So who's going to pick our fruit?

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So who's going to pick our fruit?
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dpack

Joined: 02 Jul 2005
Posts: 46212
Location: yes

Posted: Mon May 19, 08 12:09 pm Post subject:
iww

OP

Joined: 28 Jul 2006
Posts: 4661
Location: Yorkshire

Posted: Mon May 19, 08 5:25 pm Post subject:

When I was growing up there were no migrant workers. I worked weekends and holidays on a local farm, probably being paid below the minimum wage (which I don't think existed then) and certainly in conditions that would these days warrant some kind of "risk assessment" (e.g. standing in a grain store whilst they poured more corn in, rather difficult to breath, or carrying 2 x 25Kg bags of potatoes at once because it was quicker that way). Maybe I was exploited, but I also earned a lot of money, and, perhaps more to the point, learned about hard work. So maybe the fruit farmers should recruit children.

RichardW

Joined: 24 Aug 2006
Posts: 8443
Location: Llyn Peninsular North Wales

Posted: Mon May 19, 08 5:54 pm Post subject:
Ditto above post. Justme

toggle

Joined: 30 Dec 2006
Posts: 11622
Location: truro

Posted: Mon May 19, 08 6:18 pm Post subject:
I had a choice of stuff like fruit picking or working in tourist trap catering type stuff. I would suspect the 14 hour shifts I was working were illegal then, the levels of hygiene defiantly were.

ros

Joined: 19 Jul 2005
Posts: 2469
Location: Beds

Posted: Mon May 19, 08 6:37 pm Post subject:
might not be very well paid, but these days I would have thought fruit picking was ideal work for teenagers in the long break between end of O's and start of September term for As. Was what we did.

Stacey

Joined: 18 Jul 2005
Posts: 8380
Location: Kernow

Posted: Mon May 19, 08 6:41 pm Post subject:
There's a long list of what children can't be employed to do on LA websites.

toggle

Joined: 30 Dec 2006
Posts: 11622
Location: truro

Posted: Mon May 19, 08 6:42 pm Post subject:

ros wrote:

might not be very well paid, but these days I would have thought fruit picking was ideal work for teenagers in the long break between end of O's and start of September term for As.
Was what we did.

I cleaned cages in a vet that summer iirc.

ros

Joined: 19 Jul 2005
Posts: 2469
Location: Beds

Posted: Mon May 19, 08 6:47 pm Post subject:

toggle wrote:

ros wrote:

might not be very well paid, but these days I would have thought fruit picking was ideal work for teenagers in the long break between end of O's and start of September term for As.
Was what we did.

I cleaned cages in a vet that summer iirc.

somewhat less legally than picking fruit I also worked behind a bar!

OP

Joined: 28 Jul 2006
Posts: 4661
Location: Yorkshire

Posted: Mon May 19, 08 6:55 pm Post subject:

Stacey wrote:

There's a long list of what children can't be employed to do on LA websites.

Something has gone wrong somewhere in all this ... and our children - as well as our small local farms and businesses - are losing out. The good old days were not necessarily that good, but somewhere between then and now common sense went out the window and was replaced by local authority risk assessments.

jamanda
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 22 Oct 2006
Posts: 35057
Location: Devon

Posted: Mon May 19, 08 7:18 pm Post subject:

ros wrote:

might not be very well paid, but these days I would have thought fruit picking was ideal work for teenagers in the long break between end of O's and start of September term for As.
Was what we did.

Agreed. But people of that age aren't children. And I don't see why the age of a person should stop them being covered by the same health and safety at work regulations as anyone else.

ros

Joined: 19 Jul 2005
Posts: 2469
Location: Beds

Posted: Mon May 19, 08 7:25 pm Post subject:

Jamanda wrote:

ros wrote:

might not be very well paid, but these days I would have thought fruit picking was ideal work for teenagers in the long break between end of O's and start of September term for As.
Was what we did.

Agreed. But people of that age aren't children. And I don't see why the age of a person should stop them being covered by the same health and safety at work regulations as anyone else.

Definitely as long as elf and safety is applying common sense --and be paid the going rate as well. But why are they not doing it? parents don't allow it? kids don't want to work? school's starting A level course at the end of the summer term?

jamanda
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 22 Oct 2006
Posts: 35057
Location: Devon

Posted: Mon May 19, 08 9:06 pm Post subject:
Well the article that sparked this thread was dated 12th May. Exams go on until the back end of June. Actually, in my opinion many sixth formers work too many hours (mostly bar and kitchen work and waiting on tables here). I ask what they are doing at the weekend, hoping to hear tales of teenage hijinks and frolicking to hear "working Friday night and Saturday and Sunday".

toggle

Joined: 30 Dec 2006
Posts: 11622
Location: truro

Posted: Tue May 20, 08 7:05 am Post subject:

Jamanda wrote:

Well the article that sparked this thread was dated 12th May. Exams go on until the back end of June.
Actually, in my opinion many sixth formers work too many hours (mostly bar and kitchen work and waiting on tables here). I ask what they are doing at the weekend, hoping to hear tales of teenage hijinks and frolicking to hear "working Friday night and Saturday and Sunday".

I think this may also be part of it, those teens looking for work can find the jobs in restaurants or bars or shops and that is easier work than fruit picking.

OP

Joined: 28 Jul 2006
Posts: 4661
Location: Yorkshire

Posted: Tue May 20, 08 7:12 am Post subject:

Well another difference between when I was a teenage farm labourer and now is that I was working because I wanted to ... not because I faced the prospect of going to university and coming out 3 years later with �30K of debts, which unfortunately seems to be the reality facing the new generation. I'm certainly not saying that everything was better back then, but something has gone very wrong somewhere.

Aeolienne

Joined: 03 Apr 2008
Posts: 1498
Location: Leamington Spa, Warks

Posted: Fri Oct 10, 08 8:27 pm Post subject:

Harvesting the fruits of your labourers

An article written by Tim Harford on the 16th of August, 2008.
Published on Undercover Economist.

For many business owners, getting the most out of staff is a perennial problem. In the case of fruit farmers, perhaps perennial is the wrong word: workers show up only for the summer harvest. In a couple of weeks they will be heading home, usually to a university course somewhere in eastern Europe.

Tough work for the fruit pickers, the business is also a headache for the owner, who must offer a pay scheme that both satisfies minimum wage laws and motivates workers in an industry in which slacking is an understandable temptation.

The owner of a large fruit farm business, �Farmer Smith�, was pondering the problem one Christmas, when he discovered that the connection between pay and performance was also an area where economists were scratching around for solid evidence.

And so an unlikely alliance was formed between Farmer Smith and the economists Oriana Bandiera, Iwan Barankay and Imran Rasul. The economists would design and administer pay schemes, and in exchange for that (and for confidentiality) Farmer Smith would let them treat his business as a gigantic laboratory for researching the nexus between pay, workplace friendships (which they mapped out) and workers� productivity.

The owner had been paying a piece rate � a rate per kilogram of fruit � but also needed to ensure that whether pickers spent the day on a bountiful field or a sparse one, their wages didn�t fall below the legal hourly minimum. The owner tried to adjust the piece rate each day so that it was always adequate, but never generous: the more the workforce picked, the lower the piece rate. But his workers were outwitting him by keeping an eye on each other, making sure nobody picked too quickly, and thus collectively slowing down and cranking up the piece rate.

Bandiera and her colleagues proposed a different way of adjusting the piece rate � one that workers could not influence with a collective go-slow � and measured the result. By the time the experiment was over, Farmer Smith�s initial scepticism had long evaporated: the new pay scheme increased productivity (kilograms of fruit per worker per hour) by about 50 per cent.

The next summer, the researchers turned their attention to incentives for low-level managers, who would also be temporary immigrant workers, but who would be responsible for on-the-spot decisions such as which workers were assigned to which row. The researchers found that managers tended to do their friends favours by assigning them the easiest rows. This made life comfortable for insiders, but was unproductive, since the most efficient assignment for fruit picking is for the best workers to get the best rows.

The researchers responded by linking managers� pay to the daily harvest. The result was that managers started favouring the best workers, rather than their own friends, and productivity rose by another 20 per cent.

Small wonder that the economists were invited back for another summer. They proposed a �tournament� scheme in which workers were allowed to sort themselves into teams. Initially, friends tended to group themselves together, but as the economists began to publish league tables, and then hand out prizes to the most productive teams, that changed. Again, workers prioritised money over social ties, abandoning groups of friends to ally themselves with the most productive co-workers who would accept them. In practice that meant that the fastest workers clustered together, and again, productivity soared � by yet another 20 per cent.

The series of experiments provided a fascinating confirmation that financial incentives can trump social networks, with some precision and much detail about the mechanisms involved. Bandiera and her colleagues have now stopped the experiments, in the belief that there is nothing more to be gained from this particular seam of inquiry. The owner does not seem to agree: he�s hired a consultant to keep on hatching new performance pay schemes.

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