| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| cab |
Strawberry Fields ForsakenBest headline in the Independent ever:http://tinyurl.com/43oltn Often a topic of discussion here in the past. Shame to see food, any food, rotting on the plant because of a lack of labour to pick it. |
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| vegplot |
Perhaps we should consider a slave economy. | ||||
| marigold |
Growers could consider paying more than minimum wage? Or market it right and they could get people to PAY for the privilege of picking the stuff...
Weight-reduction through fruit picking - why pay ££££ for a health spa when you can sweat in our polytunnels FREE? Nostalgic fruit-picking holidays - camp in our field free if you pick <nn>lb of fruit? Historic Land-Army experience weeks - bring your own uniform, all rations provided, singalong on Saturday night? |
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| cinders |
I used to love strawberry picking as a kid.Use to eat more than i picked  Picking strawberries is now called for
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| Fee |
Strawberry picking was great, one for the basket, one for the mouth, one for the mouth, one for the basket... | ||||
| Chez |
It's usually paid as piece-work, isn't it? Was when I used to do it, anyway. | ||||
| cinders |
Ye thats what i remember chez. My mum did all the work and we ate the strawberries as we picked.We would pick half a basket for the day,swop with her for a full basket so we could get paid 
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| Fee |
It was, as cinders says, you got paid by the basket, but it was a day out for us, a treat, so we used to leave most of the picking up to my Mum too
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| Treacodactyl |
Isn't this a case of people still expecting to not pay a reasonable amount for UK produce? | ||||
| gnome |
certainly a case of growers not wanting to pay minimum wage to slave labour. if they can't even get migrant workers to do it, just how bad are the wages and conditions? there are always hundreds of people descending on morecambe bay for cockle picking season - a task far more dangerous than picking strawberries. if they are really concerned about losing their crop, they should spread the word and change tactics - instead of hiring people to pick them to sell to supermarkets they should charge people to pick their own - say a fiver for a basket full.
if things get really desperate they can drop the price and invite local home brewers to pick a sackfull to make home made strawberry wine or jam. my guess is that they will rather let the fruit rot than see a drop in the price. after all, if there is few strawberries on the market, they can demand a higher price for them. |
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| cinders |
ours was a skive of school aswell as a treat
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| Helen_A |
I don't think it is ness. that they would rather see the fruit rot than pay 'minimum wage' - its that they have consistently found over the years that the locals don't want to pick for that sum (or more - the firm down the road from some friends in Cambridgeshire pay most of their pickers £8.00 an hour *plus* picking bonuses; which is a lot more than most of the local shop, office or factory jobs pay. But in spite of advertising locally they have very few locals even applying, and the majority of their workforce is from Eastern Europe (and a fair few of them are agricultural students and the like)).
Add into that what the supermarkets or big buying groups will actually pay for the crop, and the cosmetic standards they apply, and unless you have a big firm behind you you may not be able to pay more than a minimum wage anyway to even break even at the end of the year 
Helen_A |
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| cab |
I can buy a box of spanking good strawberries, picked in Histon, just under 5lb in weight normally, yesterday retailing on the market for £5.50. Bargain. Because of your next point:
The strawberries in the box are perfect, they're just not ideal 'strawberry' shape, at least not all of them. Funny old world, isn't it? |
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| Cho-ku-ri |
Britain is now full of middle class people who enjoy eating strawberries and nobody willing to pick them. In real terms the supermarkets are selling them too cheap. Our minimum wage legislation has now priced this labour intensive commodity out of production. Well done New Labour. | ||||
| cab |
Oh, and regarding fruit picking in Cambridgeshire, at least around Cambridge, one big problem is the seasonality of the work. Accomodation is such an expense here (it is everywhere of course but its a particular problem here) that seasonal work like that is especially uappealing. If you want seasonal work here, and you're young, fit and active, then you'd do better on the punt tours or in shops in Cambridge. | ||||
| Cho-ku-ri |
Instead of paying so much Tax credits and Disability Allowances, more people could and would go out to the countryside to pick fruit again 
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| cab |
Marvellous idea, getting the disabled to pick fruit, with only one obvious drawback... |
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| marigold |
CKR, I'm used to people who've never met hating me for being too ill to work, assuming I'm faking it and resenting my benefit payments, but suggesting the disabled should be sent into the countryside to pick fruit really is going a bit far. |
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| Cho-ku-ri |
It is well known that hundreds of thousands have been taken off unemployment and put on disability allowances to massage the figures. I'm not suggesting people with physical disabilities pick fruit, but of course it would be illegal for me to suggest they couldn't. If say you are off work due to stress, what better thing to do on a summer's day than pick strawberries with other people? If doctors can now suggest to depressed people to get out of the house and walk more, what is wrong with suggesting fruit picking? Vilify me as much as you like, but with economies crumbling here in the west, we are all in a position where fruit picking might be an option! | ||||
| Helen_A |
I also suspect, though, that a fair number of people who would go and pick fruit seasonally, can't actually do so as they would be expected to spend all their earnings on childcare to 'enable' them.
My grandma used to tell me all about how lots of people would earn good money picking with the 'help' of 'family labour' - and that the children were expected and encouraged to 'come along'... Not that she ever did that with my mum (lucky enough to have a housekeeping job where my mum was welcome and encouraged to come as company for the children of that household), but they knew of plenty of familes who did. Not that I'm advocating this of course - but it would be nice if it was an option... Helen_A (yes the lettuces are being planted - I'm using 'family labour' to do it )
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| cinders |
That why my mum went strawberry picking as you didn't have to worry about childcare | ||||
| Cho-ku-ri |
I picked fruit as a child with some of the 'roughest' people from Dundee. Some brought thier children, via the berry bus, to the field in their night clothes. 
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| Frewen |
I have no problem with picking fruit, I would quite like to
(once the children no longer need caring for - I'm not paying a minimum of £6 per hour to leave them with someone other than their parents). I've done a few jobs in my time, antisocial hours, high stress, sometimes low pay. I'm not shy of hard work. What I would like to say though, is having been clinically depressed there was no way at that point in my life I would have been able to conduct any kind of work. I couldn't leave the house, eat or sleep properly. I don't know if your comments were directed at those on benefits or the system that provides those benefits, but I hope it is the latter |
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| Jamanda |
That's a good idea - after all there's no point wasting good education on that sort 
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| marigold |
Is it? Speaking as someone with personal experience of "going through the system" of having to prove you really are too ill to work, I know it's not a simple matter of saying "Oh I feel too poorly to work" and the nice people at the DWP saying "OK, here's your Incapacity Benefit then". The stress of claiming benefit (and all the other sh*t you have to put up with being ill and unemployed) has not helped me recover from my neurological illness. And as for what you have to go through to try and get back into work... well, the system sure ain't designed to make it easy. I can't do hard work now, but I've not shied away from it in the past - hotel chambermaid, bar work, kitchen porter in a Little Chef. I could probably pick fruit 1 hour a day every other day without getting too ill, as long at it's before 10am so I don't get sunstroke. Not terribly convenient for the potential employer is it? No doubt I'm taking this too personally, but every time someone takes a pop at the feckless benefit-scrounging disabled they hurt all the honest disabled (who would much rather be working and earning proper money) and have no impact whatsover on the small minority of unrepentant scroungers who will scrounge no matter how difficult you make it for anybody to claim support from the state. |
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| cab |
I didn't know that. What evidence do you have for that claim? |
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| Cho-ku-ri |
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| Cho-ku-ri |
Ok. so we don't want to pick strawberries, we don't want to pay a fair price for strawberries to be picked by others, then let's grow our own or do without. | ||||
| cab |
The fair price I currently pay for high quality strawberries picked by others would appear to be a pittance. Would I pay more than that? Yes. |
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| Cho-ku-ri |
It was in the strawberry's natural season of summer when the schools were off. Not the plastic coated extended season of today. Perhaps this is why there is a shortage of pickers. The artificial season is now too long? |
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| gil |
That is how I spent my childhood; picking fruit from June to September with my parents, on fruit farms in Kent. |
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| Chez |
Tax credits are actually 'working tax credits' - ie, you have to have a job already to get them. Please don't jump in with statements that you haven't thought through? |
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| cab |
I ought to have my first outdoor ones ready, what, three weeks from now? And they're not even a really early variety. Well before the summer holidays. |
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| Cho-ku-ri |
Well here in Perthshire where Britain's Jam berries were grown, the season is a little later and the school holidays earlier. Of course they don't grow the vast acres here anymore for jam making. It is all plastic tunneled table berries that they grow for the supermarkets nowadays. I wonder how far our Hartley's jam berries have traveled, and who paid the pickers and at what wage? | ||||
| gnome |
in the not so distant past, students would supplement their spending money by fruit picking during their holidays - but it's not something they can do in term time. | ||||
| gnome |
actually, that suggestion is quite a good one - i'm not too fussed over strawberries anyway - i think they are very overated. i much prefer cherries or bananas. |
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| Behemoth |
IIRC the long summer holiday was set to allow children to do agricultural work.
Of course Pol Pot would have got the strawberries picked one way or another. |
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| gnome |
i think there is a lot of halcyon days rose spectacle here. strawberry picking today does not involve pleasant afternoons in the sun, gathering strawberries in a field in the fresh air - it involves long. hot sweltering tunnels of polythene greenhouses, no fresh air, no breaks, no pleasant butterflies and sunny afternoons in the country. i doubt that the money you make would pay for your bus fair out there, let alone the cost of a child minder. i'm sure the owners of the strawberry farms would have something to say about you bringing your children along. i suspect it would not b covered by their insurance. | ||||
| cinders |
certainly days gone by and fond memories
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