Many hands make light work... thoughts about volunteer labour on the flower field.
Many hands make light work…
…so the saying goes, and increasingly I see flower growing businesses resorting to volunteer labour so that it’s lighter on their purses too.
What I’m going to say in this post is going to annoy and irritate some, and make others cheer in agreement. Free labour is a growing issue in flower farming and I’m going to raise my concerns with it in this blog. I’ve purposely chosen to put it here in my blog because – rightly or wrongly – it feels tricky to out this issue on Instagram. Here on my blog I feel a lot more comfortable to write about my opinions and feelings. Home turf so to speak.
Another thing to clear up from the outset: there are a number of social enterprises and community projects that grow vegetables and flowers, which provide opportunities with therapeutic benefits for volunteers too, and I’m not talking about these charities. I’m talking about the use of unpaid labourers in private profit-making businesses.
My labour costs are quite high because I choose to pay myself a full-time wage for the time that I put into my business. It’s not an extravagant pay packet, but one that makes my work worthwhile. The only information I have seen on what flower farmers pay themselves is unpublished survey from Flowers From The Farm that aligned me with the smallest percentage of their members who had a turnover that allowed them to do this. Flower Farmers don’t appear to be making much money, and yet everytime I go onto instagram I see another business talking about their ‘team’ in reference to volunteers who come and labour for them. I purposefully chose not to look at what a lot of flower farmers do (and don’t follow many) but I am concerned by this growing trend. Its unsustainable, unethical and unnecessary, if you have a good financially planned business.
I’ve lived in farming communities most of my life, and I know the hours that farmers put in to care for their land and animals. It is by no means normal - in the wider farming community – to rely on volunteers to carry out routine tasks. Sure, a community might gather together to help with one off jobs; fix a problem, share a burden or get something done quickly, but not the day to day tasks. In America the tradition of barn raising is a community event. Here the harvest was traditionally an ‘all hands on deck’ event – the sun was out and the meadow grass needed to be cut, turned, dried and stacked in the barn before the rain came back. But routine work is something that is paid for. Dairy hands. Muck spreaders. Crop processing. Tractor driving. That’s paid work. The food we buy in our butchers, our green grocers and our supermarkets is grown by businesses that pay for their labour, and if they don’t they are investigated for slave labour or discriminatory work conditions! Their hard work (in addition to the graft) is balancing the books, and making enough money from the things they grow. to feed and house them.
Using volunteers is commonplace in the market gardening world. Market Garden businesses are typically small in scale, usually up to a couple of acres, and intensively grow vegetables. WWoof-ers and ‘interns’ are popular ways to meet the labour requirements of the business. (Wwoofing is an organisation called Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, which was set up as a cultural and educational exchange to build a community of ecologically and sustainably focussed farming practice //wwoof.net/) People can travel the world gaining experience of different agricultural businesses. In exchange for bed and board, these volunteers undertake routine tasks around the farm and learn how to do it. Often these farms are organic, often these farms grow high-priced produce for the financially well-off. Usually these market gardens trade on the provenance of their product; locally grown, chemical free. It’s perceived to be more holistic, healthier, wholesome. The principle of volunteering is rooted in the idea that its a mutually beneficial arrangement that builds international capital. Interestingly it has encouraged a culture of market gardens relying on unpaid labour in one form or another.
I see a lot of flower farms that are now looking to volunteers to get the work done; Some have ‘volunteer days’; turn up and do some weeding, tea and cake supplied. Others have small armys of keen to help people turn up on rotation to keep their large plots looking tip-top and instagramable throughout the summer season. These businesses promote these opportunities as a way to learn, a way to ‘commune with nature’, be active, meet like-minded people and help out.
Regardless of whether you grow food or flowers, in small scale agriculture and horticulture, the biggest limitation on how much money you can make it your own capacity to grow, pick and sell the product. However enjoyable the donning of some gardening gloves is for the volunteer, small scale businesses use unpaid labour in order to maximise their productivity. That is the bottom line. It is a way of getting the mucky, messy, hard work done cheaply. Its a way of maximising profit.
In Victorian Britian a private estate’s walled garden would be managed by two full time gardeners, per acre. Their job was to grow year round vegetables, fruit and herbs, possibly some flowers too, for the ‘big house’. They didn’t have to package or sell it. (Or do the marketing and accounting either!) The price expectations of our food is another blog entirely, but its fair to say that doing everything that is required for a business to grow and sell enough, for two full-time workers, is not easy. And socitial expectation of what food should cost makes it even harder. This is the justification for using volunteers; it makes the finances ‘work’. Flower farms have adopted this approach, necessitated by an inability to charge properly for their flowers.
BUT what sort of profit making business relies on free help in order to make money?!
Imagine, for fun, that a big multi-national supermarket decide to do it. The opportunity is to pop along for a couple of hours to stack shelves, help on the checkout or check for out of date products. You get to learn about the business, see what work is like, hang out with other people and maybe take some of the out of date products home at the end of your opportunity.
That would be preposterous. Ethically unacceptable. Unequivocally wrong.
Let’s try another; a farm in Kenya decides to invite some women, who were otherwise at home during the day, to come and spray the rose crops with pesticides and do some weeding in the glorious sunshine. It’s an unpaid opportunity to see what the work is like, get hands on experience and meet other like-minded people. Drinking water and a light lunch provided if they put in a full day.
Again. That’s not nice is it?
Wrapped up in this culture of ‘volunteering’ is privilege and class. It’s political. Some work isn’t worth paying for. Some people don’t need to be paid. Some people are happy to be paid nothing for their work. Some people are desperate for work and will do anything…
It's also incredibly unhelpful to the business and the sector; if you rely on free labour to make the money you currently make, imagine how much MORE free labour you will need to make more profit. I mean, financially, you are structuring your business so that your biggest cost is free. (Imagine explaining that one to a business advisor; “you’re paying them nothing?!”) It either gives you pricing advantage – “I don’t need to charge the full price because…” – or it means you make enough without paying for the extra labour but there would never be enough for anyone else to be paid. One of the most irritating and totally incorrect justifications is ‘when my business is big enough, I won’t need to use volunteers’. Really? Quite simply, the evidence isn’t there... those WWoofers haven’t opened up hundreds of jobs in agriculture have they? You can’t suddenly make enough to pay for labour, if you don’t charge for labour. If you charge for labour but get it for free, why are you arguing you can’t afford the labour?!!!!
No, if from the offset you structure your business so that you properly calculate time into your pricing, that time will be covered. It might not be a fulltime job immediately. You might have only enough for a few hours a week. You might have to develop a different product so that you can charge properly for the labour it requires. (That cheap wholesale buckets of flowers might not be a thing anymore! HORRAH!) But you will be able to actually pay people for their work.
And if you pay people for their work you build the sector. YOU MAKE JOBS. People can actually get hired to do jobs that they enjoy. Businesses have the capacity to grow, and the sector is recognised as growing too. With sector growth there is the possibility for government support, investment and CHANGE. Now that would be huge and brilliant for the sustainability of the flower industry.
A volunteer labour force helps unsustainable businesses make money, by doing all the unsexy work behind the scenes. This is universally true, whether its illegal migrants picking daffs or woofers growing organic veg. These businesses are profit making. They might be nice and pretty and a really good thing. But they are not charities. Not social enterprises. Not community asset businesses. They are private businesses, usually on privately owned land. They are unethical and they are unsustainable until they value the labour their businesses require.
This is my opinion, but it is opinion of lots of people and why – in the Uk at least – we have employment laws; Rights and standards in place to protect people from discrimination. So if you’re looking to volunteers to make your business ‘work’ then I think that you really need to go back to the drawing board and do the math again. It can work. But not the free labour way…
This year I will have a couple of flexible, seasonal paid opportunities on our flower field. I have paid people in previous years – in 2021 and 2022 I had a Field Assistant – and this year I am looking for people to do specific jobs. If you were to come to me as a volunteer this is the sort of work you would do: Mowing. Weeding and Field Prep like Potting on seedlings. Mulching beds. Deadheading. Its easy, not challenging, safely managed work, and I will pay between £10 - £13 per hour for you to do it. I will have 1-2 days of work available each week from April. And I hope to have a more secure salaried Field Assistant position available next year as I work out – post COVID – what my business looks like and its year round form.