Fruit Picking Profits and the Myth of “Lazy” Workers
Written By: Giacomo Bianchino
About a week ago, 161 people came out of quarantine in the Northern Territory. They went straight from the hotel to “[save] Top End crops” - specifically the mango farms. These people were here to fill a gap in the labour market and help farmers with a harvest that would have otherwise remain unpicked. But they weren’t in quarantine after flying in from Melbourne, Perth or Brisbane. In fact, they had flown in from Port Vila as part of a scheme to import migrant labour from Vanuatu. This scheme had the backing of the National Farmers’ Federation (NFF- the peak body of agriculturalists in Australia), who put forward $100 000 for flights and $2500 for each worker in quarantine fees. Meanwhile, August saw an unemployment rate of 6.8 percent and an underemployment rate of 11.2 percent for Australian citizens. Declining consumption in this period has prompted the government to propose bringing forward tax cuts to incentivise spending. Let’s put this in perspective. Farmers in the “developed” (imperial) world spend $100 000 to save their flailing agricultural industry. Meanwhile, the government flouts its own international travel restrictions and artificially creates demand through tax cuts while being unable to incentivise its own labour force to fill rural jobs.
What are the reasons for this mess?
If you ask the farmers and the government, the answers are clear. On the one hand, NT is too far for most Aussie workers to travel. According to the Northern Daily Leader, the jobs are “usually in rural and regional areas, which may not be where the unemployed workforce lives, and the decision to relocate for work can be a difficult one, particularly during a pandemic.”
On the other hand, the Agricultural Minister, David Littleproud (you are forgiven for not knowing who this scrub is), has complained that the reason unemployed Australians aren’t packing up and shipping out to the NT is because they receive too much on the dole. "Even when our social security payment for the dole was $550 a fortnight,” he moans, “we couldn't get people off the couch to go and pick fruit. "The solution, for the agriculturalists, is to slash the dole and force Australian workers into such economic precarity that they can’t say no to what NFF top dog Ben Rogers calls “physical [sic] demanding work from early in the mornings to late in the evening ”during which workers “spend their nights sleeping in caravan parks or tents.”
In fact, this week a liberal backbencher, John Alexander, floated the idea of labour “conscription.” While he was unclear as to whether he was actually suggesting that people be forced to work (an idea some might have the gall to call slavery), he said that “pressure” must be applied to get people “off the couch.”The common narrative, then, is that the problem stems from the enviable conditions Aussie workers find themselves in. Even the unemployed can eke out a decent existence in the lucky country. They have it too good and refuse to go out and reak their backs picking crops in the middle of nowhere. Apart from the standard capitalist attempt to blame the work force for the system’s own inability to solve the problems imposed by their mode of production, they do have a point here. There is nothing incentivising workers to do rural labour. Wage growth in the agricultural sector has stagnated since 2012, with average salaries in the industry falling in the $60k range. In fact, the average hourly rate for a farm worker in Australia is only $25.42. Most office jobs are somewhere around five dollars more than this, and growing, while the rural jobs stagnate.
“As farmers seek to recoup losses from falling domestic prices and consumption, their only option is to sell their crops abroad”
Usually, to fill this gap, farmers make use of itinerant backpacker labour. The Australian government has to forcibly coerce backpackers into doing farm work for nearly nothing in order to keep the Agricultural sector alive in Australia. With travel restrictions, their cheap and fast labour supply has dried up. Enter the government with its programs of corporate welfare. But why does the government bend over backwards to accommodate the NFF and the farmer syndicates? A quick look at the 2020 AusGov “Snapshot” of the agricultural industry shows that it does very little work in the economy. Agricultural exports account for only 2.2 percent of GDP, while in terms of employment it only constitutes 2.6 percent of the overall workforce (and only 7 percent of the rural workforce). In terms of consumption, only 30 percent of Australian agricultural product is consumed domestically, while 70 percent is exported. This figure is growing as Australian agriculture gears up to increase commodity production for the international market.
In terms of the fruit industry, the figures are higher – we consume about 82 percent of horticultural produce made domestically. But as the rest of the industry moves to an export-oriented model, it becomes increasingly difficult to compete. Fruit and vegetable exports increased by 69 percent in the 20 years between 1999 and 2019. As farmers seek to recoup losses from falling domestic prices and consumption, their only option is to sell their crops abroad. But moving into international competition brings new problems for domestic industry. As the global rate of profit levels out to a minimum through competition, farmers must increase the mass of their production – the size of the land farmed and the amount of machinery use. They must also limit variables like labour costs. As the “Snapshot” reports, market conditions see “the best managers operating the largest farms.” In the government’s language, these managers know how “use inputs conservatively.” What this really means is that they know how to restrict labour while increasing production.Historically, the best way to do has been through centralisation (or concentration) and automation. In the last 20 years, farms with over $1 million in receipts have increased their share of overall profit from 18 percent to 60 percent. So, the big farms have come to dominate the market, while farms between $200k and $1 million have declined from 75 percent to 37 percent of the overall cash share in agriculture. This is a huge concentration of wealth and productive capacity in the hands of the richest farmers. These farmers also have the capital to rationalise production- to use machines instead of farm labour.It is these farms that are able to compete on the international market, and even to benefit from the levelling of the rate of profit. As Marx claims in the third volume of Capital, industries using low “organic compositions” of capital (a high ratio of machinery to labour), actually receive more for their products on the open market than do those using large amounts of labour. Value is “transferred” from labour-rich economies to the capital-intensive economies.
On the other side of town, farmers can barely make ends meet. According to one 2015 report on the social pressures of agriculture, "as many as 75 percent of Australian farm businesses do not generate sufficient returns to meet both personal needs and business growth." Many of these do not have the capital to automate production, or work in industries that require the use of vast amounts of labour. Certain harvest crops, especially those with fragile fruit like mangoes, require lots of labour at least once a year. This means lots of the value that maller farmers “create” is added by labour power. They can restrict costs, and be “input conservative”, by reducing the amount they pay their workers. This allows them to reap a larger amount of surplus value from their labourers and get a larger profit at market. Australia is a high-wage, imperialist economy. It competes internationally because it is able to automate and produce at a high level, while relying on a significant value-addition by whatever labour is used in its production process. Within its domestic economy, however, there are huge contradictions. Small farmers can’t compete with the large, automated farms without restricting wages. The depression of wages in the horticultural sector doesn’t match general Australian market conditions.
Wages in other sectors generally keep pace with inflation, even if they do not grow in real terms. For agricultural workers, stagnating wages mean that they can barely support themselves. While Littleproud, Rogers et al would want us to place the blame with “lazy” Australian workers, the truth is that the problem comes from internal problems of capitalist agricultural production. They cannot keep apace of wage growth in Australia, and accordingly must use hyper-exploitable labour. So, they either coerce backpackers into working for minimum pay, “conscript” urban Australian workers or source labour from economies that pay lower wages to their workers. Australia can exploit the global asymmetries in labour costs by bringing over workers whose cost of living is much lower and thus have a lower wage threshold. The differences in relative prosperity across the world often allows capitalists to find such a “geographic fix” for domestic problems. So, the capitalists have urged the importation of exploitable labour rather than raising the wages to a level which would incentivise Australians to take the jobs. We must defend the rights of the incoming workers and seek to get them the protections available to all Australian workers. We must also, however, point out that this crisis is the outcome of internal contradictions on the behalf of the capitalists who organise agricultural production.