Alex Colás previews an important meeting

From the 1934 explosion at Gresford colliery in Wales which took the lives of 266 miners, to the catastrophic collapse ten years ago of the Rana Plaza garment factory outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing 1,134 mainly female workers, this Friday’s International Workers’ Memorial Day (IWMD) commemorates those who’ve died at or from work, and reminds us of the continuing struggle for workplace health and safety.

Together with construction, ship-breaking and mining, agriculture is among the world’s most hazardous sectors. According  to the International Labour Organisation, “at least 210,000 agricultural workers are killed by accidents each year”, which proportionately constitutes a threefold higher risk than workers in other sectors. If we add to this the estimated 56 million workers engaged globally in highly dangerous capture fisheries and aquaculture, and 22 million employed worldwide in food and drink manufacturing, the agri-food sector emerges as a focal point for occupational safety and health.

On Friday, the recently-established Food and Work Network will meet in Sheffield to discuss worker organisation across the agri-food chain in the UK and beyond. The coincidence with the IWMD is timely for a number of reasons. First, because the ordinary, everyday practice of food consumption often hides the challenging work environments that produce all the components going into millions of daily meals across the country – including of course the labour of drivers, cooks, cleaners, supermarket and hospitality staff, among others.

During the pandemic, food-related jobs were consistently among the top ten occupations hardest hit by Covid-related deaths. Though perhaps not as debilitating as the ‘invisible’ workplace killers like asbestos, dust or fume inhalation, food workers still face a multitude of everyday hazards ranging from occupational asthma caused by excessive exposure to flour dust, to kitchen scalds and burns.

More recent investigations by Emilianio Mellino from the Bureau for Investigative Journalism report working, living, and pay terms and conditions among immigrant labour on British farms supplying fruits and vegetables to the big supermarkets that recall Chicago’s meatpacking district a century ago. These conditions were powerfully narrated in Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle: poorly paid, precarious, physically demanding work undertaken by non-unionised migrants that is compounded by cramped, cold and unsafe living conditions in on-site caravans.

The invisibility of food workers across the supply chain, and the physical marginalisation and concealment of their workplaces and stations means we all-too-often disassociate food price and quality at points of consumption from occupational safety and health at sites of production.

Linked to this are the obstacles placed in the way of unionising food workers across the supply chain. The IWMA reminds us that a safe workplace is a unionised workplace, but employee segmentation, insecure  contracts, unsocial hours, high staff turnover and union-busting corporations all complicate extending this collective insurance across the food sector.

In the face of these challenges, the UK’s Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) understood the importance of whole-chain organisation when it led the national McStrike campaign in late 2017 for union recognition, the end to zero hours, and a significant pay uplift for food workers. Importantly, that campaign directly addressed sexual harassment in the industry as a pressing workplace health and safety issue, which the hospitality sector has only recently responded to through an employers’ checklist and action plan that nowhere mentions union representation.

Workers’ health and safety concerns do not of course stop at the end of a working day. Housing, transport, recreational time and facilities, and access to affordable, nutritious and culturally diverse food every day of the year all affect the health and wellbeing of working families. Food deserts, high transport and energy costs, lack of residual time outside work and other household labour can all lead to stress,  poor diets, high blood pressure, interrupted sleeping patterns, and ultimately mental health problems which present outside the workplace but are closely connected to daily working patterns.

These aspects of the everyday economy are acutely experienced by food workers across the sector, from the seasonal fruit and vegetable pickers mentioned earlier to the bar and restaurant staff working long and late shifts. As the labour movement across the world commemorates IWMD this Friday, those who work to produce our daily necessities like food should be at the forefront of our action and organisation.

Alex Colás is a member of Brent Central Labour Party, and co-convenor of the Food and Work Network.

Image: c/o TUC