Wanted: British staff ... work ethic would be nice
Comment Fordyce Maxwell
Ididn’t have great hopes for a television programme called “British Workers Wanted” and that was a correct assumption. After about ten minutes of “I’ve got bad knees/bad back/i wouldn’t get out of bed for £7.50 an hour” and “I just don’t want to work, to be honest” I switched off.
The attitude of most of those interviewed was summed up by the owner of a recruitment agency in Bognor desperate to find British workers to replace departing Eastern Europeans worried about the implications of Brexit.
Talking of the reluctance of home-bred Britons to do a day’s, mainly manual, work for what is now thought of as a small wage, she said: “You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make the f ****** drink.” Well, quite. The flaw in that succinct analogy was that the recruitment agency couldn’t even get potential workers to water. The Eastern Europeans are leaving and the British don’t seem to want to know about low-paid seasonalortemporaryjobs in hotels, care homes and agriculture.
Immigrant workers prepared to work harder than the natives is not new. Irish workers used to come to Scotland and England for the summer, starting with singling turnips through to picking potatoes and shawing turnips and sugar beet, living in bothies and sending money home.
There was a noticeable difference even then in the way they approached a job and the way a squad from the local town went about a day’s potato picking. Anyone who ever drove a potato digger, turning up a drill at a time for the squad to pick into baskets to tip into a trailer, can remember the abuse and invective if the pickers thought each new drill was coming round too quickly.
Friends involved with berry-picking squads in Fife and Angus, an involvement that included trying to collect bus-loads of pickers from housing estates, maintain that was even more educational.
The arrival of seasonal workers from Eastern Europe in the past 30 years changed that. Like the Irish workers of half a century ago they came prepared to work hard and earn as much as they could from a physically demanding job. They were, and are, prepared to put in the hours and stick at a job until it’s done.
Some came to stay and have become regular, valued, workers particularly on dairy, pig, poultry and fruit farms. In city life Polish plumbers – often a generic term for all East Europeans – have become a byword.
The same is true on many British farms where their work ethic is also a byword. It is remarkable the number of farmers who can tell a variation of the same story, that of offering training and jobs to local youngsters and getting no takers. Either that or a few turn up for a day or so then quit. Some never make it past the first lunchbreak. The East Europeans get stuck in.
The question is why this should be. Are all youngsters seduced by TV reality shows that hold out a promise of making big money with relatively little effort? Why pick rasps for £8 an hour when you can make videos or write a blog in your bedroom and hope?
Are they brought up with a sense of entitlement, the belief that no-one has to work hard to achieve anything? Is too much done for them?
It’s hard to know. Without harping on the so-called good old days, most of us brought up on farms were doing chores from an early age. By early teens at busy times of the year in school holidays and weekends we were doing a full day’s work.
Many rural and country town youngsters were also working from an early age, contributing to the family income. We grew up expecting to work and some couldn’t wait to get at it.
Our only hope is that against much evidence there are more youngsters than we think who still have that attitude. As well as the workshy in recent years I’ve met local diligent, skilled young tradesmen and farm staff who work hard and have ambitions. But we need more of them.