The supermarket sandwich furore shows multinationals’ EU interests
Jonathan Lindsell, 11 November 2014
Yesterday it emerged that Greencore is to recruit 300 Hungarians to work in its Northampton sandwich factory. The company makes fresh lunches for M&S, Waitrose, Tesco and Sainsbury’s and is opening a £35m new facility in 2016. They advertised jobs in the UK first, but quickly turned to central Europeans for labour after it became clear not enough Midlanders were interested.
This embarrassing story came to light at a bad time for Prime Minister David Cameron, who is already under pressure for failing to give MPs a vote on controversial EU policing and criminal justice measures like the European Arrest Warrant. He has also promised to reform the EU’s free movement principle, but was told by Nordic heads of state last week that he would be blocked. Cameron spoke to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) on Monday morning and was told that employers supported high immigration.
One interpretation of the sandwich story is simply that Britons are too work-shy, partly as a result of the comparatively ‘generous welfare system’, so Greencore was forced to hire from further afield. In this instance, the picture is more complicated. Northampton’s unemployment is only 2.4%, under half of the national average (6.2%), meaning there really might not be many locals available for the job.
It’s understandable why many would not want such employment. The job advertisement made clear that workers would have plenty of overnight and weekend shifts, and did not display the salary offered. Greencore, the world’s largest sandwich manufacturer with annual revenue of £1.2 billion, is known as an undesirable employer.
A Unite Union employment tribunal in 2012 found they paid most employees minimum wage, and the Irish company did not tell Channel 4 News what the Northampton recruits would earn. The 2012 tribunal told Greencore to pay Hull workers £1.2 million after unilateral contract changes, although strike action was needed to achieve this.
As ‘UsvsTh3m’ point out, reviews on the anonymous employer-ratings website Glassdoor are excoriating. They include charges of bullying, overwork, unsafe and unsanitary conditions, holiday cancellation and a lack of compassion: ‘terrible culture, everyone hates work…Sweatshop mentality’. Arguably EU migrants make the best employees, not only because they are attracted by wages higher than those in their home countries, but because they are unlikely to be union members or fully aware of employment law.
This reflects how the EU works for big business in general. It creates such a wide talent pool that they can offer rock-bottom conditions, knowing someone somewhere in Europe will be desperate enough after the Eurocrisis and austerity to take the job. Small fines for breaking employment rules are mere slaps on the wrist and do not appear to change behaviour. If a country comes down too heavily on enforcement, most businesses can simply relocate within the single market. Their customers and suppliers will be the same, product regulations will be the same, their labour pool will be the same, the factory will simply be on another border.
The picture becomes clear. The sandwich factory is not opening for over a year.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/11225271/Earl-of-Sandwich-says-migrant-workers-can-make-good-or-better-sandwiches.html
No British worker is going to be applying for jobs on a minimum wage that far in advance. The recruitment of foreigners will be done through an agency, probably foreign, which will be able to deliver workers in bulk when the factory is ready.
Here is what the ex-boos of Greggs says about foreign workers in his industry:
‘Sir Michael Darrington, a former chief executive of Greggs, said it seemed a “bit of a nonsense” for the firm to be considering hiring staff from abroad when the factory will not open until 2016…
‘Sir Michael told the same programme he did not believe people needed to be recruited from abroad, adding: “There are pockets – central London and London is a little bit of a different market, but apart from that I don’t think it’s a very big issue. “
In parts of the country without large numbers of immigrants native Britons can generally be found to do the jobs which employers, politicians and the media frequently claim they will not do. This gives the lie to the canard of the British being work-shy.
It would be interesting to know where the jobs were advertised in England and the time they were advertised for. The company probably restricted their English advertising to the local government Job Centres for only a short time before turning to foreign recruiters. If this was the case the local unemployed would have little time to respond.
The recruitment of foreign workers is likely to be a very different kettle of fish. They will almost certainly be recruited through an agency abroad which will have the workers lined up before the jobs are advertised in England.
There is also a great difference in earning the minimum wage (which will be topped up by in-work benefits such as tax credits, child benefit and housing and council tax benefit) if you are coming from a low wage economy, than there is earning the minimum wage if you are British. That is because any money saved will have several times its purchasing power in the low wage country from which the worker hails compared with its purchasing power in Britain.
Someone who is prepared to rough it for a year or two living in overcrowded accommodation could probably save £5,000 without much difficulty when the in-work benefits are added to the minimum wage income and the recently hugely increased personal tax allowances (soon to be £10,500 pa) are taken into account.
£5,000 could buy you a house in the lowest wage economies and even in economies such as Poland which have increased their GDP considerably since they have joined the EU, a multiplier of three or four times would not be unreasonable. Place a British worker in a position where they could go abroad to do a low paid menial job and come away with enough money to buy a property in Britain and there would be no shortage of takers for such work.
Willingness to work is almost always a matter of pay. If I advertise for someone to work in the sewers for £150 a week I am unlikely to get any takers. If I advertise for such a worker at £1,000 per week I will get plenty of applicants.
More generally, the idea that any employer has the right to import as many foreign workers as they want to expand their business is pure rootless capitalist behaviour which ignores the wishes and interests of the native population. The right to run a private business in Britain (or any other nation state) should be constrained by what the native population can do. If you can’t find the labour in Britain or hire the skills you need from people who do the work abroad, you don’t run your business in Britain.
Read more at http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/05/17/helping-boris-johnson-to-understand-why-foreigners-get-all-the-jobs/
They advertised with ‘a big poster’ outside the factory and on their website through October. Their spokesperson told the Daily Mail that they’d tried hard to recruit in the UK.
Big deal. That is a far cry from using a private recruitment agency or foreign gangmaster which you can bet happened with the foreign recruits. Putting up a poster outside the factory or advertising on their website is unlikely to make many people aware of the vacancies.
It would be interesting to know if they advertised the job in the local job centre.