It had been a sweltering morning picking cherries beneath plastic polytunnels in July when Ilyas finally lost his temper at the farm where he was working in Kent.
“We could hardly breathe in there,” he said. “It was very difficult to work because the weather was very hot.”
It was his first day harvesting the fruit, having spent several weeks thinning apple trees, and he says he was told he had not picked enough and was being sent back to the caravan early.
Not long after returning to the caravan, Ilyas’s contract was terminated and he was returned to Kazakhstan last month. He is one of a growing number of farm workers who have sought help with dismissal from the Worker Support Centre this season after travelling to work in British fields.
In a video recorded at the farm, Ilyas can be seen confronting a supervisor. He says “you treat us like animals” and that he had not signed up to “these unrealistic targets”.
Ilyas said the target was to pick about 15 boxes of black cherries a day and that each box contained between 6-7kg of cherries. He said that if about 10 cherries or more were bad within that then the whole box could be rejected.
In the video, recorded on 29 July, a supervisor tells him to stop filming and they argue. The supervisor tells him his work is finished for the day and when Ilyas asks why, the supervisor says “because you’ve not met targets today”.
The farm’s HR manager told the Guardian she believed Ilyas was removed from the fields to “defuse the situation” due to his aggressive behaviour and that sending him home was “a last resort”.
Ilyas, 32, had been working on British farms since March after coming to the UK on a seasonal worker visa. As an educated IT worker, he was willing to try something different since he had the potential to earn more than double his Kazakhstani salary of about £830 a month.
Now he says he regrets the experience. “The targets are unrealistic and probably the aim of the managers was to squeeze everything possible in the shortest period of time.”
The farm, Mansfields in Kent, is one of the biggest in the country. It grows more than 25,000 tonnes of fruit each year over 1,200 hectares (3,000 acres) of farmland in several different sites.
Lee Port, the chief executive of Mansfields, said: “We use targets as much as possible as we need people to understand expectations from the moment they start working with us. On the first day of picking we communicate through training that the focus is on quality and that we would expect a first-time picker to pick around 50-60% of the target set.”
Port said the average across 250 staff was for three trays of cherries to be picked an hour and that Ilyas worked for 4.75 hours and picked an average of 0.8 an hour. He said experienced pickers were set the target of 3.5 trays an hour and that other new pickers in Ilyas’s team achieved an average of 1.5 trays an hour.
Port said Ilyas was picking “nearly half the expectation of a new picker and, when his performance had been raised as a concern and supervisors had tried to help with additional training earlier in the day, he started acting aggressively which continued throughout the morning”.
Port also said he had witness statements attesting to Ilyas “acting aggressively and demonstrating poor conduct”. He was issued a final warning as a result. He added: “If Ilyas hadn’t been aggressive he would not have been sent home.”
Port said of the polytunnels: “The working conditions are monitored daily, with risk assessments carried out by our health and safety departments. The cherry orchards are under plastic, but the fields are well-vented and staff start early to ensure optimum picking conditions for pickers and the fruit.”
Ilyas said he now has a job in Kazakhstan and has no intention of working on British farms again.
Port said workers were less productive as a result of the increased living wage. “One of the problems that we are seeing across industry is people happy with just hitting the minimum targets. When picking fruit in the orchards the staff have the opportunity to earn significantly more money on bonus, based on performance and quality of picking. With the living wage increasing as it has the staff are now happy with earnings and don’t seem to be as motivated.”
One of the reasons that Ilyas said he was not able to make as much money as he hoped was because of the amount he spent before coming to Britain. In addition to the cost of flights and visas, he said he had paid about $1,000 (£760) to a third party in Kazakhstan.
Ilyas said the company promised to find him work in the UK and that after about nine months of waiting it told him about Pro-Force, which recruited him and deployed him on several farms.
Pro-Force recruits at events in Kazakhstan and does not use third parties. But the company acknowledged that it regularly comes across scammers charging people to tell them about these events or, for example, to send them links to the Pro-Force website. It said when that happened it investigated and reported them to the Kazakh authorities.
Pro-Force said there was no log of Ilyas reporting that he made payments to a third party but it was investigating the company after the Guardian flagged it to them.
Pro-Force said: “Pro-Force places worker welfare front and centre of its operations and commits to such in its strategic objectives. The company has forged a reputation for doing so amongst peers and key industry stakeholders, in part due to the fact that it pioneers worker welfare initiatives such as the minimum 32 hours rule it introduced in 2019, and the UK’s first pilot employer pays principle scheme to take place in 2025.”
Asked about Ilyas’s case, Pro-Force said: “Though we are unable to comment on specifics, there were documented conduct and performance concerns with Ilyas – despite this, he was provided with two transfers prior to his final placement. An impasse was reached at his final placement where there had been concerns regarding his conduct and performance, and Ilyas left with only a matter of weeks remaining on his visa. Pro-Force is disappointed to hear of Ilyas’s dissatisfaction, and is committed to investigating his allegations should he provide us with the relevant information.”
