THE GUARDIAN

COMMENT

The 19 dead cockle-pickers were victims of modern business practices

Felicity Lawrence
Monday February 9, 2004
The Guardian

It has taken 19 bodies on a Morecambe beach to bring the scandal of modern working conditions to public attention. While police vow to bring to justice the ruthless gangmasters who sent migrants out against such treacherous tides, we reel in shock at this sudden exposure of the brutal exploitation that has been taking place right under our noses. Yet we are still talking of victims of "sands and snakeheads", as though last week's tragedy was an unfortunate conjunction of climate and crime.

It is the nature of the free market, however, rather than its rogue elements, that we should be examining now. Today's food and manufacturing sectors are dependent on hidden armies of cheap migrant labour, both legal and illegal. They cut our daffodils in Cornwall, pack our carrots in Lincolnshire and pick our fruit in Kent. They piece together our microwaves in the north and build our electrical goods in the south.

This is the new 21st-century global business model, where "efficient" manufacturers and retailers talk of driving costs out of the chain. They avoid tiresome forward contracts committing them to specific volumes. Such contracts would help suppliers plan their factory rotas, but they also entail a risk of under- or over-supply. Instead, retailers and manufacturers order "just in time" from wherever is cheapest around the globe, waiting for their barcode scanning to tell them how much consumers are buying. Instant communications allow them to relay what they need at a moment's notice. Modern transport networks enable them to have it delivered with unprecedented speed. To survive in this brave new world, today's supplier must leap to in equally short order, so they pass the risk down the line to those at the bottom, to labourers who are turned on and off like a tap to meet fluctuating demand. And if necessary they must be kept hard at it until the orders are finished.

Few workers in developed industrial economies are prepared to tolerate the conditions this new model creates. In the west, we imagine we left behind the brutal pecking order of the docks, or the semi-slave hours of the textile factories, at the turn of the 20th century. But this new flexible ordering system still needs not just flexible labour, but flexible labour in excess. For to turn labour on and off like a tap, you must have a surplus.

The need has been met by migrants, many of whom are drawn into Europe by collapsing agricultural prices at home, who are desperate enough to take whatever they are offered and frightened enough to be docile.

Instead of protecting them, we try to send them home, imagining illogically that we can enjoy the free movement of goods and capital that globalisation has brought, but can shut out the free movement of labour that has inevitably accompanied it. If they are organised by crime, it is because the new business model refuses to take responsibility.

But for their numbers, the Chinese who died might have gone unnoticed. Many others do. Two Poles killed in a greenhouse accident last summer. An unidentified migrant electrocuted when he pushed the wrong button on a tractor, closing the arms of a crop sprayer on overhead power lines. A coach crash in the snow at dawn last month between two vehicles taking Czechs and Portuguese to work in a bacon factory. These accidents happen because migrants are routinely exposed to danger - driving machinery without training, out on the roads before the gritters, sent on to quicksand without knowledge of the tides.

Nor is there anything unusual about the conditions in which the Chinese labourers and their compatriots were living - hot-bunking, dozens to a small flat, inhumane working hours, pitiful pay. Today's gangmasters house 21st-century workers in squalor like this right round the country. I have come across cases from Bristol to Sussex to East Anglia, from the 65 migrants living in an old 10-bedroomed hotel with no kitchen and no heating to the 27 camping in a small house without sanitation. Extortionate rents are deducted from wages for this housing to disguise the fact that migrants are being paid less than the minimum wage.

Instead of giving permanent jobs to regular staff, many factories have devolved a substantial part of their workforce to employment agencies, which subcontract to gangmasters - so that any contractual relationship between the factory and its labour is at several steps removed.

These conditions are not confined to migrants in the developed world. Globalisation has seen migrations within developing countries too, with newly urbanised workers providing "flexible" labour 16 hours a day, seven days a week, from spreading slums in Africa and south-east Asia, to meet retailers' "just-in-time" ordering.

The gangmasters work not in a vacuum but in a globally competitive free market. The drive to reduce consumer prices is being led from the US, and in particular by the world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart. Even the pro-business magazine Business Week recently questioned whether Wal-Mart, which owns Asda in the UK, and its seemingly virtuous business model, might have perverse consequences.

With sales of $245bn in 2002, Wal-Mart is bigger than all but 30 of the world's largest economies. It has cut tens of billions of dollars out of the supply chain and passed the savings on to shoppers as bargain prices. It has a global workforce of 1.4 million people, and plays a huge role in wages and working conditions worldwide. It is driving productivity across the globe. It is also vigorously anti-union. Its prices are lower because it has aggressively squeezed costs, including labour costs. In anticipation of its arrival with 40 new stores in southern California, other supermarkets have tried to freeze or reduce wages and benefits, saying they will not be able to compete if they don't.

In this country, it is casual labour that has felt the squeeze of price wars. Out in the fields of East Anglia or on the sandbanks of Lancashire, it is as though we have regressed to the dark days of the early industrial revolution. In the name of a flexible workforce and cheap consumer goods, two centuries of reforming legislation have been thrown away - the factory acts pioneered by philanthropists' sense of humanity and shame, the employment regulations fought for by early labour organisations. These were introduced to curb the abuses and excesses of that last great revolution in trade. Regaining these basic rights in a global labour market is a huge challenge.

· Not on the Label, Felicity Lawrence's book on the politics of food, is published by Penguin in May

felicity.lawrence@guardian.co.uk