Happy New Year?

It’s that time of year, when pictures of the Roman god Janus (who has given his name to the month) appear, with two faces. The idea being that he faces both ways to represent endings and beginnings.

Well, if he was looking forward to 2014, many of the stories he will see will already have appeared in 2013.

In fact, it is exactly one year ago this week the horsemeat scandal broke in the newspapers. Don’t forget this was revealed by the Irish food standards agency - not its British counterpart, let alone the British food industry. At the time, one of my fellow ETI bloggers pointed out that “dodgy meat and poor working conditions are driven by the same purchasing practices”

The government-commissioned interim report on the food chain, published last month, doesn’t pull any punches, but uses the term “food crime”, which it defines as “an organised activity perpetrated by groups who knowingly set out to deceive and or injure those purchasing a food product.” https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/elliott-review-into-the-inte…

Big money can be made from food crime. Take some meat which has been condemned as unfit for human consumption, and should only be used as pet food. Mix it into higher quality meat and could turn a profit of £2,500 in a small batch of 10  tonnes of burgers.

Somebody who does not think twice about doing that, is not going to be very fussy about the minimum wage or health and safety. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if the occasional fingertip has found its way into cheap burgers. Eric Schlosser described in his 2001 bestselling book, Fast Food Nation, how the US meat processing industry had rolled back trade union membership (regular readers were no doubt waiting for my customary reference to trade unions) with one consequence being increased accident rates.

Where the United States leads, sooner or later the UK follows.

Since the horsemeat scandal broke, the UK food industry and retailers have been scrambling to rebuild customer confidence and there are increased checks into the source of our meat. Criminal gangs are pretty good at evading these kind of checks and they will operate lower down the chain. It’s here that a network of agency workers, often migrant workers, may get the minimum wage, but “deductions” for dubious benefits of overcrowded accommodation and dangerous transport, means their take-home pay is quite low. That’s if they get the minimum wage. The Office for National Statistics estimates that 279,000 jobs paid less than the minimum wage in 2013. That number, or close to it, seems to be very consistent in recent years. (www.ons.gov.uk/)

To paraphrase Tony Blair, if we want to get tough on food crime, then we need to get tough on the causes of food crime, and that is going to mean tackling unscrupulous, often criminal, employers. The Gangmasters Licensing Authority, which was set up as a result of an ETI initiative, has finally been able to secure a prison conviction of a gentleman who, quite apart from not possessing a bone fide GLA licence, also had an offensive weapon, committed actual bodily harm, charged  workers £400 for getting them a job, levied £50 a week for accommodation and five pounds a day for transport. He beat workers with an iron bar when they complained and kept their documents.

That was a bad case, but is just the tip of the iceberg? Do you think that Audrius Morkunas, now safely behind bars, was worried about food safety? You just can’t separate the two issues of food crime and crime against workers.

Maybe you want to think about something more pleasant than dodgy burgers? How about holidays? What about somewhere nice like Goa?

Better choose your hotel carefully. Earlier this month, a building under construction collapsed in Goa killing 14 people. 

As I pointed out in a blog last year,   there were six building collapses in 2013 in Mumbai alone, killing a total of 118 people and injuring 110. None of them were garment factories, and none of them or as catastrophic as the Rana Plaza disaster in Dhaka in April. But it’s just a matter of time before another garment factory or shoe factory in India or Pakistan or wherever, producing for the UK catches fire or collapses.

Another issue that won’t go away is the minimum wage in Bangladesh and Cambodia and other low-cost garment producing companies. So far this year, six workers have been killed in protests around the minimum wage those two countries.

If we carry on at the same rate, that will mean 173 workers dead by the end of the year, shot by the police or the army.

There are 350 shooting days till next Christmas.