The Worker Support Centre and the Landworkers’ Alliance are pleased to announce a new partnership in the fight for rights and dignity for farm workers recruited via the Seasonal Worker Scheme.
This partnership will promote decent working conditions for migrant farmworkers in UK agriculture. Our organisations will work together with Migrant Worker Champions and their colleagues to develop a campaign to increase awareness of the work of seasonal workers, and their experiences in UK agriculture. This partnership will connect with farm workers across the movement for an alternative food system and build a coalition for change, to ensure decent work across the food supply chain and promote best practice from the sector.
The project will see a strong engagement with LWA’s FLAME and member organisers, alongside WSC’s intensive outreach and participatory engagement to identify leading farmworkers who are working to campaign for change. Highlighting the importance of decent work for all farmworkers as a central component of a healthy agroecological movement, the campaign will seek to increase engagement with issues affecting migrant seasonal farmworkers with the purpose of advocating for their interests and ensuring labour standards.
The Seasonal Worker Scheme allows for the recruitment of up to 47,000 workers for the UK’s agricultural sector. Under the scheme, farm workers are tied to one of six recruitment agencies known as Scheme Operators. Workers’s immigration status is tied to aScheme Operator, who acts as the worker’s visa sponsor and places them on farms they have contracts with. Workers seeking to leave their employer have to arrange for a transfer via their scheme operator. Scheme operators may refuse these requests, with 89 workers who approached the Worker Support Centre during January-July 2024 seeking support for refusal of transfer.
Workers currently have to meet many of the costs of migration, such as visa application costs, medical checks, and flights to the UK, and some report paying illegal fees to third party recruiters. These costs can run into thousands of pounds, representing several months’ wages in a worker’s home country. Workers frequently meet recruitment costs by incurring debts or selling possessions. High debts can make it difficult for workers to leave an employer that is mistreating them, and result in consequences for workers if they are dismissed or returned home early.
Workers recruited via the scheme cannot stay in the UK for more than 2.5 months if working in poultry or 6 months if in horticulture. As a result, many key employment rights which are only granted after two years of work, such as protections against unfair dismissal, are not currently available to workers. Regardless of how many years workers return to work on this visa these rights will currently never be realised.
This project will explore the range of experiences of seasonal agricultural workers on the SWV, will support workers to claim spaces for change and communicate their story, and will engage key stakeholders across industry, government and civil society to improve standards and promote best practice so that we can achieve a fairer, more equitable and just farming system for all.
If you would like to be connected to this work, please contact Catherine McAndrew at catherine.mcandrew@landworkersalliance.org.uk and Valeria Ragni at Valeria@workersupportcentre.org.uk.