Time To Bring In The Harvest

Polly Toynbee writes:

There goes the last remnant of a better era. Farming minister David Heath announced the abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board, the last of the old wages councils. There are just four weeks of "consultation" before farm workers lose this special protection. The rest of the wages councils were eviscerated by Margaret Thatcher and axed by John Major in 1993, ending an era when governments saw endemic low pay as their concern.

In the old days, the sectors with workers at most risk of exploitation had their own wages councils, with representatives of employers and workers fixing pay and conditions, mindful of what an industry could bear. Hairdressing, catering, retail, laundry and tailoring had some of the lowest-paid and most vulnerable workers. Wages councils were founded in 1909, the year of the Liberal government's radical People's Budget, with its unprecedented taxes on the wealthy. What a sad paradox that, in their first return to government since Lloyd George, Heath, a Liberal Democrat, is killing off the last wages council.

His press release is headed: "Getting rid of outdated labour restrictions will mean more jobs." These days certain killer words flash out instant red alerts: "reform", "flexible", "harmonise" and "modernise" all signify their opposites. Heath's "plans to modernise the agricultural labour market" mean taking farm workers back in time. His plan for them to be "harmonised with the rest of the economy" won't feel harmonious when it "leads to a more flexible labour market" to "end an anomaly requiring farmers to follow outdated and bureaucratic rules".

Farm work is not noted for good pay and conditions. It is still one of the most dangerous occupations with a high accident rate. Isolated, under-unionised, with little choice of other work, a third of agricultural workers live in tied housing, exceptionally vulnerable to the whims of employers. That's why their wages council was allowed to survive when the others were scrapped. Their current minimum pay, which is legally enforced, is just 2p an hour above the national minimum. But the board also sets sick pay, holiday pay and a graded pay progression, important when so many work on small farms with little chance of promotion. The board ordains other conditions, such as warm clothing, essential for outdoor work. It sets a pay rate and age for child pickers, who will lose all protection from now on. (Nine-year-olds were discovered picking spring onions from dawn till dusk in freezing weather in Worcestershire last year.) The board sets fair rents for tied housing – £28 a week for a caravan – but there will be no rent limits from now on.

Richard Neville, a union member, drives a tractor on a Sussex farm. His farm-working parents were veterans of the last battle in 1976 over security in tied housing. "Wages are bound to fall back. The board fixes overtime rates at time and a half: we'll lose that, though sometimes we're doing 20 or 30 extra hours a week. There's a lot of poverty in these rural areas, because costs are high, but people don't see it." Labour's Mary Creagh, shadow environment secretary, is fighting to save the board. "Those who pick the apples should be able to afford to buy them," she says, watching the rise in rural poverty: "The most picturesque market towns now have food banks." One chance of reprieve comes from the Welsh assembly, which claims they have the right to prevent the board's abolition in Wales – though Defra denies that's within its powers: lawyers are at work on both sides.

Heath is right on this: the idea of a statutory board with legal enforcement officers, ordering employers to provide footwear and clothing to their workers, giving them three days' extra holiday, better sick leave on full pay and graded pay rates, does seem an oddly outdated anomaly. In a free market, why would the state intervene? Back in the 1970s workers' pay, rights and conditions were the stuff of politics. In those fractious times, unions' struggle to keep members' pay from falling far behind sky-rocketing inflation led to head-on confrontation with governments trying to hold inflation down. As the prices and incomes board strove to arbitrate, the net result was pay scales that made this country more equal than it had ever been in history – or will be again on the present trajectory. But all that was blown away spectacularly in the 1980s, as boardrooms turned kleptocrat. Within a few years the number of poor children shot up from one in seven to one in three, where it has stayed – and it will now worsen.

This week ONS figures reveal that real living standards have fallen by more than 13% since 2008 – but that virtually meaningless average hides a gigantic difference between high and low earners, as useful as averaging Zimbabwe and Manhattan. Resolution Foundation figures show that the incomes of the bottom half of households have stagnated ever since 2003: without change, stagnation is the new norm and recovery won't help. At £6.19, the real value of the national minimum wage has fallen back to 2004 levels. Everything this government does conspires to depress low incomes further, with cuts in credits and housing benefit as wages still fall behind high food and fuel inflation.

Labour contemplates the living wage, currently set at £7.20. Labour councils urge public and private employers to sign up. It's a great gesture when organisations do sign up, but it costs little for banks, local councils, KPMG or anyone else employing few minimum-wage staff. So far no large employer of the low-paid has signed up: no hotel, care home or catering chain, no supermarket, cleaning company or security guard provider. Voluntaryism isn't enough.

Labour should use its fight to save the Agricultural Wages Board to think again about the old wages councils. Bringing in the minimum wage was one of Labour's best achievements – but a single rate across all industries will always be a lowest common denominator, rising only at the pace of the most precarious sector. Market conditions in hairdressing, sandwich-making and care homes are unconnected. A fair rate set for each industry would help to keep wages up, avoiding the risk that the minimum wage is the norm, not a rock-bottom backstop. Wages councils could restore some of the best spirit of the postwar settlement, when the state did intervene on pay.

Pat Glass, of this Parish, has been taking on the Government’s failure to create the promised Supermarkets Ombudsman. Beyond that, we need to make the supermarkets fund investment in agriculture and small business, determined in close consultation with the National Farmers’ Union and the Federation of Small Businesses, by means of a windfall tax, to be followed if necessary by a permanently higher flat rate of corporation tax, and in either case accompanied by strict regulation to ensure that the costs were not passed on to suppliers, workers, consumers, communities or the environment.

There is the most pressing need to revive the movement of those who have resisted enclosure, clearances, exorbitant rents, absentee landlordism, and a whole host of other abuses of the rural population down to the present day. Those who obtained, and who continue to defend, rural amenities such as schools, medical facilities, Post Offices, and so on. Those who opposed the destruction of the national rail and bus networks, and who continue to demand that those services be reinstated. Those who have fought, and who continue to fight, for affordable housing in the countryside, and for planning laws and procedures that take proper account of rural needs. Those who object in principle to government without the clear electoral mandate of rural as well as of urban and suburban areas. Those who have been and who are concerned that any electoral reform be sensitive to the need for effective rural representation. Distributism and the related tendencies. And those who are conservationist rather than environmentalist.

Farm labourers, smallholders, crofters and others organised in order to secure radical reforms. County divisions predominated among safe Labour seats when such first became identifiable in the 1920s, while the Labour Party and the urban working class remained profoundly wary of each other throughout the period that both could realistically be said to exist at all, with several cities proving far less receptive to Labour than much of the nearby countryside. Working farmers sat as Labour MPs between the Wars and subsequently. The Attlee Government created the Green Belt and the National Parks. Real agriculture is the mainstay of strong communities, environmental responsibility and animal welfare (leading to safe, healthy and inexpensive food) as against “factory farming”, and it is a clear example of the importance of central and local government action in safeguarding and delivering social, cultural, political and environmental goods against the ravages of the “free” market.

The President of the Countryside Alliance is a Labour peer, Baroness Mallalieu, and its Chairman is a Labour MP, Kate Hoey. For at least three consecutive General Elections until 2010, few or no Conservative MPs were returned by the hunting heartlands of Wales, Yorkshire, the Midlands, Devon and Cornwall. The present Coalition means, either that Labour is now the only electoral option for the age-old rural Radicalism of the West Country and Hampshire, and for the combination of that with Unionism (or, at least, with a strong suspicion of rule from the Scottish Central Belt or from South Wales) in the North and South of Scotland and in Mid Wales, or else that the Labour Party now demands to be replaced with something that can indeed meet this profoundly pressing and electorally opportune need.