The ‘blind spot’ of agricultural research: Labour flexibility, composition and worker availability in the South West of England

Abstract

-Agriculture in the UK faces a number of long-term challenges as the global marketplace continues to expand, world population grows, and an increasing pressure is exerted upon natural resources. It needs to ensure its place as a competitive, resilient, and environmentally sustainable industry both locally and in the global arena. A key constraint which ties in with all of the above is the availability of labour. Both governmental departments in their statistical analyses of agriculture in the country, as well as academic research, largely ignore the existence of certain actors performing farm labour who are not the farmer, particularly agricultural contractors, and as a result, have missed the emergence of significant patterns occurring within the farm workforce. Accuracy of data concerning labour use in agriculture has, therefore, been extremely limited. This paper identifies the composition of labour on farm holdings in the South West of England today and recognises the increasing prevalence of flexible labour sources. It determines both current and anticipated future staffing needs of the holdings studied, which provides an indicator as to the gravity of agriculture's labour crisis in the South West.

Analyzing work organization on livestock farm by the Work Assessment Method

“…In addition to the quantification of work times, the method also makes it possible to describe the work organization flexibility using additional indicators, taking account of the sequence of periods and standard days at the scale of the farming year (adjustments of periods, rhythms of standard days, and origin of the periods). Other elements can also be considered to account for the flexibility of the work organization, such as the possible use of outside labor (numerical flexibility cited by Laurent 2003 andNye 2018), the versatility and replaceability of the workers (functional flexibility), and the porosity of the organization (Jean et al 1988), that is its ability for the famer to alternate periods of work with periods of non-work (the method does not quantify these non-work times by week, year, holidays, or weekends). These different aspects should be questioned in addition to the WAM diagnosis to complete the flexibility assessment (Chauvat et al 2016).…”

“…Thus, work organization is a central element to be taken into account when considering the future of livestock farms. There are different disciplines which deal with work and its organization on farms; Economics to answer questions about work duration and labor productivity (Bewley et al 2001;O'Brien et al 2006;Aubron et al 2009;Meul et al 2012), Sociology for questions about the social trends and norms that lead to workforce organization (Nye 2018), and Ergonomics to analyze working conditions (Jafry and O'Neill 2000). Livestock scientists and in particular French ones have worked on this subject since the 1980s, because their view has been that the changes in livestock management had to be taken into account through the influence of these changes on the work: New herd management practices and land uses modify the work, its rhythm and its duration of work, the possibility of changing the timing of tasks, the competence or know-how required, and workforce.…”

Labor in agrifood value chains: a scientometric review from Scopus

“…(2) paying low-wages for the most socioeconomic vulnerable people to supply the workforce demand in farms, such as women and migrants (Barrientos, 2013;Barrientos and Kritzinger, 2004;Barrientos et al, 2003;Dolan, 2004;Kritzinger et al, 2004;Tallontire et al, 2005). Recent European studies confirm the increasing contribution of contractors to the labor organization (Nye, 2018), and the permanent demand for precarious workers (Forget et al, 2019).…”

De contratistas de maquinarias a prestadores de servicios. Tensiones y disputas en la agricultura tercerizada de la región pampeana argentina

“…A las pequeñas unidades les permitiría aprovechar las economías de escala y garantizarle el acceso a trabajo calificado, que no podrían lograrlo si todo el proceso productivo se llevara a cabo en la misma unidad (Arnalte, 1991;Key, 2004). Para las grandes empresas, la subcontratación cumpliría una función esencial al reducir los costos laborales, por lo que, en este caso, no se estaría contratando maquinaria, sino flexibilizando la contratación de trabajadores (Nye, 2018).…”