Coronavirus brings continent’s seasonal migration patterns to a halt
www.ft.com
I see the paywall has come up. Basically the FT article discusses how UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy farming industry all use East European labour for harvesting. Spain and Italy also use north African. Heard that in Spain and Italy Africans arent treated well. All these western European countries have the same problem due to the health crisis.
This is a Europe wide problem.
People coming from the poorer Eastern European countries mainly.
The article shows that across Europe Western farming industry has based it business model on cheap flexible labour who it has no commitment to.
What this pandemic shows is the inequality that has become entrenched across Europe which suits business.
This isnt about workers of individual countries won't do the work. This line of argument really winds me up.
If any good comes out of this pandemic its to shows that the economy can't go on like this.
Larry Elliot in Guardian has said this:
Too many people were only hanging on by their fingertips, and that was unsustainable, says the Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott
www.theguardian.com
As he points out the workers here have not recovered from the last economic recession in terms of wages.