Media reporting of labour shortages in UK horticulture during the COVID-19 pandemic: the use of wartime metaphors in the selective unveiling of precarious work/workers

Over the 21st century almost all of the UK's harvest labour has been foreign-bom. The COVID-19 crisis (from March 2020) threatened UK food security by limiting this supply of low-wage foreign labour into the UK. In response a national campaign was launched to get a domestic 'Land Army' to 'Feed the Nation' and 'Pick for Britain' (the three main epithets used). The article profiles this campaign. We show that the COVID-19 crisis put low-wage harvest labour into the spotlight when this labour is usually hidden from public view. Potentially, such unveiling could have challenged the economics of the food production system. However, we argue that the rupture was stage-managed by invoking a wartime rhetoric and three key concomitant roles of the victim-hero farmer, the good migrant, and the reluctant British-based understudy. These emphasised the valiant nature of harvest work and framed migrant workers as (temporary) heroes helping to save the nation. In contrast, British-based workers' reluctance to embrace precarious work was framed as personal deficiency rather than a structural failure to create decent jobs. In all, the spotlight cast on the low-wage rural economy by the COVID-19 crisis was carefully targeted and stage-managed and did not challenge the persistence of precarious horticultural work.