'The reality is cheap food tends to mean cheap labour and we need to start thinking a lot more about this as we encourage supermarkets to vie with each other over price wars.'
-Prof. Tim Lang, Thames Valley University[61]

A Panorama documentary screened in June 2000 exposed just how vulnerable migrant workers are to exploitation by 'gangmasters'.[62] Gangmasters, who act as an informal employment agency, hire casual labour to work on industrial farms, in packhouses and canning factories to produce much of the food that ends up on supermarket shelves. The film illustrates how migrant workers from Eastern Europe are housed in damp accommodation, moved around so they cannot make friends or learn English and are unable to return home as they are indebted to the gangmasters who pay them next to nothing. As many hvae come to the UK illegally and speak poor English, they have no means of redress and end up trapped in a cycle of work and low pay at the hands of the gangmasters.

MP's from the Environment, food and Rural Affairs Select Committee (2003) were daming of the supermarkets, stating,

"We are convinced that the dominant position of supermarkets in relation to their suppliers is a significant contributory factor in creaing an environment where illegal activities by gangmasters can take root. Intense price competition and short timescales between orders put great pressure on suppliers who have little opprtunity or incentive to check the legality of the labour which helps them meet these orders."

Trade Union researcher, Don Pollard, informally estimates that there are 100,000 gangworkers working on farms and in pack houses in the UK. Of these, around 30,000 could be undocumented migrants.

Despite years of campaigning by trade unions, gangmasters are still unregulated and are free to abuse British and immigrant farm workers at will. The same exploitation of undocumented migrants has been going on in the USA and across Europe for years.

Shop-workers' rights

The major supermarkets employ around three-quarters of a million people in the UK. Over two thirds of employees in food retailing are part-time, the majority are women and many are students and temporary or agency workers.

Most retail checkout operators (84% women) fall in the bottom ten percent of non-manual occupations with average earnings of £184.70 a week. A significant percentage do not earn enough to pay NI contributions and are thus excluded from pensions and other contribution-based benefits.[64]

Most retail companies use a starter rate for new employees whilst they undergo 'training' so with the high turn-over rate amongst students and the minimum wage not applying for under 18 year olds, they can get away with extremely low pay.

Although flexible hours suit employees such as mothers and students, the system is not without its problems. Staff can find their hours altered arbitrarily by managers to cover busy periods or staff shortages. Its no wonder that staff turnover on the shop floor at the major grocery chains averages 26% a year. Retailers complain that because of the nature of the job they are often forced to employ staff who lack the skills they require. 'Dedication, enthusiasm and motivation were among the attributes seen as lacking in shopfloor staff'.[65]

When the Sunday Trading Act became law in 1994 there was protection for those who didn't want to work Sundays. That right is being removed for all new starters as many have Sunday only contracts or contracts that stipulate Sunday as one of the possible working days. Formerly, in order to entice workers to work weekends overtime premium payments were made usually at the rate of up to time and one half for Saturday and double time for Sundays. At the time of the Act, USDAW met with the major retailers in the Shopping Hours Reform Council where a 'gentleman's agreement' was made to protect weekend premiums.[66] According to USDAW, weekend premia have now largely disappeared.

Many supermarkets have been looking at ways to cut back on the need for the check-out till. Asda has been working on technology to scan the whole trolley at once using radio tagging. Tesco is very keen on similar Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags which it has trialed in some of its stores, and provoked local protests. Campaigners claim that the tags may not be de-activated when shoppers leave the store with purchased items, which will mean that a shopper can then be tracked by the store, or whoever, by the tagged products. Safeway has also pioneered customers using hand held scanners.[67] These technological changes would ultimately reduce the number of jobs for shop-workers.

According to the Labour Research Department:[63] All the major supermarkets recognise unions except Marks and Spencer, which is strongly unionised in Belgium and France, and John Lewis, who own Waitrose. John Lewis, however, is a partnership, run on the priniciple of 'worker's co-ownership' in which every employee is a partner and owns the company. At Sainsbury's (174,000 employees) and Safeway (92,000 employees), unions only have rights for consultation or individual representation. At Tesco, the largest UK employer, employing 221,000 workers (2003), the shop-worker's union, USDAW, has full recognition rights. USDAW represents 188,350 supermarket employees including over 100, 000 at Tesco (USDAW membership figures). The GMB has sole union rights at Asda (117,000 employees).

Many feared the potential impact on labour rights of Wal-Mart's entry into the UK market as cut backs in this area is one way in which Wal-Mart has achieved its low prices. In the USA, Wal-Mart's wages are well below the American average for the industry with many of their employees able to claim the equivalent of UK income support.

Wal-Mart are famously anti-union and practice the hiring of part-time, temporary and casual labour to try to get around employment legislation, usually dismissing workers before they are entitled to claim redundancy and unfair dismissal.[68]

Wal-Mart is also facing the largest employment discrimination class action in American history, after being charged with discriminating against female employees in pay, promotion and training, and with retaliating against women workers who complained about the alleged abuse. This involves all 700,000 women who worked for the company in 1996-2001.

Wal-Mart is also renowned for putting pressure on its suppliers to reduce costs which invariably leads to cuts in jobs and wages, and worsening working conditions in the USA. This also encourages suppliers to source from free-trade zones with no labour protection and where underage labour can be exploited. Many claims have been made against Wal-Mart for exploiting underage labour in Bangladesh and Guatemala. A recent Oxfam report showed that the other UK supermarkets are equally guilty.[69]

GMB representatives have found that since the merger, Asda has undermined their position by not inviting them to the induction of new recruits, and not making membership information widely available to employees.[70]

References
[61] Professor Tim Lang. Centre for Food Policy. Thames Valley University quoted from Gangmasters documentary (see below).
[62] 'Gangmasters' Panorama BBC1 Transmitted 19/6/00 Transcript on http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/audio_video/programmes/.../ transcript_19_06_00.tx
[63] 'Unions make In-roads into No-Go areas' Labour Research Department press release 1/9/99
[64] See 'Race to the Top' research on Labour Rights in the UK www.rttt.org Module 3
[65] 'The Big Staff Checkout' 20/9/03 www.grocertoday.com
[66] 'Supermarket Wars' by Steve Davison in Socialist Appeal. www.socialist.net/74/supermarket_wars
[67] Keynote Report Supermarkets and Superstores 2001
[68] See Wal-Mart Watch website www.walmartwatch.com/info/
[69] Oxfam UK 'Trading Away our Rights: Women working in global supply chains' (Feb 2004); 'Praise Uncle Sam and pass the 18p an Hour' by Greg Palast. The Observer. 20/6/99.
[70] Personal communication with GMB researcher Ida Clemo 2001