The Co-operative Farms Migrant Workers Case Study

The Co-operative currently farms around 50,000 acres of land in England and Scotland, the equivalent of about 25,000 football pitches! It has been farming since 1896, when it bought its first farm to grow potatoes for its food stores, giving it over 100 years of farming expertise. It now grows an increasing range of cereals and fresh fruit and vegetables for its Co-operative Food store and owns three packhouses; packing potatoes, broccoli and strawberries. The business requires a large amount of additional labour during the harvest periods on its Fruit Farms, which it recruits for from all over Europe and a significant proportion of the workforce within its Potato Packhouses are also of foreign nationality.  

What the Co-operative farms did to support migrant workers:

Migrant Workers Project: A graduate from The Co-operative Group’s Leadership Programme was tasked to look at how it could improve the management of migrant workers on its farms and packhouses, helping the business understand what difficulties the workers face in the workplace and what more could be done to support them.
From this the following actions were identified:

•  English lessons are available at both Langley Brook and Carnoustie packhouses for all permanent staff.
• Every site that has a significant foreign workforce has employees who earn an additional payment each month for providing a translation service for work related matters. It seeks external translation support for meetings that are confidential.
• Health and Safety signs, Induction documents and Policy and Procedure documents are translated into several languages. The Co-operative’s annual employee engagement survey “Talkback”, is translated into all the languages spoken in the packhouses so that foreign workers have an equal say.
• The accommodation provided for seasonal foreign workers is regularly reviewed and updated.
• Feedback from the graduate project revealed that employees were unaware of where to go to get support and advice. It now advertises when the HR Officer is on site for employees to drop in and seek any advice they require, with the help of the on-site translators.
• A Managing Diversity workshop was run at the Langley Brook packhouse for all levels of Supervisors and Managers.

The business impact:

• There are a number of migrant workers that have been promoted to Line Supervisors and Managers at the packhouses and Fruit Farms.
• There is an ever increasing number of returnees for the summer harvests, reducing recruitment and training costs.
• Turnover rates within their packhouses are low as the organisation has been able to develop the workforce and promote from within.