January 28, 2006	Saturday	Zilhaj 27, 1426

LONDON: Thirteen instances of bonded or forced labour; 28 examples of illegal employment of children and young workers; 40 cases of illegal deductions from pay; 34 breaches of the law on the status of foreign workers; and any number of the usual abuses over excessive hours. These bald statistics from a new audit of 164 gangmasters who provide casual labour to the food and farming industry in Britain cannot begin to convey the human misery that is still routine for migrant workers in Britain today.

This evidence, which has been given to the government, can leave it in no doubt that scandalous conditions are as rife in British supermarket packhouses and food-processing factories as they were when the tragedy of Morecambe Bay forced them upon our attention two years ago.

The government now has, as the auditors point out, “compelling, first-hand evidence of ongoing serious abuses of agency workers in the entire food industry”.

So what’s the problem? Surely no one would want to block the legislation that was rushed through as a private member’s bill after Morecambe Bay and became the Gangmaster Licencing Act? Surely no one would want to frame the new law in such a way that the majority of places where these abuses occur are removed from its provisions? Yet that is what is being discussed this week in Whitehall.

Government departments are wrangling over whether they can exclude from licensing any labour supplied to ‘secondary processing’ — the packaging and processing plants where fruit, vegetables and meat are sorted, cut and packed, or turned into ready meals — as opposed to the farms where these are grown.

Nearly all the gangmasters found guilty of the litany of abuses listed above were operating in this secondary processing sector. In the real, squalid world of 24-hour shifts on the food production line, there is no clear line between work in the field or on the factory conveyor belt. The gangmasters bus people from jobs in one sector to those in another at their will. Sometimes the different activities take place on the same site.

Everyone in the industry understands this. That’s why there is remarkable unanimity on new regulation between sides that are often opposed.

—Dawn/The Guardian News Service