ABSTRACT
For over a century, the gangmaster system has been an important part of UK agricultural and food production, and now provides over half of the labour needed for planting, cultivating, harvesting and packaging of UK fruit and vegetables. Gangmasters – labour providers who recruit and organize groups of people to work on farms and in packhouses – are involved in a legal activity that provides a flexible labour force needed to meet the seasonal production and market demands of the food industry. However, within this framework of legal and essential labour provision there are, and always have been, serious abuses of workers’ rights.
