Farmers’ dislike of Brexit growing
Recruiting group: Rules led big ‘drop in immigrant workers’
BOSTON, England — For four decades, the prime agricultural land that Sarah Pettitt’s family rented near its home produced bumper crops of vegetables, including purple sprouting broccoli destined for the shelves of upscale British supermarkets.
But when post-Brexit migration rules kicked in, curbing recruitment from Eastern Europe, a vital stream of workers dried up in this area close to Britain’s eastern coastline.
Pettitt said she had little choice but to cut production by one-fifth.
“If you can’t get people to come and harvest it, you’re not going to take your pound notes out of your back pocket and chuck them in the fire,” she said as gray clouds hung over the 100-acre expanse of flat, fertile land that her family routinely rented from a local farmer but has now given up.
Two years after Britain left the European Union’s economic area, ending the ability of the bloc’s citizens to automatically work in Britain, the effects of Brexit are unfolding across the economy.
One of the clearest is a shortfall of 330,000 workers, mostly in less-skilled jobs, including transportation, retail and hospitality, according to the Center for European Reform and U.K. in a Changing Europe, two research institutes.
That dearth of workers has hit the food and farming sectors particularly hard. Last year, about $27 million worth of fruit and vegetables went unharvested, according to a survey by the National Farmers’ Union.
In the survey, 40% of respondents said they had
suffered crop losses, and more than half said they had cut back production.
Pettitt, for one, would welcome more Poles, Latvians or Lithuanians to Boston — “that would be fantastic,” she said.
But in the years since Britain voted to quit the European Union, many have left the country, and Brexit is making it hard to recruit replacements. And harvesting crops, she said, is a job many Britons have long avoided.
Brexit has meant “a massive drop in immigrant workers,” according to an assessment by an agricultural recruiting group.
At the time of the vote in 2016, Brexit supporters were chafing at what they felt was a loss of sovereignty to the European Union, notably on control of immigration.
Opinion polls now show that Britons’ sentiments have begun to shift against Brexit, as business owners cite difficulty in finding workers, as well as thorny trade issues and what they describe as onerous paperwork requirements.
In Boston, where residents strongly supported Brexit, there is little evidence that attitudes have changed toward the European Union. But people like Pettitt are coming to realize the effects of Brexit on their own lives and livelihoods.
Located 160 miles north of London, Boston has became a prime example of Britain’s 21st-century population shifts.
When a group of former Communist countries joined the European Union in 2004, Britain was one of only three of the bloc’s
nations that immediately opened their labor markets to the new workforce. At the time, Poland’s economy was suffering from high unemployment, and hundreds of thousands of Poles moved to Britain, including highly motivated young people with good qualifications.
With many jobs to be had, particularly in farming and food processing, Boston swelled in size after 2004.
But the influx of immigrants put pressure on schools and medical services, stoking a local backlash that eventually contributed to a pro-Brexit sentiment in the town a decade later.
But with the onset of Brexit, the situation was basically reversed — now workers from countries like Poland could not come to Britain to work without a visa. At the same time, the economies of countries in Eastern Europe improved, making jobs there more attractive and luring some — even those who had the right to stay in Britain — back home.
“It doesn’t seem to be as advantageous for some East European employees to come over and try and make a living because it’s more competitive to be back in their own country,” said Simon Beardsley, the CEO for Lincolnshire Chamber of Commerce, a business group, referring to agriculture, food processing and hospitality.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, even more drifted home, and some of those who stayed anyway moved away from farm work.
Replacing them is tough.
Employment agencies in Britain still recruit many workers from abroad. But Pettitt, who once employed as many as 22 people, said that even with immigration from faraway places, including the Middle East and Asia, there are not enough workers for her to sustain her previous production, especially at peak times.
She was finding it difficult, she said, to find people — including Britons — who were willing to work on farms, or who were as motivated and reliable as those from Eastern Europe.
“They come with all the best intentions on the Monday, moan and groan about the fact that they had to arrive at 7,” she said. “They’d stay, but you’d not see them the next day. It’s all too hard or too difficult or too uncomfortable.”