Strawberries have always been fashionable. A favourite Summer motif, you can often find them printed on all sorts of garments and accessories. I still remember the yellow shorts and skirt with their prints of large fuchsia strawberries I had in the early '80s as a young girl. Bought from an Italian department store - Upim - they were the main staple of my Summer wardrobe, almost a symbol of carefree happy days. Those long and happy strawberry summer days came to mind when I saw JW Anderson's S/S 22 menswear and resort collection. The collections feature indeed giant strawberries in natural colours or in surreal acid shades, replicated on tops, trousers, oversized bags and slide sandals. Bright and fun, youthful and cheerful, these designs lensed by Juergen Teller, do not hide anything conceptual about them. They are just strawberries for fun summer days. Strawberry fields forever. Or maybe not.
Soft fruit is indeed at the centre of a fruity saga in the UK. After Brexit happened growers in Britain feared the flow of migrant seasonal workers going to the UK to pick soft fruit such as strawberries, may have been disrupted by new laws and regulations.
Most of them usually come from Eastern Europe, in particular from countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. When free movement of migrant farm labour from the EU came to an end, it was replaced by a pilot Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme that allows people to go to the UK for up to six months to do farm work.
The scheme started in 2019 with an annual quota of 2,500 workers; in 2020 it was extended to 10,000 workers, while the government launched the "Pick for Britain" campaign to find domestic workers. As the campaign was a flop (of the people placed on farms by one major agency, fewer than 4% remained on assignment by the end of the season) and it soon became clearer that it was unlikely to find domestic force, in 2021 a new extension made 30,000 visas available for people to work on UK farms.
The amount of form-filling, post-Brexit immigration red tape and the Delta Coronavirus variant in the UK started posing serious issues for many seasonal workers who were discouraged, causing applications to fall dramatically (some farmers registered a 90% decrease in applications).
But there are other reasons that also discouraged migrant workers: demanding targets set by employers and zero-hour contracts (workers are paid for the amount of fruit they pick rather than by the hour, so if you don’t meet the targets you can be dismissed); besides, under free movement, workers could change jobs freely, but those under the seasonal workers pilot can only change roles with the help of the same agencies that brought them over and are not allowed to seek work in other industries.
Focus on Labour Exploitation (FLEX), a research and policy NGO organisation working towards an end to labour exploitation, reported workers being pushed to do more work, being given inaccurate information about earnings before travelling to the UK, being refused to transfer to other farms and ending up not earning enough to cover living costs and the debts they incurred in before moving to the UK.
Horticulture is in a crisis also in other countries and migrant workers are a vital asset to countries such as Italy and Spain: yet quite often these workers are not protected by laws and they are exploited, and obliged to sleep and live in unhealthy environments. The Coronavirus pandemic shed light on racial, healthcare and income disparities, but Brexit in the case of the UK is contributing to reveal the conditions of migrant seasonal workers in the UK. So, yes, let strawberries be forever trending in fashion, but never forget the labor conditions in strawberry fields.
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