I like spring onions. Salad needs the fresh, sharp, kick of mild onion to balance the sweetness of tomato and the slight bitterness of leaves. Never occured to me to ask where the spring onions come from, and who picks them.
So when I hear that Romanian children as young as 9, and up to 16 have been harvesting spring onions in Worcestershire I'm appalled, angry, ashamed. But wearing a cotton dress and sandals in October and in a northerly wind with low temperatures. And as employed supplementary labour to their parents with derisory wages. At that stage I'm beginning to feel as if time has slipped and words like safeguarding, child protection, and human rights have still to be invented and legislated into existence. And then to fuel embarrassment and incredulity with more anger, I discover there is a Gangmaster's Licensing Authority which has the good purpose of "regulating those who supply labour or use workers to provide services in agriculture, forestry, horticulture, shellfish gathering and food processing and packaging".
And I am relieved and grateful such an authority exists and intervened in this case. But my anger and incredulity is that such a regulatory body is best described by the word Gangmaster; that such a body is necessary is patently and sadly obvious. But that in this country the children of migrant workers can be so unprotected as to be defined as those whose welfare depends on the Gangmaster (say that word out loud) the Gangmaster's Licensing Authority is for me a moral disgrace.
And it leaves me with several questions. Which supermarkets are stocking food harvested under such exploitative conditions? Do supermarkets have codes of practice for their suppliers and do they enforce them? How does such exploitation of children in forced child labour relate to the UNICEF Convention on the Rights of the Child? What is the sub text, the subliminal impact on how we see other human beings, when we legitimate such discourse as "gangmaster"? What are the criteria for slavery, and which of them do not apply to a child with no choices, nor protection from the demands of the labour market, and no status in a country of which they are not citizens?
According to the Guardian, "the minimum working age in UK and European law is 14 although 13-year-olds can work in special circumstances. The number of hours children aged 14 and 15 can work is controlled and restricted to school holidays and weekends. There is no minimum wage for under-16s." Now as a boy I used to pick berries in the summer, and potatoes in October, for what was then not a lot of money. In Scotland the October school break is still called by those old enough to remember "the tattie holiday". But I was never forced to work. I was older than 9 years of age. I was paid enough to make it worth it. I had warm clothes. I wasn't denied school. And home was just a mile away.And the farmer wasn't a gangmaster!
The measure of a society is how it treats its children. To put it another way - this week, the measure of a society is how we harvest our spring onions.
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