“We are Polish strongmen,” laughs Piotr Zabiec, taking a break from another busy day processing turkeys on a farm near Chelmsford in Essex. “Without us, maybe you won’t have a turkey on your table at Christmas time.”
The 41-year-old has left his fiancee and two children at home in the central city of Włocławek, trading his usual work as a health and safety inspector and taxi driver for a month removing giblets from thousands of birds for the turkey producer KellyBronze. It is the first time he has come to the UK to work, encouraged to make the trip by friends who have spent the past few Decembers in Britain.
“I’m honest, I came for money,” says Zabiec, explaining he expects to earn £2,500 for a month’s work, about four times his usual monthly salary, joking he might take a four-month break when he returns to Poland.
Despite visa hurdles and travel challenges posed by Covid, Zabiec is one of an estimated 3,000 workers – mostly from Poland and eastern Europe – who have travelled to Britain to answer the government’s rather last-minute call for help in getting Christmas turkeys to the nation’s tables on time.
The 45-strong temporary team at KellyBronze are some of the foreign workers, including lorry drivers and butchers, who have saved the UK’s first post-Brexit Christmas, after a year of widespread staffing shortages, especially in the food processing and logistics sectors.
Following months of pleas from the poultry industry, and weeks of negative headlines, the government announced an immigration policy U-turn at the start of October, allowing up to 5,500 seasonal poultry workers and 5,000 HGV drivers to enter the UK on emergency visas.
All of the EU nationals working at KellyBronze who do not usually live in the UK had to apply to the temporary seasonal worker scheme, while some of the others have already received settled status.
This year, about 20 of the regular Christmas staff did not make the trip, either because they did not want to fill out the visa paperwork or because they didn’t have a passport, as they have been able to travel freely around the EU – and to the UK before Brexit – using their Polish ID cards.
Others nearly did not make it because of delays in receiving their work permit.
Dominik Dycka, a farmer, has travelled without incident to the UK in late November for the past seven years. With three other workers on board, he set off in his car on the long drive to Essex 12 days after submitting his temporary worker visa application – he expected a response within 14 days – but before receiving an approval.
When he was stopped by UK border officials at Dunkirk, he was told he wasn’t allowed to cross the Channel. This led to a scramble to get his three passengers – whose visas had already been granted – to meet the coach carrying the rest of the workers, so they could travel on to Essex.
Meanwhile, Dycka spent a couple of days waiting in vain in a Calais hotel for a response from the Home Office, before driving back to Poland. When his visa finally arrived, days later than expected, the company booked him a flight to the UK.
“I felt really bad,” Dycka said, speaking in Polish, translated by a colleague. “They [the border officials] treated me like I had done something wrong. But I didn’t do anything wrong, I just wanted to come to work.”
The experience has put the 39-year-old off returning to the UK for the ninth time next year, even though the extra thousands of pounds he earns during December are vital for supporting his parents’ potato and crop farm in Poland.
Several of the workers, including those with settled status, said they felt as if they were “interrogated” on arrival at the border despite having all the necessary documents.
Yet many say their treatment by officials contrasts starkly with the way they are treated on the farm, where they return year after year.
Supervisor Jacek Marciniak, 43, has worked for the family business for two decades. He spends half of the year with KellyBronze, including five months in the spring and summer at the company’s hatchery a few miles away, where the new season’s poults start their life, and then during the pre-Christmas rush. The work is also something of a family affair, with Marciniak’s wife, brother and sister-in-law Patrycja also preparing the Christmas turkeys.
The processing work isn’t for the faint-hearted. Clad in white coats, hairnets and face masks, the team spend long days inside the chilly plant, hand-plucking, preparing and packaging the premium birds, which are hung for two weeks after slaughter. But there is a convivial atmosphere, with workers chatting to one other or singing along to songs on the radio.
“It’s a very hard job and not many English like to work here,” said Maciek Mirolewicz, who works the rest of the year at a window firm in Corby. “The money is good for us and we have no problem working hard.”
The company owner, Paul Kelly, knows the value of his seasonal team, who will process 35,000 turkeys this year.
“I give them all a hug when they arrive and give them all a hug when they leave,” Kelly said, surveying the activity inside the processing hall. “I wouldn’t have a business without them.”
This year, Kelly has been reminded of what he calls “the dark days”, before Poland and seven other eastern European countries joined the EU in 2004, when he struggled to recruit extra seasonal staff from the surrounding area in rural Essex.
“I’m usually a positive person, but the past few years have been a real downer for me,” Kelly says.
“Pre-Brexit I was bullish, the demand from lots of people for better-quality turkey was increasing and we could sell more and more. But what if we can’t get them plucked?”
He adds he is unable to cut down on labour by automating parts of the process because his more expensive premium turkeys have to be plucked by hand rather than machine.
Kelly calculates it has cost the business £500 to bring over each worker on the government scheme, and like many people in agriculture, complains that the decision was made far too late. The British Poultry Council estimates that just over half of the 5,500 visa allocation will be filled, not for lack of demand but because there was not enough time to arrange the workers’ visa applications and travel. Despite pleas from farmers, the government’s annual seasonal worker pilot scheme – which allows 30,000 people from anywhere in the world to work in the UK each year – is restricted to those in edible horticulture, picking fruit and crops.
The company, started by Kelly’s grandfather, is celebrating its 50th year, yet he fears future staffing difficulties may force him to reduce the numbers of turkeys he rears.
If others make the same decision, a lot more of the 10m turkeys that form the centrepiece of many families’ Christmas dinners would end up being imported from abroad.
Thousands of additional workers are needed by the meat-processing industry each year to slaughter and process the festive poultry. However, Britain’s meat-processing sector, two-thirds staffed by non-UK workers, is short of about 15% of its 95,000-strong workforce. It was already struggling to fill vacancies before the pandemic, which – coupled with Brexit – led to many EU nationals returning to their home countries.
Meanwhile, Marciniak, who has recruited many of his fellow Włocławek residents to Britain over the years, is aware his compatriots may decide in future to search out well-paid roles elsewhere in the EU.
“They can go wherever they want in Europe. There is plenty of work if you want to find it and probably they look for a different place after all that’s happened,” he says.
When the job is done and the last birds have been collected by customers from the farm gate, the Polish workers will have departed for home, where they will relax and enjoy Christmas, but with a traditional meal of carp on 24 December instead of a turkey dinner.
