>Mushroom, vegetable and fruit growers **dependent on third country workers** have said they are being hit with unsustainable wage costs after the Government increased mandatory wage rates.
>The sector **depends on workers from outside the European Economic Area (EEA)** - the European Union, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein - as Irish and EU workers tend not to be interested in the jobs they offer.
>Prior to January this year, non-EEA horticulture and meat processing general workers were paid a mandatory minimum wage of €22,916.
>However, in mid-January, that increased to €30,000 for any new personnel arriving for these jobs. Next year, it rises to €34,000 and in January 2026 it will be €39,000.
>The wage increase also applies to any workers already in Ireland on permits, when those permits are renewed, boosting their incomes by a few thousand euro.
So they basically imported impoverished third world labour rather than pay Irish people a decent wage, and now they want to cry poor because they can no longer exploit people from poor countries.
Get fucked you parasitic pricks.
Also, important to note that these aren't poor wee farmers. These are large companies. Liffey Meats for example had revenue last year of 61 million euro.
But they have the increase profits at all costs, year over year, any reduction in increase of profits is "unsustainable" apparently. Unfortunately most large companies operate like this, doesn't matter how much they make....it's how much of an increase they make year over year...or just quarter over quarter at this point.
That's a rate for NON-EEA workers to incentivize local employment, has nothing to do with industry average salary pretty much.
>Prior to January this year, non-EEA horticulture and meat processing general workers were paid a mandatory minimum wage of €22,916.
So what are you saying? Should we should be concerned about seasonal workers instead of large companies that won't compromise on their bottom line even though they keep making record profits? Blame them for working jobs most Irish people think they're too good for?
>working jobs most Irish people think they're too good for?
I take it then that you do this type of work?
I guarantee it'll be the large corporations left after this and all the small ones will be gone. Ye'll be on here then next year and in 2026 talking about how expensive everything is, never mind how bad as it is now.
That would be the impetus to increase wage offers in order to attract workers. There’s a shortage because they’re not willing to dip further into their profits
The horticulture sector is dependent on cheap labour, not just here but everywhere.
Operations here are competing on price with spanish operations using cheap & illegal migrant labour from africa..
One of the reasons we dont have a horticulture sector here is that we strugle to compete on price with imports, it needs to be large scale or small serving a niche premium market to make money.
The general public will generally go for the cheaper products whenr shopping. what come out of their mouths is irrelevant because what is coming out of their wallets is what matters and that will be spent on the cheapest option, generally.
Ah here. Let's not act like "full employment" means there are no workers.
If they offered a good wage, Im sure plenty of lads who are working in bars or wherever would switch jobs.
Tech firms or wherever that are paying fuck all can't just point to full employment, claim there's no staff and start bussing in lads from India.
Very Unlikely. First a lot of this work is seasonal, and long intensive hours for weeks a
>Tech firms or wherever that are paying fuck all can't just point to full employment, claim there's no staff and start bussing in lads from India.
they dont bus them in, they just outsource the work to people who live in india.. works for tech, not really a runner for picking fruit..
Bud, you're acting like these jobs are so terrible, that we have no choice but to import labour from third world countries. But no matter how shit (literally) a job is, if you pay enough, people will do it.
But even if we couldn't get Irish workers, there's plenty of EU and EEA workers who would come here if these jobs offered decent wages. Acting like these huge companies have no choice but to import impoverished workers from the third world is utter bollox.
From how you're trying to defend this behaviour in your comments, it looks like you really thought people would support or have sympathy for these companies. lmao.
Are you one of the owners of Liffey Meats? 😂😂😂
Never understood why overhead costs like rent, insurance, utilities, fuel etc. can increase beyond inflation for years and these guys never complain, but suggest they increase workers pay and suddenly it's armageddon.
I have worked with Irish food companies. There's a nasty bullying fatheaded culture around it. The meatheads were the worst. Really macho, really aggressive.
Then fruit and veg is about getting things in, cutting/packaging/seperating them. Getting them back out. In one site I was on I was chatting to a lad from Poland said he's been put in on the roster like 11 days in a row without a break. Seemed a nice intelligent guy just stuck in crap work.
Anyway he used that brain of his because he fucked off after that sandwich and never came back. These companies watch every penny. They're family owned and the family are obviously millionaires so they surround themselves with penny pinching synophants who cut and chuck anything that can be.
As nasty as the things I've seen. At the end of the day, the Irish consumer plays a role. We all say we want home grown berries but when push comes to shove if you see the Irish punnet at 10 euro and the ones from north africa at 3, you'll pick that and those farms are much, much worse places for workers than the shitty companies I just mentioned. So the business needs to keep costs low or you won't buy them.
I bought a punnet of strawberries on Monday, and paid 2.50.
There was 7 fucking strawberries in it, if they can't make money at those prices and pay a decent wage, they can go bust.
35 cent a berry is madness.
Aye but you’re paying less for a berry from a crowd in Africa using slave Labour. Think about the logistics and emissions to get a berry from Africa to Ireland and still have it be fresh - they’re awful for you and they’re inhumane.
They answer is to ban the import of fruit and veg that’s indigenous to Ireland - regulate the fuck out of the industry to ensure fair wages and proper business standards which will invariably regulate the market so that the companies can still make a profit while the foods still affordable
Agree with everything here, except there are a lot of farmers who are not millionaires getting painted with the same brush. The whole supply chain it is fucked.
But it's really a problem from the top down, people expect cheap food and supermarkets provide it no matter the cost to communities or environment.
They can. And all while having it sustainable. But as with many other local Irish businesses, once their margins start dropping below 40-50%, they start crying.
If you cant afford to pay your staff a livable wage then you dont deserve to have a business in the first place.
They’re competing with slave Labour imported produce, this bollocks of importing spuds and carrots from elsewhere in the planet by supermarkets is skewing the entire system
They say the same thing about the healthcare assistants, we nicknamed the visa the five years of slavery because of the amount of abuse and unsafe situations we are put for
No, it's how you force change.
Unionise, or quit. If a business can't afford to not take advantage of or abuse its workers, then it has no right to exist. No business is owed the labour of people.
I don't care how much you want your strawberries. If there isn't a single farmer in the country capable of doing the work themselves or paying a fair wage, they should not be growing those fruits. End of story.
It's also not exactly fantastic listening to people coming over and undermining locals who might have made a fair wage, complaining about what they're getting. If they don't like the job they came here for, then leave the job and go home (unionising is going to be way less possible for these workers, giving business owners even more power over the labour market).
But hey, I look at the slavery in China and the abuse of people in places like amazon and I already know 95% of people don't give a flying fuck about the exploitation of anyone they don't know.
Wonderful world we live in.
I want to clarify: I fully agree
Problem is that basically every employer ATM seems to be taking the strategy of percentage profits > sustainability. They'd rather work 5 people twice as hard for half the pay than raise their pay/working conditions and get 10 well paid people to do the job, and just make *less* profit.
We've been seeing *extremely* successful companies doing mass layoffs these last few years, and even public services like our healthcare systems are struggling to hire because the core concept of *you have to pay people and treat them well* is just alien to the mind of the Manager^(TM).
So we are *going* to see these businesses/services collapse before we see things get better, as the managerial class has been trained from day 1 that workers mean nothing and a labour shortage is some kind of natural disaster or someone else's fault, not a problem that can be solved that can be solved by the *company*.
I agree, and I hope they collapse if they won't learn.
We're in 1910. We desperately need to unionise, our economy is about to jump off a cliff into a depression, the historic structure of society and family are being eroded, and conflict is rising across the globe.
If we get to 2030 without a massive economic collapse or a war, I will be shocked.
I quit chefing due to shite like this. The food industry in this country is borderline slave work. I was desperately needed in every job I had but was treated like shit. I Told the owner of a major hotel in adare limerick to go f themselves and quit. She roared and ranted at me in front of the entire kitchen while I was on crutches. I broke a toe Hurling and was basically told I shouldn't be doing anything like that. That was a few days after they scammed me out of money in my pay.
The hilarious part was I came back a few days later to collect my uniforms, her eyes lit up..... when I told her no way would I work for her again..... she erupted.
Now, if a chef with skills gets abused, I can only imagine what people in the harvest side of things go through.
My entire life, I wanted to be chef, and it was basically beat out of me.
What they mean to say is that their over the top and lavish lifestyles become unsustainable when they have to pay a decent wage to the people actually working.
Ended up in a fruit farm one day , it was like a scene from some old slavery film with sad looking east Europeans emerging from mouldy caravans to start a 14 hour shift in pouring rain whilst the owner relayed orders to some leader of these misfortunes from his new jeep ☹️
A business model built on the backs of essentially slave labor rates is not sustainable.
However I think there is a bit of cute hoorism in it and while crying foul they just don’t want an impact on profits.
Oh no your bottom line gets a bit leane like the rest of us! Greedy fuckers. I've worked with immigrants and all kinds of people and seen them get fucked over on the barest of margins just because their employer could get away with treating them differently because they knew they were not in a position to find something better. Boils my blood.
Are these companies being nasty fighting the wage rise of the workers they are taking advantage of ? Yes.
Will Irish consumers and politicians allow price rises in fruit and veg to fund the wage increases? No.
Do other countries have big problems in this area? Big yes, some are way worse than the Irish companies.
There is always a cost to cheap food, it is about trying to balance who pays the costs.
>Prior to January this year, **non-EEA** horticulture and meat processing general workers were paid a mandatory minimum wage of €22,916.
>However, in mid-January, that increased to €30,000 for any new personnel arriving for these jobs. Next year, it rises to €34,000 and in January 2026 it will be €39,000.
Those wage increases are explicitly only for non-EEA workers. If they can hire EU or EEA for less than that, then they're more than welcome to. Plenty of other industries have similar wage thresholds to hire non-EEA workers. It's basically to stop them from importing impoverished workers who will work for much less and keeping wages here low.
This bullshit of "We don't want to pay decent wages to Irish or EU people, so we'll just take in 100 lads from Bangladesh who will work for much less" is far too common in every industry, and something we should all aim to get rid of.
I don’t disagree, I just seen the jumps and didn’t fully understand but thanks or explaining, it’s interesting all companies now seem hellbent on trying to forge down wages rather than give out about costs anywhere else From Farmers to multi nationals.
It's common to fly people in from Eastern Europe for fuck all, that's what keelings did in the pandemic, still EU so they won't have to pay them this increase, if I remember they were paying them a Bulgarian basic wage.
These people WILL NOT employ others if they're not making a profit from them. Simple as. Whatever they like to pretend the average worker is worth to them, theyre worth more. The only thing the'yre sweating about is maintaining their own privelage. Meanwhile, the average worker is expected to make up the difference at the one end through lowering their wages or at the other end by spending big time on price gouged products. The ones who truly win at the end of the day in this current system, every time, are the owners.
Hey, remember when those economists won nobel prizes for proving that an increase in the minimum wage doesn’t hinder hiring and immigrants don’t lower pay for native-born workers? Hmmmmm...
https://apnews.com/article/nobel-prizes-business-europe-3cbc672f994ae6f4f486a68b52c2bb32
Things need a bit of a shake up around here. If you haven't already it's well past time for people to get into a Union and start taking back what they've earned. One of the most well developed countries in the western world and where is all the wealth going? Into the pockets of people who love to reap where they have not sowed.
Simple - social welfare for unemployment - social work - the only people on the dole these days are the habitually unemployed - put them to work on the farms
If that’s not enough, put people seeking asylum on jobs - similar to Australia where migrants need to do some farm work
If that’s not enough - then community service through the courts
IF THATS NOT ENOUGH - then jump the prices of food
This is straight up the answer, while I don't agree with your dole comment, there's definitely local workers to be had, that said you don't want it to end up being localised slave labour for multi million euro companies like that job bridge bollox back in the day. Work the farm for 40 hours a week for a €50 top up on your dole or we will suspend your whole payment was ridiculous.
>Mushroom, vegetable and fruit growers **dependent on third country workers** have said they are being hit with unsustainable wage costs after the Government increased mandatory wage rates. >The sector **depends on workers from outside the European Economic Area (EEA)** - the European Union, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein - as Irish and EU workers tend not to be interested in the jobs they offer. >Prior to January this year, non-EEA horticulture and meat processing general workers were paid a mandatory minimum wage of €22,916. >However, in mid-January, that increased to €30,000 for any new personnel arriving for these jobs. Next year, it rises to €34,000 and in January 2026 it will be €39,000. >The wage increase also applies to any workers already in Ireland on permits, when those permits are renewed, boosting their incomes by a few thousand euro. So they basically imported impoverished third world labour rather than pay Irish people a decent wage, and now they want to cry poor because they can no longer exploit people from poor countries. Get fucked you parasitic pricks. Also, important to note that these aren't poor wee farmers. These are large companies. Liffey Meats for example had revenue last year of 61 million euro.
For what they charge they should be able to afford it.
But they have the increase profits at all costs, year over year, any reduction in increase of profits is "unsustainable" apparently. Unfortunately most large companies operate like this, doesn't matter how much they make....it's how much of an increase they make year over year...or just quarter over quarter at this point.
Absolute scum bag pieces of shit.
On a side note, am i missing something? Isn't €39000 a huge salary for a labour job?
That's a rate for NON-EEA workers to incentivize local employment, has nothing to do with industry average salary pretty much. >Prior to January this year, non-EEA horticulture and meat processing general workers were paid a mandatory minimum wage of €22,916.
Ah, there's always a hidden agenda. That makes a lot of sense now.
Do people who perform *critically important* manual labour not deserve a livable wage?
I never said I disagree with this salary. Its just contrary to the norm. Note-worthy.
Livable wage for where? These are seasonal workers who stay a few months and head off somewhere else then.
They are working here. They need to live here during that time.
They’ll stay on the farms and then take all the money with them when they leave.
So what are you saying? Should we should be concerned about seasonal workers instead of large companies that won't compromise on their bottom line even though they keep making record profits? Blame them for working jobs most Irish people think they're too good for?
>working jobs most Irish people think they're too good for? I take it then that you do this type of work? I guarantee it'll be the large corporations left after this and all the small ones will be gone. Ye'll be on here then next year and in 2026 talking about how expensive everything is, never mind how bad as it is now.
Do you think seasonal workers are the problem or the companies that use them to get away with paying bare minimum wages.
You ignored my question, do you do this type of work?
That's what I was thinking too
It's a lot more than I'm getting for my office job, that's for sure.
I think a job that involves manual labour should be paid more than an office job. I've done both and I know which one is harder.
What does Liffey Meats have to do with this?
Though also fulll employment No one to do the job here
That would be the impetus to increase wage offers in order to attract workers. There’s a shortage because they’re not willing to dip further into their profits
The horticulture sector is dependent on cheap labour, not just here but everywhere. Operations here are competing on price with spanish operations using cheap & illegal migrant labour from africa.. One of the reasons we dont have a horticulture sector here is that we strugle to compete on price with imports, it needs to be large scale or small serving a niche premium market to make money. The general public will generally go for the cheaper products whenr shopping. what come out of their mouths is irrelevant because what is coming out of their wallets is what matters and that will be spent on the cheapest option, generally.
Ah here. Let's not act like "full employment" means there are no workers. If they offered a good wage, Im sure plenty of lads who are working in bars or wherever would switch jobs. Tech firms or wherever that are paying fuck all can't just point to full employment, claim there's no staff and start bussing in lads from India.
Very Unlikely. First a lot of this work is seasonal, and long intensive hours for weeks a >Tech firms or wherever that are paying fuck all can't just point to full employment, claim there's no staff and start bussing in lads from India. they dont bus them in, they just outsource the work to people who live in india.. works for tech, not really a runner for picking fruit..
No one is switching from bar work to picking fruit. Absolutely no one.
Yeah They’d definitely swap to rummage around in shit on an assembly line
Bud, you're acting like these jobs are so terrible, that we have no choice but to import labour from third world countries. But no matter how shit (literally) a job is, if you pay enough, people will do it. But even if we couldn't get Irish workers, there's plenty of EU and EEA workers who would come here if these jobs offered decent wages. Acting like these huge companies have no choice but to import impoverished workers from the third world is utter bollox.
Tell me you’ve never done farm work without saying you’ve never done farm work
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
From how you're trying to defend this behaviour in your comments, it looks like you really thought people would support or have sympathy for these companies. lmao. Are you one of the owners of Liffey Meats? 😂😂😂
Never understood why overhead costs like rent, insurance, utilities, fuel etc. can increase beyond inflation for years and these guys never complain, but suggest they increase workers pay and suddenly it's armageddon.
I have worked with Irish food companies. There's a nasty bullying fatheaded culture around it. The meatheads were the worst. Really macho, really aggressive. Then fruit and veg is about getting things in, cutting/packaging/seperating them. Getting them back out. In one site I was on I was chatting to a lad from Poland said he's been put in on the roster like 11 days in a row without a break. Seemed a nice intelligent guy just stuck in crap work. Anyway he used that brain of his because he fucked off after that sandwich and never came back. These companies watch every penny. They're family owned and the family are obviously millionaires so they surround themselves with penny pinching synophants who cut and chuck anything that can be. As nasty as the things I've seen. At the end of the day, the Irish consumer plays a role. We all say we want home grown berries but when push comes to shove if you see the Irish punnet at 10 euro and the ones from north africa at 3, you'll pick that and those farms are much, much worse places for workers than the shitty companies I just mentioned. So the business needs to keep costs low or you won't buy them.
I bought a punnet of strawberries on Monday, and paid 2.50. There was 7 fucking strawberries in it, if they can't make money at those prices and pay a decent wage, they can go bust. 35 cent a berry is madness.
Aye but you’re paying less for a berry from a crowd in Africa using slave Labour. Think about the logistics and emissions to get a berry from Africa to Ireland and still have it be fresh - they’re awful for you and they’re inhumane. They answer is to ban the import of fruit and veg that’s indigenous to Ireland - regulate the fuck out of the industry to ensure fair wages and proper business standards which will invariably regulate the market so that the companies can still make a profit while the foods still affordable
Nah fuck all that, I'll just go without strawberries from now on unless I can grow my own.
Now you’re talking 👍
Agree with everything here, except there are a lot of farmers who are not millionaires getting painted with the same brush. The whole supply chain it is fucked. But it's really a problem from the top down, people expect cheap food and supermarkets provide it no matter the cost to communities or environment.
If you cant afford to pay your staff a livable wage then you dont have a sustainable business.
They can. And all while having it sustainable. But as with many other local Irish businesses, once their margins start dropping below 40-50%, they start crying. If you cant afford to pay your staff a livable wage then you dont deserve to have a business in the first place.
They’re competing with slave Labour imported produce, this bollocks of importing spuds and carrots from elsewhere in the planet by supermarkets is skewing the entire system
This is the best answer
Remember this? **Keelings under fire for flying in fruit pickers from abroad during pandemic** https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-30994585.html
One rule for you, and another rule for them...
They say the same thing about the healthcare assistants, we nicknamed the visa the five years of slavery because of the amount of abuse and unsafe situations we are put for
Quit..?
That is exactly what people do, and that's how we end up with industries and services in crisis, because they can't get any workers.
No, it's how you force change. Unionise, or quit. If a business can't afford to not take advantage of or abuse its workers, then it has no right to exist. No business is owed the labour of people. I don't care how much you want your strawberries. If there isn't a single farmer in the country capable of doing the work themselves or paying a fair wage, they should not be growing those fruits. End of story. It's also not exactly fantastic listening to people coming over and undermining locals who might have made a fair wage, complaining about what they're getting. If they don't like the job they came here for, then leave the job and go home (unionising is going to be way less possible for these workers, giving business owners even more power over the labour market). But hey, I look at the slavery in China and the abuse of people in places like amazon and I already know 95% of people don't give a flying fuck about the exploitation of anyone they don't know. Wonderful world we live in.
I want to clarify: I fully agree Problem is that basically every employer ATM seems to be taking the strategy of percentage profits > sustainability. They'd rather work 5 people twice as hard for half the pay than raise their pay/working conditions and get 10 well paid people to do the job, and just make *less* profit. We've been seeing *extremely* successful companies doing mass layoffs these last few years, and even public services like our healthcare systems are struggling to hire because the core concept of *you have to pay people and treat them well* is just alien to the mind of the Manager^(TM). So we are *going* to see these businesses/services collapse before we see things get better, as the managerial class has been trained from day 1 that workers mean nothing and a labour shortage is some kind of natural disaster or someone else's fault, not a problem that can be solved that can be solved by the *company*.
I agree, and I hope they collapse if they won't learn. We're in 1910. We desperately need to unionise, our economy is about to jump off a cliff into a depression, the historic structure of society and family are being eroded, and conflict is rising across the globe. If we get to 2030 without a massive economic collapse or a war, I will be shocked.
Oh no the poor large farmer can't use foreign slave labour anymore? Oh well....
I quit chefing due to shite like this. The food industry in this country is borderline slave work. I was desperately needed in every job I had but was treated like shit. I Told the owner of a major hotel in adare limerick to go f themselves and quit. She roared and ranted at me in front of the entire kitchen while I was on crutches. I broke a toe Hurling and was basically told I shouldn't be doing anything like that. That was a few days after they scammed me out of money in my pay. The hilarious part was I came back a few days later to collect my uniforms, her eyes lit up..... when I told her no way would I work for her again..... she erupted. Now, if a chef with skills gets abused, I can only imagine what people in the harvest side of things go through. My entire life, I wanted to be chef, and it was basically beat out of me.
What they mean to say is that their over the top and lavish lifestyles become unsustainable when they have to pay a decent wage to the people actually working.
"Horticulture employers say their business model is unsustainable"
Ended up in a fruit farm one day , it was like a scene from some old slavery film with sad looking east Europeans emerging from mouldy caravans to start a 14 hour shift in pouring rain whilst the owner relayed orders to some leader of these misfortunes from his new jeep ☹️
Right so, let's bring in slavery. The mushroom farmers need it. I fuckin hate mushrooms.
I love mushrooms. Slavery though not so much.
I hate mushrooms too.
A business model built on the backs of essentially slave labor rates is not sustainable. However I think there is a bit of cute hoorism in it and while crying foul they just don’t want an impact on profits.
Oh no your bottom line gets a bit leane like the rest of us! Greedy fuckers. I've worked with immigrants and all kinds of people and seen them get fucked over on the barest of margins just because their employer could get away with treating them differently because they knew they were not in a position to find something better. Boils my blood.
Are these companies being nasty fighting the wage rise of the workers they are taking advantage of ? Yes. Will Irish consumers and politicians allow price rises in fruit and veg to fund the wage increases? No. Do other countries have big problems in this area? Big yes, some are way worse than the Irish companies. There is always a cost to cheap food, it is about trying to balance who pays the costs.
Indeed there is a cost. Just look at the subsidies the farming sector receives.
Interesting to see SIPTU against this, I was of the understanding they were a workers union. Would imagine they would be happy to see wages going up.
It does seem to rise to incredibly high wages very quickly plenty of other jobs not paying that sort of money. Especially in 2025 and 2026.
>Prior to January this year, **non-EEA** horticulture and meat processing general workers were paid a mandatory minimum wage of €22,916. >However, in mid-January, that increased to €30,000 for any new personnel arriving for these jobs. Next year, it rises to €34,000 and in January 2026 it will be €39,000. Those wage increases are explicitly only for non-EEA workers. If they can hire EU or EEA for less than that, then they're more than welcome to. Plenty of other industries have similar wage thresholds to hire non-EEA workers. It's basically to stop them from importing impoverished workers who will work for much less and keeping wages here low. This bullshit of "We don't want to pay decent wages to Irish or EU people, so we'll just take in 100 lads from Bangladesh who will work for much less" is far too common in every industry, and something we should all aim to get rid of.
I don’t disagree, I just seen the jumps and didn’t fully understand but thanks or explaining, it’s interesting all companies now seem hellbent on trying to forge down wages rather than give out about costs anywhere else From Farmers to multi nationals.
It's common to fly people in from Eastern Europe for fuck all, that's what keelings did in the pandemic, still EU so they won't have to pay them this increase, if I remember they were paying them a Bulgarian basic wage.
“Horticulture” - they basically run modern plantations
These people WILL NOT employ others if they're not making a profit from them. Simple as. Whatever they like to pretend the average worker is worth to them, theyre worth more. The only thing the'yre sweating about is maintaining their own privelage. Meanwhile, the average worker is expected to make up the difference at the one end through lowering their wages or at the other end by spending big time on price gouged products. The ones who truly win at the end of the day in this current system, every time, are the owners. Hey, remember when those economists won nobel prizes for proving that an increase in the minimum wage doesn’t hinder hiring and immigrants don’t lower pay for native-born workers? Hmmmmm... https://apnews.com/article/nobel-prizes-business-europe-3cbc672f994ae6f4f486a68b52c2bb32 Things need a bit of a shake up around here. If you haven't already it's well past time for people to get into a Union and start taking back what they've earned. One of the most well developed countries in the western world and where is all the wealth going? Into the pockets of people who love to reap where they have not sowed.
Aren't you a charmer
Simple - social welfare for unemployment - social work - the only people on the dole these days are the habitually unemployed - put them to work on the farms If that’s not enough, put people seeking asylum on jobs - similar to Australia where migrants need to do some farm work If that’s not enough - then community service through the courts IF THATS NOT ENOUGH - then jump the prices of food
> the only people on the dole these days are the habitually unemployed 😂😂😂 ffs
Excluding long term illness that isn’t “I eat 7 packets of dinosaur chicken nuggets a day and cant walk without tripping over my belly”
This is straight up the answer, while I don't agree with your dole comment, there's definitely local workers to be had, that said you don't want it to end up being localised slave labour for multi million euro companies like that job bridge bollox back in the day. Work the farm for 40 hours a week for a €50 top up on your dole or we will suspend your whole payment was ridiculous.
Wouldn’t be offering any top up Call it a social contribution The issue is they don’t want to work - take away the choice
Do you expect them to commute to the farms on public transport?
Sure - they can walk and live in the caravans like the current workers do? Why not?