Abstract
As international borders closed amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Australian horticultural industry experienced a dramatic reduction of key groups of workers upon which it has come to depend, particularly at harvest. These labour shortages focused public attention on the importance of seasonal labour for horticultural production and the availability of fresh fruit and produce, resulting in a paradoxical revaluation of that work. On the one hand, seasonal farm work was revalued as essential labour, and migrant workers were acknowledged as critical to Australia’s food security. On the other hand, the increased visibility of seasonal farm work highlighted its systematic devaluing as so-called unskilled work that is done for low wages, under often poor conditions, and that is widely figured through racialized narratives. Faced with the prospect of critical labour shortages, both industry and government sought—and largely failed—to reinscribe the terms by which seasonal labour was imagined in attempts to make it attractive to “local” workers. What resulted was an entrenching of uneven distributions of precarity, risk and vulnerability along the fault lines of race and migration status.
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Introduction
Over recent decades, the Australian horticultural industry has come to depend, as have many global horticultural industries, on labour performed by highly mobile, seasonal workforces. Notwithstanding periodic media exposés of poor working conditions, the mobility and labour of this essential workforce—predominantly made up of non-white temporary migrants and concentrated in rural locations—have gone largely unremarked upon, and remained invisible to, the Australian citizenry. In March 2020, however, as borders snapped shut following the COVID-19 outbreak, horticultural labour issues were thrust into the public and political spotlight. International border closures saw Australia’s overall horticultural workforce plummet as many temporary migrant workers—including those on Working Holiday Maker (WHM) visas, international students and Pacific Islanders employed through the Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) guest worker scheme—returned home and replacements were unable to arrive. The heightened visibility of seasonal labour issues resulting from these shortages produced a paradoxical revaluing of this work. On the one hand, there was a renewed valuing of seasonal farm work as “essential” labour and of migrant workers as critical to Australia’s food security—an awareness heightened by consumer experiences of empty shelves and stock shortages at the supermarket end of supply chains. Yet, the increased visibility of seasonal farm work also highlighted its systematic devaluing as “un-skilled” work that is done for low wages, often under poor conditions, and that, critically, is widely deemed unsuitable and unwanted by “local” workers. Attempts by industry and government to reinscribe the terms in which seasonal labour was imagined to make it attractive to local workers overwhelmingly failed. Nor did the recognition of seasonal labour as “essential” ultimately translate into increased economic valuation through significantly improved wages or conditions. Rather, what was demonstrated throughout the pandemic was the reassertion of structures and systems that unevenly distribute precarity, risk and vulnerability along the fault lines of race and migration status.
The shifting valuations of horticultural labour amid the pandemic highlight ambiguities inherent to value itself. In one sense, the simultaneous valuing and devaluing of seasonal labour is reflective of a tension running through all relations of capitalist production, as Marx theorized in his labour theory of value. That is, labour creates value (in the things it produces) in excess of the valuation of that labour through wages. In this sense, labour’s valuation through wages never matches the value produced by labour, and it is this gap that produces profit for those controlling the means of production. In another sense, seasonal labour’s simultaneous valuing and devaluing reflects an underlying ambiguity within which, as Graeber (2001) observes, value denotes at once the price of things (its economic sense), the extent to which a thing is considered desirable or good (its sociological sense) and the meaningful difference attributed to signifiers (its linguistic sense). The economic and sociological dimensions of value, particularly, converge in the figuring of horticultural labour through the pandemic, including through narratives that position it as work good for, and suited to, the bodies of migrants and others outside of the “citizenship-labour nexus” (Neilson & Rossiter, 2008, p. 59), even as political effort has also been put towards reactivating that nexus through appeals for local labour. These multiple dimensions of labour value reflect what others (e.g. Peck, 1996) have shown, namely that labour power is produced and reproduced through social as well as economic processes that extend beyond the workplace. These include migration regimes and strictures, which do not simply increase the total pool of available labour for industry but more specifically increase the availability of labour that is more exploitable and more suitable for subordination (Scott, 2013). They include racialized imaginaries and hierarchies that are themselves rooted in the histories and geographies of Empire (Stead, 2019, 2021).
Critical theorists of supply chains have highlighted the role of racialized, gendered, geographic and other forms of difference in their operation and in capitalist value creation (Bear et al., 2015; Tsing, 2009, 2016). In Anna Tsing’s theorization of “supply chain capitalism”, these form the basis of the kinds of “niche difference” (2009, p. 167) around which the different stages of geographically dispersed supply chains are organized. Diversity, for Tsing, is thus inherently bound up with outsourcing as a key technique of supply-chain capitalism, not as a peripheral consideration but as an integral part of its structure. Yet while Tsing’s attention to the role of racialized relations in the organization of contemporary capitalist production resonates with the analysis we develop here, the kinds of horticultural production we are concerned with also differ in significant ways from models of global supply chains organized through outsourcing. Rather, the industry’s use of temporary migrant labour provides what geographer Sam Scott (2013), writing about the UK fruit industry, has described, following Harvey, as an “in situ spatial fix”. In the Australian context, this enables the reproduction of imaginatively charged narratives of national self-sufficiency that belie the kinds of dependencies, vulnerabilities and racialized inequalities laid bare by the pandemic.
In this chapter, we consider, first, the ways in which border logics and narratives of national self-sufficiency were mobilized in the early days of the pandemic. We then consider the widespread labour shortages and the awareness these generated about the industry’s reliance on migration. We document both the various attempts to mobilize “local workers” and the narratives that framed these efforts and their failures. The gap between the narrative of self-sufficiency and the reliance on migrant workers is reflective, we argue, of ambiguities in how the scope and place of supply chains are conceptualized. The competing, sometimes contradictory imaginings of both local and migrant workers, meanwhile, speak to the shifting ways in which value is imagined, produced and assessed within these chains. In the final section, we focus on the operation of race, migration and visa status in the production of horticultural labour power and value.
Border Logics and Narratives of National Self-Sufficiency
Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted border closures and an amplification of border logics. On 19 March, eight days after the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced international travel bans. With limited exemptions, only Australian citizens, permanent residents and their immediate family members were allowed to enter the country. At the same time, non-citizens within the country who were deemed not to be economically valuable were encouraged to leave. Speaking on 3 April, Morrison declared that people in Australia holding temporary visas and without the capacity to support themselves financially—including the tens of thousands whose casual jobs had been abruptly terminated due to the effects of lockdowns—should “return to their home countries” (Gibson & Moran, 2020). Australia, Morrison continued, needed to focus on its citizens and residents: “As much as it’s lovely to have visitors to Australia in good times, at times like this, if you are a visitor in this country, it is time … to make your way home.” The exception was those migrants, like “nurses or doctors”, whose “critical skills” could assist in Australia’s response to the crisis.
In this early, concentrated period of crisis response we see something of a reassertion of the “citizen-worker” as a political subject, a subjectivity previously theorized as in decline in the context of a globalizing economy and a polity marked by the prevalence of, and reliance on, migrant labour (Neilson & Rossiter, 2008). Here rights, protections, home and work itself are the domains of citizens. The exemption for “nurses or doctors” denotes both the exception amplifying the rule and assumptions of value tied to understandings of skill. These are themselves resonant with a longer-established Australian migration imaginary that has historically devalued “unskilled” and temporary migration, which have nevertheless become more prominent over recent decades, and on which many industries (like horticulture) now depend.
Alongside the closing of borders and calls for migrants to “go home”, these early weeks of the pandemic also saw widespread panic-buying prompted by a series of city- and state-wide lockdowns. Resulting shortages of many staple items were further exacerbated by disruptions to logistics systems, with the unfamiliar spectre of empty supermarket shelves bringing the vulnerabilities of just-in-time food supply chains into public consciousness. The federal government responded to public concerns over struggling supply chains with forceful assertions of Australia’s self-sufficiency in food production. Agriculture Minister David Littleproud slammed “ridiculous” panic-buying, writing, “It is important to understand that Australian farmers produce enough food for 75 million people: three times what we need.” Farmers, he continued, are “calmly going about the business of food production” (Littleproud, 2020). By April, the government had produced a report emphasizing that empty shelves were merely a temporary “disruption” rather than an indication of food shortages. The report stressed that imports account for only 11 per cent of foods consumed in Australia and are “motivated by taste and variety” rather than a need to supplement local supplies (ABARES, 2020, p. 2). Despite the empty shelves, Australia’s self-sufficiency was claimed to be assured.
“I Can’t Get Workers”
Farmers were, however, far from “calm”. The reliance of the horticultural industry on migrant labour is something that growers are keenly aware of, in ways that often run counter to the narratives of the predominantly urban-based political elite. Around 65,000 workers (out of a total industry workforce of 80,000) are employed annually to provide seasonal labour, including harvesting, picking, packing, planting and pruning (Australian Fresh Produce Alliance, n.d.). This work is almost invariably casual and paid by piece rates. Prior to the pandemic, only 5000 of these 65,000 workers were reported to be Australian citizens or permanent residents (although these figures, sourced from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, do not include the locally resident undocumented workers upon whose labour the industry is heavily reliant). Around 8000 were Pacific Islander temporary labour migrants employed through the SWP; 52,000 were other temporary migrants, mostly on WHM visas, including many European backpackers undertaking eighty-eight days of agricultural work in order to secure a second-year visa extension under the provisions of the WHM scheme. As migrant arrivals all but ceased, it quickly became clear that Australian growers would struggle to meet their peak seasonal labour requirements. In September 2020, Ernst & Young (2020) forecast a shortfall of 26,000 workers for the coming harvest.
Several months into the pandemic, stories about farming labour shortages, and their effects, were proliferating in the mainstream media. These stories tended to invoke motifs, well established within Australian rural imaginaries, of family farms and struggling “Aussie battlers”. Vegetable growers in the Lindenow Valley were reported to have destroyed a celery crop worth $150,000 due to a lack of workers to pick it (Somerville et al., 2021). Salad grower Dino Boratto was described as having been forced to destroy $20,000 worth of spinach when he could not make up for the lost labour of fifteen “skilled” SWP workers. Boratto was quoted as describing how the major supermarkets had predicted a rise in demand for salad leaves over the Christmas season, a demand he could not meet without (migrant) labour: “I looked them in the face and said, ‘Yeah? What do you want me to do? I can’t get workers’” (Topsfield, 2020).
Locating Production
The divergences between government narratives of self-sufficiency, and industry highlighting its reliance on migrant workers, speak to ambiguity in how—and where—horticultural production is conceptualized. Supply-chain thinking invokes a fundamental linearity, with bracketed, end-to-end sequences of production stages across which value production is understood to be distributed (Lepawsky & Billah, 2011, p. 135). Where these chains extend across transnational space, this is understood to be the result of outsourcing (Tsing, 2009, 2016). In important respects, however, the landedness of farming proves resistant to geographical dispersion in horticultural production. The immobile materialities of trees and roots cannot be outsourced, even if supermarkets and buyers at the powerful consumer ends of food supply chains readily cast a global net in selecting from whom they buy. It is this sense of place-bound production—and the nationalistic and settler-colonial imaginaries bound up with it—that underpins the narratives of Australian self-sufficiency, as against government appeals for endless growth in agricultural export markets.
Labour shortages catalysed by the pandemic reveal the fault lines in this figuring. Horticultural supply chains, so imagined, might indeed fall within a national frame, but the industry’s reliance on temporary migrant labour speaks to transnational aspects of production that fall outside the parameters of supply-chain modelling. In his analysis of the UK food industry, geographer Sam Scott (2013) draws on David Harvey’s concept of the “spatial fix” to describe this use of migrant labour as an in situ spatial fix for capital, in contrast to the kinds of geographic expansion that Harvey’s term is more often deployed to describe (cf. Anderson & Shuttleworth, 2004). Here, rather than stages of production being outsourced, what is shipped offshore is the work of producing the labour power that is then put to work in the fields and orchards into which workers are imported.
These slippages in geographic framing invite us to think not only about where supply chains begin and end—and the forces of production that exceed them—but also about the kinds of value through which supply chains themselves are produced. Doing so brings back to the fore the multiple and ambiguous ways in which value itself is conceived—the tensions between value as economic price and value as that which is deemed socially good (for particular groups of people). These paradoxes of value became acutely visible as both industry and government sought to mobilize local labour to fill the shortages created by the pandemic border closures.
Revaluing Local Labour?
As the scale and implications of seasonal labour shortages became clear, government and industry looked to entice local workers into horticulture. Some spruiked lucrative returns from the piece rates that have long been a point of contention between industry, government and unions. Agriculture Minister David Littleproud, for example, declared that workers in Queensland were earning up to $3800 a week picking strawberries (labour that is widely documented, globally, as back-breakingly difficult and notoriously underpaid; see for example Holmes (2013) and Wells (1996)). Other proposed financial incentives included allowing workers to continue to receive JobSeeker (social security) payments while undertaking horticultural employment and one-off relocation payments to entice workers to rural locations facing labour shortages. The Northern Territory Farmers Association (NTFA), among others, suggested encouraging students to work in horticulture, promoting it as an alternative “gap year” option. Incentives such as reductions in tertiary student debt were considered, and NTFA chief executive Paul Burke suggested that a year working in rural and regional Australia could provide students with a valuable cultural exchange (Brann, 2020). Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack tried to lure young workers with promises of love and “Instagrammable” moments:
If you know somebody who might be on the coast who might be lounging around with a surfboard, tell them to come to the regions … Tell them to bring their mobile with them, because it would be a great Instagram moment for them … who knows … they might meet the love of their life. (Gillespie, 2020)
Di West, a strawberry grower from Queensland, issued a call to arms, asking Australians to “pick for their country”. “You’re just here for a brief time,” she implored. “We need you to get out there and have a go and be a real Australian” (Nichols, 2020).
Even as unemployment rates rocketed upwards, these promises of love, money, national pride and Insta-fame fell flat. By 31 March 2021, only 871 people had received relocation assistance for working in horticulture (McGlone, 2021), while media reporting highlighted the material and economic realities of seasonal labour. A report on the New South Wales blueberry industry, based on data collected during the 2019/2020 season and released as industry and government representatives were heralding lucrative returns from piece rates, confirmed the prevalence of wage theft and exploitative conditions, with rates of pay documented as low as $3 per hour (Cavanough & Wherrett, 2020). Other reportage highlighted the experiences of the relative few who did respond to the “call to arms”. Some accounts were broadly positive, if lacklustre in their enthusiasm. Eighteen-year-old Xavier Jackson, who was unemployed before working on a strawberry farm, said of the work, “It was a little tiring the first few days but I’m getting into it now and it’s not as bad as I thought it’d be” (Nichols, 2020). Other reports were significantly more dire. One worker, who was paid for six ten-hour working days, described things ending “sourly” when he saw he had earned far less than expected. Another worker on the same farm, who had been enticed by the promise of “adventure”, described feeling “a little bit taken advantage of” when he discovered that the piece rate he was paid did not even cover his accommodation costs (Uibu, 2021).
Union responses to both the call for local labour and the persistent labour shortages mirrored these critiques. There would be a “willing workforce already out there”, suggested the Australian Workers Union, if farmers simply “started paying people decent wages” (Sullivan, 2020). In this gap between promise and reality, though, lies more than the question of decent wages. Encapsulated within both the calls to work and the ultimate failure to meet shortages with local labour are forms of valuation that extend far beyond issues of price, encompassing questions of goodness, desirability and suitability. It is to these questions of value, and the geographies and often racialized imaginaries that underpin them, that we turn in the final section.
Good Work, Good Workers?
If, as the union movement has emphasized, job insecurity and low rates of pay have proved disincentives for local workers to take up rural horticultural labour throughout the pandemic, the fact that this work was nevertheless readily filled with migrant workers prior to COVID-19—and the implications of this—should not be treated as self-evident. In his theorizing of the in situ spatial fix in the UK fruit industry, Scott (2013) suggests that the fix works for capital in two ways. First, it generates workers with forms of “human capital” desirable for industry, particularly migrant workers who are skilled and motivated (including because of economic necessity and the precariousness of their lives and visa statuses) to work in ways the industry finds productive. Second, it works to divide and discipline workers and limit opportunities for collective action, including in a context of neoliberal restructuring. Contingent visa statuses, North–South structural inequalities, and the absence of alternative welfare entitlements compel migrant labour power in ways that are less effective for citizen-workers. The distribution of “good” and “bad” workers, Scott observes, has a distinct geography.
In late 2020, a political decision was made to restart the intake of SWP workers under controlled conditions. Farmers’ responses to this decision reflect these valuations of “good” migrant labour. Speaking to the media, mango farmer Barry Albrecht explained: “It costs us to bring them [SWP workers] in, with quarantine fees and all that. But we feel they’re worth it … They’re so easy to get along with: polite, well-mannered, clean” (Srinivasan, 2020). The flipside of these valuations was the admonishment of local workers by growers as lazy and work-shy. Thus, media coverage of pandemic labour shortages included accounts of willing Australians denied work by growers. One applicant, Lukus, reported:
I’ve been told from a couple they’re worried that, as an Australian, I’m going to be lazy … I’m not as exploitable as a foreigner … Now they’re talking about fast-tracking Pacific Islander workers and that’s fine, and all power to them, but if they won’t even consider an Australian employee who’s willing to work, then it leaves some questions. (Kelly, 2020)
The kinds of difference being mobilized here are not exclusively organized around visa and citizenship status. Throughout the industry, the descriptors “Australian” and “local” are widely used to denote white workers, as distinct from locally resident but non-white workers, such as settled Pacific Islander populations, asylum seekers or refugees, who are nonetheless excluded from the kinds of belonging that the descriptor “local” bestows, even if they are nominally considered harder-working or more desirable workers (Stead, 2019; Stead et al., 2022). These are, then, strongly racialized figurings of “insider” and “outsider”. The exceptions are European backpackers, who form a large proportion of WHMs. It is notable, though, that the horticultural labour of these white workers is figured as temporary, just as it is imagined it might be for young “Aussies” who might take a pandemic fruit-picking “gap year”—an adventure good for an Instagram moment, but not the norm within the context of their lives and the social and cultural conditions of their making.
The valuations—in the broader sociological sense—of horticultural workers are thus deeply ambiguous. Local (white, often urban) workers are both the subject of nationalistic calls to arms and to adventure and admonished for their failure to live up to the imagined (rural) work ethic invoked by that nationalism. Migrant (often non-white) workers are valorized as good workers and the industry’s “saviours”, well-suited to work for which they nevertheless continue to receive poor pay and conditions.
Indeed, while proposals for enticing locals into the horticultural workforce involved financial incentives, the increased visibility and valuation of seasonal work as essential labour has not resulted in improved pay or conditions for the migrant and non-white resident workers who have remained the industry’s mainstay. The experiences of those SWP workers who were already present in the country when the international borders were closed and who remained in Australia to continue working reflect this. The pandemic has intensified and extended existing issues in the SWP scheme, including isolation, restricted movement and inadequate pay (Petrou et al., 2021). Migrant workers have endured the stress of extended separation from their families, and some SWP employers have not allowed workers to return home when they wanted to. Increasingly, SWP workers have absconded from their places of employment due to insufficient work, meaning they will never be able to participate in the scheme again. Similarly entrenched conditions, and heightened vulnerabilities through the pandemic, have been documented globally (e.g. Haley et al., 2020; Neef, 2020).
Conclusion
If crisis is an idiom that works to stabilize existing structures, and to conceal the contradictions entrenched in twenty-first-century capitalism (Masco, 2017; Roitman, 2014), how was that idiom put to work in the context of horticultural labour relations during the pandemic? The crises projected through government, industry and public discourses included the material experiences of labour shortages and panic buying, but also the affective intensities of a white work ethic understood to be in decline and a mode of landedness (the family farm) experienced as under threat. In none of this, though, was attention focused on the conditions of possibility underpinning those experiences of crisis. By these, we do not mean the pandemic itself but rather the deeper-seated fault lines that the pandemic exposed—the inequalities and geographies of racialized capitalism, the colonial dispossessions out of which the Australian family farm is forged, the exclusions of border regimes, or the alienation of most people from the activity of food production and the role of powerful corporate agents in setting the terms of that alienation.
Rather, the pandemic labour shortages and empty supermarket shelves were recast as technical crises—that is, supply-chain problems—bracketed just as supply chains themselves are bracketed. In this vein, the pandemic’s disruptions produced a renewed appreciation of seasonal labour as “essential” work, but left unchanged the economic terms and conditions of its valuation. Attempts to shift the industry’s reliance on migrant workers through enticing a local workforce were, ultimately, cast as temporary measures—short-term and extraordinary responses to labour shortages imagined as temporary interruptions to production systems otherwise figured by capital as smooth, efficient, just-in-time and not in need of transformation.
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Stead, V., Petrou, K. (2022). Putting the Crisis to Work. In: Stead, V., Hinkson, M. (eds) Beyond Global Food Supply Chains. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3155-0_4
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