The Brexit thread

[slowsider]

[Count Steer]

Agricultural worker shortage was expected about years ago, well before Brexit.

Training is one thing, but making it an attractive job is something else.

All fixable, but will cost money, for better pay, better conditions and better facilities. I know several cabbage pickers who like cabbages but hate living like tramps.

Excellent. All those crap jobs we used to import labour for, we'll just make the jobs nice and pay more. Move the fields indoors, provide thermal underpants, apprentice schemes, pensions...

(NI are trying to avoid using cheap European labour in their meat processing plants. Poots is trying to bring in non-English speaking Filipinos. )

[Cousin Jack]

Agricultural worker shortage was expected about years ago, well before Brexit.

Training is one thing, but making it an attractive job is something else.

All fixable, but will cost money, for better pay, better conditions and better facilities. I know several cabbage pickers who like cabbages but hate living like tramps.

Excellent. All those crap jobs we used to import labour for, we'll just make the jobs nice and pay more. Move the fields indoors, provide thermal underpants, apprentice schemes, pensions...

(NI are trying to avoid using cheap European labour in their meat processing plants. Poots is trying to bring in non-English speaking Filipinos. )

Once upon a time ALL the jobs got done by Brits. Some jobs were nice, some not. The shit jobs were left for the idiots who didn't learn anything at school - a strong incentive not to play the fool too much.

Farms were small, and farm labourers often worked part time for several farms to make up a full time job. It always was hard work (in my youth I have spent several freezing wet January days cutting broccoli so I know), but they were a part of the family. Then along came big agribusiness and big supermarkets, small farms got squeezed out, and big farms want to employ teams of very cheap labour with conditions that old-style farmers would not have imposed on a dog. They aren't interested in training, they do like immigrants because they or their mates can flog sub-standard accommodation to them to claw back a slice of the wages. And they will put up with a great deal of hardship to feed a family back home.

Meat process is another industry I do have just a small knowledge of. Working conditions are not nice, HR practices are dire. Again an industry that exploits immigrants who have zero knowledge of UK labour law, and have mates who rent overcrowded caravans.

All foreseeable as part of the price of cheap food. And entirely fixable, most of the UK population is overweight anyway, so a diet would do them good. Decent wages, fair conditions, and welfare benefits time limited. Get the job you want in 12 months, or do the job that is available

As for Poots, he is an Ulster Unionist. Enough said. I cannot be responsible for idiots or Irishmen.

[Horse]

The shit jobs were left for the idiots who didn't learn anything at school -

I have spent several freezing wet January days cutting broccoli

H, who worked in a motorway services for a while

[Mr. Dazzle]

I went to Uni with a guy from Hawaii who used to pick pineapples as a summer job. Bent double in 40° sunshine picking spikey fruit.

Not sure if that's better or worse than Broccoli in a freezing January.

[Cousin Jack]

I went to Uni with a guy from Hawaii who used to pick pineapples as a summer job. Bent double in 40° sunshine picking spikey fruit.

Not sure if that's better or worse than Broccoli in a freezing January.

Probably safer. Chopping broccoli stems with a very big sharp knife when you can't feel your fingers..........
I've done the hot bit too, stacking bales in the baking sun, although it wasn't 40.

[wheelnut]

We don’t need European workers
We don’t need European workers
We don’t need European workers
We don’t need European workers


Can we have some European workers please.



Hauliers and poultry workers to get temporary visas
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58694004

[DefTrap]

I quite liked working in the fields in the sunshine.
If it starts to pay well I'll go back to doing that in the summer and then drive my luxury truck around a few hours in the winter when I'm bored.

[demographic]

Once upon a time ALL the jobs got done by Brits.

IIRC a large upsurge in the use of itinerant farm workers was around the 14th century when crop rotation became more widespread. Seems Mrs Stewart did actually teach me something about history after all.
Think they were mostly Irish workers but not only them.
Gypsys played a large part and crops like Hops for beer have historically been picked by migrant/itinerant workers.
Oh and as a side note, they recently discovered (by examining the isotope makup in their tooth enamel) that some of the English archers on the Mary rose were more likely to have been Moors from North Africa and the Mediterranean.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/22 ... th-africa/

[DefTrap]

they'll be expensive for the consumer, but that's brexit.

Ftfy

Project Fear I think it was called. Bloody obvious.
But if we're all fine with that, then fine.

I'm minted natch' I couldn't give a fig about prices.

[Pirahna]

I'm in Ireland at the moment, there's other people posting on here from various parts of Europe, I've got friends spread all over too. Apparently there's a Europe wide shortage of drivers yet the only place that seems to be struggling to get stuff delivered is mainland UK. All Covid related obvs.

[DefTrap]

stay in the EU and pay lorry drivers a pittance and keep using forrin ones, then yes, it's Brexit's fault.

The option to pay more was always available surely? As was making conditions better.
Unless patriotic Britain was fine with allowing Romanian lorry drivers to shit in carrier bags on pitiful wages but not our own kings of the road.

[Cousin Jack]

But these days it's a single bloke in a tractor that does all the work, you can run a sprawling farm with less than half a dozen people,.................{?

In this part of the world it isn't a single farm, it is 20 small farms, up to 30 or 40 miles apart, all run by a big company. So we also get tractors towing farm machinery doing 30 miles on the main road, morning and night, to get from the base to the fields.

[Saga Lout]

...
Oh and as a side note, they recently discovered (by examining the isotope makup in their tooth enamel) that some of the English archers on the Mary rose were more likely to have been Moors from North Africa and the Mediterranean.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/22 ... th-africa/

And Anne Boleyn was black as well.

There seems to be a concerted effort to convince us that the UK has always been an ethnically diverse society, even though some of us are old enough to know that's not true. Growing up in the North West in the 1950s, pretty much the only black faces I saw were coal miners and mummers.

[DefTrap]

There seems to be a concerted effort to convince us that the UK has always been an ethnically diverse society, even though some of us are old enough to know that's not true. Growing up in the North West in the 1950s, pretty much the only black faces I saw were coal miners and mummers.

Lolz.
Just because you didn't get invited to the ghetto, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I've never drunk a pint of mild in a Northern pub with a miner, on his way home from brass band practice. Nor had my pockets felt by a cockernee tyke, after my pocket watch. I thought they were made up.

[slowsider]

...
Oh and as a side note, they recently discovered (by examining the isotope makup in their tooth enamel) that some of the English archers on the Mary rose were more likely to have been Moors from North Africa and the Mediterranean.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/22 ... th-africa/

And Anne Boleyn was black as well.

There seems to be a concerted effort to convince us that the UK has always been an ethnically diverse society, even though some of us are old enough to know that's not true. Growing up in the North West in the 1950s, pretty much the only black faces I saw were coal miners and mummers.

Perhaps you didn't get out much
http://revealinghistories.org.uk/what-e ... gland.html

[Docca]

The shoe pic was me last night trying to order some Onitsuka Lawnship NMs.

693F45CA-8586-4D6B-B871-3F47E4DAF503.jpeg (801.61 KiB) Viewed 394 times

[Horse]

And Anne Boleyn was black as well.

There seems to be a concerted effort to convince us that the UK has always been an ethnically diverse ... pretty much the only black faces I saw

Are black people the full extent of your definition of 'ethnic' for diversity?

[demographic]

And Anne Boleyn was black as well.

There seems to be a concerted effort to convince us that the UK has always been an ethnically diverse society, even though some of us are old enough to know that's not true. Growing up in the North West in the 1950s, pretty much the only black faces I saw were coal miners and mummers.

I would argue that it's the other way round, there seems to be a concerted effort to convince us that the UK has been just full of Brits and nobody else despite any evidence to the contrary and our royalty being foreign for hundreds of years.

I just pointed out that not ALL workers were natives as had been suggested and then gave an instance where people might be surprised that crew members off the Mary Rose weren't born bred and buttered in England. Kind of triggers some people that one, no idea why.

[Mr. Dazzle]

North West mining towns are famous for their ethnic diversity even today of course