Cooking on the Breadline
Low pay and poor conditions in the British food industry leave thousands of those who feed us too poor to feed themselves — but some are pushing back and organising for better.
Unite members on the picket line at Bakkavor, Spalding. (Credit: Unite the Union)
‘I suppose it’s better the devil you know,’ says Michael,* a food production worker from Spalding, Lincolnshire. He has worked for the food manufacturing company Bakkavor, which provides fresh food products to supermarkets like Tesco, M&S, Sainsbury’s, and Waitrose, for around two and a half decades. ‘We used to get double time or time and a half on weekends and holidays,’ Michael tells Tribune. ‘Now we only get paid any premiums after we’ve worked our contracted hours, and we have to work every two in three weekends, while management — who do work hard — get every weekend off.’
At time of writing in late 2024, Michael and more than 465 out of 1,400 of his hourly-paid colleagues are out on strike after rejecting a pay offer of between 6.4 percent and 7.8 percent, which Unite the Union, with whom the workers are organised, says accounts for little over the minimum wage increase. Michael, who is on one of the lower pay grades, says that while the company may have given workers a 22 percent pay rise over the last three years, this was ‘because the government has made them do it, not because they want to’.
What’s more, staff on the higher pay rates feel slighted, as they have not been offered the same increase as those on lower bands. ‘It’s not fair,’ says Eliana,* a higher-paid employee who has worked at Bakkavor for over a decade. ‘Team leaders’, ‘skilled operators’, and those ‘responsible for quality and safety’ are getting closer to the minimum wage (which is now £11.44), she says. ‘They should at least give the same percentage as the lowest pay grade.’ This is the main reason she decided to walk out. ‘It made people angry,’ she says.
For Eliana, the pay offer doesn’t reflect her increasing workload. ‘They’re cutting people but not giving us a pay rise,’ she tells Tribune. (Bakkavor denies this claim, stating that workers at its Spalding site received real-terms pay rises between 0.2 to 1.8 percent over the past three years.) ‘We used to be working two people to a machine, now it’s just one.’ Eliana, who lives with her partner, says that the pressure to get the same results even when short on staff is stressful, and she sometimes takes the frustration home. ‘Before going to sleep, your head is full [with thoughts] about work,’ she says. Working in environments like this, she adds, ‘you need to learn how to separate your work and personal life, but it’s hard.’
There are hundreds of workers out on strike at the Spalding site, each with their own personal reasons for joining the picket line. Liam*, who has been with the company for more than five years, tells Tribune that some of his colleagues are ‘on the breadline’ and using foodbanks. ‘There are a lot of people that struggle on this site,’ he says. ‘It’s not like this is a greed thing.’ In a small survey of food workers (including those in production, retail, and distribution) conducted by the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) in 2023, 60 percent of respondents said that their wages were not high enough to meet their basic needs, with the same number reducing the amount of food they ate to help with costs; 17 percent had relied on foodbanks. It’s no surprise, then, that many of the workers at the Spalding site can’t afford to buy the products they produce. Eliana, for instance, shops at Lidl and occasionally Tesco. Most workers haven’t shopped at Waitrose or M&S for years, if ever.
Michael notes the high turnover of staff at the site, which he partly puts down to working weekends, yet he has lasted more than two decades. ‘I suppose it’s because it’s easier to stop [here] than go somewhere else, because I’m only going to get the same wage wherever I go,’ he says. Indeed, as Sam Hennessy, a regional officer at Unite who covers the whole food, drink, and agricultural sector in the East Midlands, tells Tribune, low hourly pay is endemic in the food production sector, which is classed as low-skilled labour. ‘The treatment of workers [is a problem], too,’ he says. ‘They’re just seen as a number, completely disposable, and there’s little respect for the work they do.’
This is far from a one-site problem. Artin Giles, an organiser with the Peace and Justice Project working alongside the BFAWU in numerous campaigns in the food production sector, says that the conditions at some factories are even ‘worse than Amazon’, which is notorious for the strict demands placed on workers. ‘We’ve had workers show us chemical burns in their arms which they got while cleaning machines, and they weren’t given time off to recover,’ he says.
Another key issue for food production workers is the ‘bullying and favouritism’ that takes place on sites, according to Giles. As part of their campaign to unionise Samworth Brothers (a large food manufacturing company specialising in baked goods such as pasties, pies, and malt loaves) sites, the BFAWU conducted a small anonymous survey of workers, the responses to which have been shared with Tribune. One worker said that they were being ‘constantly shouted at, called abusive names, and harassed for mistakes I’ve made, by all members of staff in my department, including managers and team leaders’. Others reported that management hired friends and family and that there was a ‘very toxic environment’, and ‘disgraceful treatment’ of agency workers. ‘I was told to wind my neck in when I raised concerns,’ said another.
Putting Food on the Table
This smorgasbord of issues perhaps explains the recent wave of industrial action across the food sector. In the latter half of last year, workers at Tetley’s Tea Factory and a Farmfoods distribution site — organised by the GMB Union — walked out over pay. So did the Bakkavor workers, as well as Unite members working in the Princes factory in Cardiff. In 2023, BFAWU members at the Kingsmill factory in Merseyside won an inflation-busting pay rise of over 20 percent over two years. Such a win has prompted more organising in the sector, with the BFAWU currently organising at the Samworth Brothers sites, as well as at AB Mauri.
However, the issues which so sorely need solving are also what make the food sector such a tricky one to organise. As Michael noted, poor conditions lead to higher staff turnover and lower recruitment. According to the Food and Drink Federation’s latest State of Industry report, published in December 2024, vacancy rates were sitting at around 5 percent between July and September. This is double that of the vacancy rate in the wider manufacturing sector (2.4 percent) and the UK generally (2.6 percent). ‘Not a lot of people find it sexy enough, I suppose,’ says BFAWU president Ian Hodson. ‘And, of course, the historic issues around pay and working conditions multiply the reasons why people don’t want to go into the sector.’
As a result, the sector relies largely on an ageing, migrant, and insecure workforce. Analysis by The Grocer in 2021 found that over 40 percent of the food processing workforce was aged over 45, for instance, while the Office for National Statistics (ONS) data from 2023 showed that two in five food manufacturing workers were born outside the UK. Meanwhile, many companies use temporary and zero-hour workers to plug the gaps in employment.
The transient nature of the workforce poses difficulties for organisers. ‘Union reps will attend induction days for new starters, and you’ll find that in a room of fifty new starters, only three last longer than six weeks,’ says Hennessy. He notes that ‘high sickness rates’ add to the problem. ‘It’s like a vicious cycle, really,’ he says. ‘You can’t get better conditions because you can’t keep the members, and then people leave because the conditions are bad.’
One way to solve this, says Hennessy, would be the introduction of sector-wide collective bargaining, where trade unions negotiate with employers to agree minimum pay and conditions for all workers in the industry. Sector-wide bargaining would circumvent the need for separate campaigns, negotiations, and action on separate sites, making it easier for unionised workers to have their demands met. Labour promised to reintroduce sector-wide bargaining in its New Deal for Workers in 2021 but later U-turned, stating that it would not apply to large swathes of the economy.
The fact that many workers in factories and warehouses are not UK nationals poses another challenge for organisers. ‘We have a lot of workers from Eastern bloc countries, like Poland, Lithuania, Russia, and Romania,’ George Atwall, a regional officer with the BFAWU working on the Samworth Brothers campaign, tells Tribune. ‘It can be difficult to get all of them to organise trade unions because they may have had bad experiences back home.’ In this instance, he says, ‘basic leaflets’ aren’t enough. Instead, organisers focus on community-building and cohesion before recruiting lay members to help with the organising process.
On a more practical note, there are language barriers that hinder the organising process, too. ‘Each factory will have its own makeup of migrants from different countries,’ he says. In order to tackle this, organisers create leaflets and set up Facebook pages in different languages, so that they are able to attract workers from different countries. ‘We do a campaign trying to draw the workers to the [Facebook] pages and then galvanise them from there,’ he says. ‘We do this by educating them and looking at local funding for ESOL [English for Speakers of Other Languages] so that we can provide English classes and educate them further on the trade union movement.’
There’s also the ‘silent threat’ of automation, as Hennessy puts it, which can be seen as a ‘double-edged sword’. ‘There’ll be certain processes that are incredibly difficult and dangerous for humans, so if technology can assist and improve how something’s done but not risk jobs, then, as a union, we’re all for that,’ he says. ‘What can’t happen is jobs get cut, and companies just save money.’ Because technology changes so fast, Hennessy says that unions are often ‘fighting against the curve’, and attempting to respond as quickly as possible ‘both at a local level and at a more strategic, governing level’. Unite is currently conducting surveys in workplaces to better understand the role of technology and automation.
Finally, Hodson says, there is a strong anti-union sentiment in the food sector, which makes organising difficult. ‘Getting to talk to workers is a real problem because we don’t have access to workplaces, we have to wait outside factories,’ he says. ‘[Companies] do employ anti-union tactics; we’ve been outside workplaces, for example, where they know what time we’ll come in, so they’ll change the shift finishing time, which then agitates the workers [who are told that the reason they’re finishing late is the union].’
Some of these tactics are even more underhand. According to Hodson, the BFAWU has at times seen imminent recognition scuppered by last-minute bonuses offered by companies to workers who refuse to join. And while, on the one hand, companies are ‘incentivising’ workers not to join the union, on the other, they are also cracking down on those who do. ‘We know from our experience that managers have a tendency to apply pressure to anybody that joins the union,’ Hodson continues, ‘and people who have played a prime role in organising the workplace have been sacked.’
Keeping Us All Fed
Labour’s New Deal should, in theory, help with the anti-union sentiment in the sector, Hodson says, by giving unions better access to workplaces and removing the 40 percent support threshold from recognition ballots so only a simple majority of those voting will be required. At the same time, there appears to be a need for a larger societal reckoning with how undervalued food and drink workers really are.
Food and drink is the UK’s biggest manufacturing sector, valued at £104.4 billion. Each one of us depends on its continued functioning, even if we only think about it during our short weekly shop, and the work that keeps it functioning can be punishing. Hennessy points out that workers at Bakkavor, for example, ‘make a lot of chilled goods, so they’re working in fridge-like conditions for twelve hours, spending most of the time on their feet and operating heavy machinery’. Despite that hard and indispensable work, Hennessy continues, the workers are too often forgotten.
You always hear the narrative of how you know the manufacturing base got absolutely decimated in the UK, and when you talk about manufacturing, I don’t think people actually think of food. I don’t think it’s brought into the conversation as often as it should be.
Such neglect only makes the determination now on show more striking. When we speak to Eliana, she’s on the picket line. Workers chat jovially to one another in the background, and cars pip their horns in solidarity as they go past. Bakkavor has tabled negotiations, and Eliana wonders whether they’ll give the workers what they want, but she is resolved to keep going. ‘I committed to staying out [on strike], so I’m going to stay here, with everybody,’ she says. ‘We cannot give up.’