Meetings in Penzance this morning

In Penzance this morning to meet Keno, the Chilean administrator at St Mary's Church. Keno has loads of ideas about issues around migration. His own experience is intriguing. We're thinking of organising a focus group in February to bring together people like him to have thoughts to share. It would be a really valuable thing to do. It will feed into plans for the schools workshops we'll be running over the next few months.

An added to bonus to see a Christian Aid exhibition at the church on displacement.
And to bump into the tireless Andrew Yates, vicar at St Paul, who has helped us so much with I PACKED THIS MYSELF over the past decade now.

Andrew and members of the congregation were off to HSBC bank to present a petition to the manager. Christian Aid is calling on HSBC to reconsider their investment in new coal power in Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam. The charity says that coal-fired electricity is unlikely to reach poor and isolated communities in these countries, who would be better served by renewable energy.

Next steps - moving things forward in 2020

A New Year and new resolutions.
We'll be rolling out our project I PACKED THIS MYSELF across Cornwall this year in partnership with Inclusion Cornwall and the Diocese of Truro.
The aim: to increase understanding and break down prejudice against workers from overseas.
If you missed all the things we did at the start of this project ten years ago, here are just a few highlights:
Workshops at Camborne School
An exhibition at Penair School with a film made by migrant workers
A workshop at Helston School
Ten workshops in a day at Torpoint School
A touring suitcase exhibition
And, for an overview, please visit the Bridging Arts website.
For more information, please email info@bridging-arts.com.

Joseph Rowntree Foundation report on migrant workers in the UK food industry

Hundreds of migrant workers in the UK food industry live in a climate of fear, are poverty stricken, subjected to inhuman conditions and indebted to gangmasters, according to a report published today by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

'Experiences of Forced Labour in the UK Food Industry' records a catalogue of abusive practices in the food industry. Researchers spoke to 62 migrant workers. 
Quoting from the report, here are the key points:

• "The most notable and unexpected forced labour practice was the 'underwork scam' – recruiting too many workers and then giving them just enough employment to meet their debt to the gangmaster.
• A significant proportion of interviewees paid fees to come to the UK and secure work, creating indebtedness and dependence.
• Workers were threatened and bullied. Racist or sexist language was sometimes used in the workplace, underpinning a climate of fear. Some employers used fear of dismissal to ensure that workers remained compliant and deferential.
• Productivity targets and workplace surveillance were excessive; workers felt they were treated like machines rather than people and given targets that were often impossible to meet. Informal employment brokers frequently provided workers with tied accommodation, which was often sub-standard; workers thus experienced exploitation at home as well as in the workplace. Losing their job might also mean losing their home.
• It is difficult to say whether the exploitation reported was severe enough to constitute forced labour, but the evidence indicated that employers were infringing many rights.
• Low-wage migrant workers appear especially vulnerable to forced labour, despite most of those interviewed having the right to live and work in the UK. The intensity of work in the food industry, driven by economic pressures throughout the supply chain, contributes to such exploitation."

Seminar on the role of schooling in the integration of 'new' Polish migrants to th UK

Briefing by Paulina Trevena of the University of Southampton who has conducted interviews with 83 adult Poles .... She didn't talk to teachers in schools dealing with populations of migrant children or  migrant children themselves...(so rather a limited remit). ... But recommendations that make sense and match ours and those we've heard elsewhere from people at the coalface....
- 'buddying' systems can be helpful
- information packs for migrant parents would be good, particularly with info about differences in school systems
- involving migrant parents in the school community is important.
And, of course, language support at every turn is essential.
This was at the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund and part of the COMPAS Breakfast Briefing series which 'present topical,cutting edge research on migration and migration related issues). COMPAS is part of Oxford (University). More on the COMPAS website.

Box art... the possibilities

Have spent today thinking about our new project on worklessness - it relates to all the work we've done on I PACKED THIS MYSELF which deals with migrant workers and local employment (and/or lack of it). Looking at people's experience in areas of high unemployment has been central to this.

How to bring the two together visually - and even practically? The suitcase is a metaphor for history, of course (as we've used it in I PACKED THIS MYSELF, by asking migrant workers what they brought with them to this country). It can also be a metaphor for the future.

Have always been very interested in art in boxes - and came across this - so thought provoking. Immediately want to make a doll house like this....

But I had really been thinking of more traditional box art, as in Mexican shrines to the dead. This one (fairly traditional - love the playing cards and chrysanthemums)...

And this one breaking away into idolatry of that ubiquitous figurehead of Mexican art, Frieda Kahlo. (I wear a Frieda Kahlo pendant myself - given to me by Tessa.)

But then came across a fantastic artist and I cannot believe that I had never heard of him before: Joseph Cornell (1903-72). Now this is really box art.

Background from http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cornell/ 

"He had no formal training in art and his most characteristic works are his highly distinctive `boxes'. These are simple boxes, usually glass-fronted, in which he arranged surprising collections of photographs or Victorian bric-à-brac in a way that has been said to combine the formal austerity of Constructivism with the lively fantasy of Surrealism. Like Kurt Schwitters he could create poetry from the commonplace. Unlike Schwitters, however, he was fascinated not by refuse, garbage, and the discarded, but by fragments of once beautiful and precious objects, relying on the Surrealist technique of irrational juxtaposition and on the evocation of nostalgia for his appeal (he befriended several members of the Surrealist movement who settled in the USA during the Second World War). Cornell also painted and made Surrealist films."

Perhaps an interesting link (as far as I PACKED THIS MYSELF) with Schwitters here: he was an artist in exile in the UK during the war years.

The solution to youth unemployment lies in the coffers of big business?

The solution to youth unemployment lies in the coffers of big business | Stewart Lansley

http://gu.com/p/36tta

Just HOW MANY people are unemployed in Cornwall?

What is the unemployment rate in Camborne?And in Cornwall?The question came up this week at our workshops at Torpoint Comunity College and none of us were quite sure of the answer, though we knew that levels were high. Bev Faull, community police officer in charge of the migrant worker beat, said at least 3,000 migrant workers had come into Cornwall since the start of January for seasonal work, mainly daffodils. 

Every day I drive past a farm where a local grower has to recruit hundreds (600)workers from eastern Europe to pick daffodils. He is just down the road from Camborne, where unemployment is high. But he cannot find local pickers to do the work. 

Some statistics from the Camborne Redruth Packet newspaper last Sunday - and the chilling suggestion of a 'lost generation' of young people: 

"Unemployment figures show that the amount of people out of work in Devon and Cornwall has risen sharply over the past year.The number of people out of work and claiming benefits show levels have reached a 16-year high with a record number of people working part-time. Youth unemployment remains stubbornly high, leading to fears of a lost generation of young people." Camborne Redruth Packet, 18 March 2012