties onto workers they cross a line, and that should be a red line within agroecology.
It is a choice to pay people £1.41 an hour.
To come back to farmer innocence, this trope denies the agency that the farmer possesses in making this choice. There are many agroecological farms that do find a way to pay at least the minimum wage and provide decent working conditions. If you can’t make your business work whilst paying workers at least the minimum wage, which should hardly be a radical demand, then you should stop or change your business. And it’s important to note that a lack of prior training isn’t a justification for underpaying workers. It is very normal in the world of work to be trained on the job. Agroecology, in that sense, isn’t unique or special.
A friend of Alex’s told him about undertaking the Soil Association apprenticeship nearly 20 years ago; he was paid more then than trainees are paid now. Perhaps it’s not unrelated that he still works in horticulture all these years later. The blog makes reference to this short-lived scheme, which unfortunately ran into the problems of low profitability in the sector. Clearly, there is no easy answer to the crisis of profitability within all forms of agriculture. But workers’ rights cannot be subordinated to the issue of profitability, and rather must be seen as the leading edge for overcoming this agricultural economic crisis. Confronting the structural power of capital, in the form of cheapened food, will require leveraging the structural power of workers1.
Furthermore, the back and forths on the legality of various traineeship schemes are ultimately more of a side issue to the more fundamental point of workers’ rights and workers’ power. Framing rights in terms of what is and isn’t legal is in fact a symptom of the problem whereby work and workers are simply not respected or valued. The fact that it’s now legal again to pay someone something like £2.50 per hour (plus accommodation), as with the Apricot Centre model, does not make it morally right.
The movement talks a lot about justice. But in what way is it just or fair for trainees — whether genuine trainees or workers in disguise — to be subjected to paltry wages in a country with an escalating cost of living crisis? When we take the letter of the law as synonymous with the boundaries of justice, we end up in a situation where the same farms who are known to have been illegally employing workers in the past can now register as a CIC and do it all again, but legally.
At a broader level, the frequency of resorting to, and legally and economically justifying, exploitation reveals a flaw in the agroecology movement’s current theory of change. For years the mantra has been that we must grow agroecology by building up small farm businesses, selling locally, and “enlightening consumers”. While we may have had some successes with this approach, those successes have often come at the cost of moving closer to the mainstream, of sacrificing core values to gain very little ground. We would suggest that part of the reluctance to face up to the issue of exploitation is a symptom of a broader reluctance to reckon with the inadequacy of existing narratives and the need for a new theory of change. We need a genuinely anti-capitalist theory, not one that proposes to make capitalism greener, fairer and more local.
From the margins to the centre
bell hooks talks about bringing the margins to the centre in our political work. Now is the time for organisations like the LWA to show leadership in doing exactly this. Give the platform to workers, amplify their voices, listen to them, and start remedying their treatment within the world of agroecology. If we don’t then agroecology will forever fail to grow.
This is not just an ideological statement about the importance of workers, but a deeply pragmatic one. Currently, the movement is fairly hostile to many workers and is leading to high rates of burnout, with large numbers leaving the sector as a result, as articulated in the SALT workers’ inquiry. As long as conditions for agroecological workers are such that they actively deter new entrants and drive people out of the sector, there will never be enough hands to do the work of transforming the food and farming system. Rather than the kind of pragmatism that requires workers’ demands for decent wages and conditions to be ‘balanced’ with the rights of exploitative businesses to stay in operation, this kind of pragmatism recognises that if workers don’t matter to our movement, then our movement doesn’t matter — and won’t ever matter.
The blog closes with appeals to “the movement” to come together in unity. Again, SALT members and other exploited workers have made it clear that the appeal to the righteousness of the movement is frequently a way of suppressing critical voices. The language of activism and the ‘greater good’ are co-opted in service of the interests of employers, effectively using the idealism and passion of (often younger) people coming into the sector against them. Workers tell themselves that they are doing this work for the good of the climate, ecosystems and society. They are told they should be grateful for the chance to participate in “regenerating” the farm or community, often by exploitative employers who have been privileged enough to skip breaking their back on someone else’s farm because they’ve inherited money, a farm, or had a high-paying first career.
The unity the blog calls for, and that we also strive for, cannot be demanded or imposed: it will only develop out of genuine engagement with the fractures that have developed from neglect of a critical issue. If the movement is to move forward then it must centre workers’ struggle. We can continue to work for better conditions for small farms — workers’ rights are not contradictory to this. But workers’ rights are currently being undermined by a lack of attention, resources and ultimately an ideology which favours the landowner over the land worker.
The LWA, as the blog states, represents workers as well as owners, and when exploitation, abuse and discrimination has been uncovered and painstakingly laid out, it behooves organisations to take note and allow the spotlight to pass to workers. Now is not the time to try and enforce a false unity. Now is the time for investigation, hard conversations, and moves towards substantive change.
Dignity, respect and rights
Unfortunately, as highlighted at the end of the SALT workers’ inquiry, members of SALT have been subjected to hostility from the wider movement. The report’s authors write (p 45):
We are organising to see a future where workers are safe from precarity, discrimination and workplace abuse, and where they are provided with decent livelihoods doing the work they love. We write in hope that the care that workers bring to their work will be reflected in how they are treated by their employers, and the wider sector.
We do not enjoy being seen as agitators and ‘troublemakers’, bringing uncomfortable issues to the forefront. However, the themes raised in this report are serious, and cannot be treated lightly. If this report has brought up challenging feelings for you, we ask you to sit with that discomfort and consider how or if you have participated in upholding the systems of power that operate within land-based workplaces.
For the LWA and its members to centre those exploited workers, and genuinely move towards a constructive and radical food/farming system transformation, they should heed the recommendations made at the end of SALT’s workers’ inquiry:
To think beyond the small scale; include workers in discussions; consider the differences between workers and owners; increase focus on business training to support businesses to eliminate unpaid labour on their farms; to lean away from legal loopholes; to create systems of regulation and accountability; and to improve labour quality standards.
So we call on the LWA, on other members, and on their employees to push this issue and to ensure that we find a path forward that is rooted in the dignity, respect, rights and power of workers.
Links:
You can read SALT’s Worker’s Inquiry here.
You can read the LWA’s blog here.
We can imagine ‘workers’ in an expansive sense to include all those, in all parts of the world, who provide labour to the system of capital —- be it paid or unpaid, productive or reproductive, valorised or unvalorised, labour.