When Julia Quecaño Casimiro left Chile to pick cherries in Herefordshire in June, she hoped she would finally save enough money to study biochemistry. Instead, when she left the farm a month later, she ended up homeless in London with little more than £100.
Casimiro, 23, has become the first person on a seasonal worker visa to take a farm to an employment tribunal. Her claim against Haygrove farm for unlawful deduction of wages, unfair dismissal, discrimination and harassment was filed last week and a preliminary hearing is expected in March.
Haygrove, which supplies cherries and berries to most leading supermarket chains, rejected her allegations and intends “to defend the claim robustly”. The case has been brought by the United Voices of the World union, which represents some of Britain’s most vulnerable low-paid workers.
Casimiro grew up in Bolivia, where she worked from the age of 11, doing jobs to prop up the family’s income as small-scale farmers. She was one of 134 Latin American workers who came to the farm but is alone in taking it to tribunal. “We were all used to working really hard but we wanted to make money,” she said.
When Casimiro arrived on the farm, terrible weather meant there was initially no work. For 12 days, she sat in a rain-hammered caravan wondering how she would make back the cost of the flight and visas. The farm lent her and the others between £50 and £100 for essentials and did not charge for accommodation during this period but did not pay them.
When work finally began in July, Casimiro said the conditions were not what she expected.
“There was constant shouting at us,” she claimed, saying that one supervisor in particular would often raise their voice. Haygrove disputed her account and said no grievances had been raised previously about the supervisor.
Casimiro said there was no drinking water available where they picked cherries and that she ended up eating the fruit to quench her thirst, for which she was reprimanded.
Haygrove said water was provided in all picking fields by team leaders and that this was regularly audited. It added that eating fruit was forbidden for hygiene reasons.
Casimiro and other workers living in the caravans had to leave at 4.20am to be bussed 90 minutes away to one of the farm’s other West Country sites. They were not paid for this time and Casimiro said she had expected to be living where she worked. Haygrove said she was offered the chance to move to the other site but chose not to, something Casimiro denies.
Casimiro said that on the day she raised concerns about the farm with a senior colleague, she was told she would not have a shift the next day.
“I was very upset,” she said. “I felt they were taking the job away not because of my work but because of what I’d dared to say.”
Haygrove denied this. A spokesperson said that higher-performing workers were allocated more shifts so it was “entirely possible” that she was not required to work, but that feedback was welcomed and never reflected in work allocation.
Casimiro said that when she was first recruited for the work in Chile back in May, she was told she could make about £500 a week and that she would have to repay no more than $1,000 (£800) for the cost of a flight.
While Casimiro was waiting around in the caravan, she received a flight bill of more than £1,500 to be repaid in six weekly £250 instalments.
Haygrove said workers were given a guide flight cost of between £1,000 and £1,400 but that flights turned out to be more expensive – and the issue became a flashpoint because of a discrepancy in the face value of the tickets and what the travel agent charged.
The farm loaned the flight cost to reduce the risk of modern slavery and paid the discrepancy in price.
After receiving the flight bill, Casimiro and many of her Latin American colleagues went on an unofficial strike. Some negotiated with the farm and returned to work but Casimiro left.
Casimiro believes that Britons would not accept the conditions “because they have better options”.
She added: “The only people who will accept it are people like me who are in need and are not really aware of what they are signing up for.”
Haygrove said that when it recruited British workers during the pandemic, they picked at a third of the rate and did not stay on but did not complain about conditions.
Brexit and the war in Ukraine have created a recruitment crisis for farms, who had relied on Ukrainian pickers when the supply of EU workers dried up. The seasonal worker scheme was designed as a solution, allowing farms to bring workers thousands of miles for short-term employment while the workers shouldered the cost of their own flights and visas.
The Guardian revealed last year that Indonesian workers were left with debts of up to £5,000 to third parties after coming to pick fruit in the UK and being given little work to do. Since then, the government changed its policy to make sure seasonal workers are guaranteed 32 hours work a week.
But David Camp, the director of the Association of Labour Providers, said the rules requiring employers to guarantee 32 hours did not specify that workers’ contracts have to start when they arrive on farms, allowing them to hold off paying wages until weather improves.
“The 32-hour rule was a step forward but changes to the scheme rules are still required to ensure fairness for all seasonal workers,” Camp said. “Where this increases costs for growers, this must be reflected in increases to prices paid to farms.”
When asked if she regretted her decision to come to Britain, Casimiro started to cry. “I’ve regretted it 1,000 times because it’s been so hard,” she said.
After leaving the farm, she ended up in London and said: “I couldn’t tell my family what was going on. I had no money, nowhere to go and I didn’t know what to do.
“I wanted to kill myself because I felt I was trapped in this situation when I had sometimes £4 or £5 in my pocket and nowhere to go and no one to call. The only thing I could do, because I couldn’t work, was to borrow more and more money.”
Casimiro’s lawyer, Claire Marcel at the United Voices of the World union, said the scheme had been “very badly made” and that it should not be possible “to just circumvent the labour shortages by recruiting further and further away”.
Haygrove said it always adhered to Home Office rules, that the 32-hour rule applied to the employment start date and that its seasonal workers averaged a 46-hour week this year.
Its director, Angus Davison, said: “Ms Casimiro’s frustration saw her leave Haygrove without notice, and with a free aeroplane ticket home, after working for us for only 11 days.
“However, the vast majority of cherrypickers remained with us in August, September and October and saw their hours of work increase to expectations as the weather regularised.
“We therefore believe that Ms Casimiro’s position is born out of her short-lived, atypical, snapshot experience which coincided with extreme harvesting conditions.”
He added: “This July, an isolated incident of discontent occurred involving a number of South American cherrypickers including Ms Casimiro.
“This discontent was prompted by distrust caused by a discrepancy in the face value of flight tickets and the amount loaned to workers for the tickets, and lower than typical hours of work available in the month of July as a result of not only poor but genuinely extraordinary weather conditions.”
Commenting on the apparent loophole that allows growers to push back start dates once workers arrive on farms, a government spokesperson said: “The rules are clear that employers cannot withhold wages from workers in this manner.” They said inspectors had not found evidence of this practice on farms this season.
