Rural delivery: 'Labour units' also deserve respect

By LOUISA HERD*

Evaluating the money spent on your labour units ...

That's quoted from the spring issue of Dexcelink, a freebie magazine which my boss handed to me the other day from the dairy farm advisory and research organisation, Dexcel.

As a farm worker, my first thought was: "Gee, how nice, and they wonder why this industry has problems recruiting staff."

Generally, I'm not overly sensitive about what folks call me but this "labour unit" terminology beloved of farming's intelligentsia makes me mad.

I'm not a unit. I'm a person. I'm that female at Bill's that milks his cows. I'm the silly moo who broke a post with the front-end loader last week. I'm a mum and a wife, a mature student, an aspiring writer and a big Bob Marley fan.

I am not an occasionally useful agricultural implement. The boss doesn't spray me with CRC every night after a good wash-down from the cowshed hose. I don't get cranked up the next morning and kicked if my motor doesn't turn over first go.

So why do I keep seeing this hideous label bandied about? It is dehumanising, callous, and says a lot more about the academics at the helm of the industry than it does about us lowly workers.

Especially when I looked over the other articles in the table of contents and there was a piece called "Dexcel's People Are Its Strength".

So they're people are they? Not consulting units, or teaching units, or management units?

Attitudes percolate down from the top. I attended a short course several years ago and was entertained by a farm owner describing how they had told "the unit" to clean out the calf pens that morning.

It was, apparently, a difficult management decision, because there was a possibility that "the unit" could have been more effectively used elsewhere. I kid you not, this same person later bemoaned the fact that they couldn't get staff to stay.

On another course (I love doing courses), a chap in the class was enlightening us on how he could improve his farm's profitability. He had decided to "offload a unit". I didn't take any exception to his need to reduce his workforce - after all, no one expects a job for life.

What grated was the way he said it, as if he'd decided to flog off his old hayrake. Ah, well, what the hell - it's only a labour unit and they're 10 a penny out there, eh?

But that's just it - we are not 10 a penny. Not if you want a good one, that is. So why demean us to the level of the quad, the tractor and the silage wagon? Even the farm dog is given his name, so why not us?

In an attempt to rationalise everything into a form which can be easily expressed on those graphs beloved of the farming consultants, a certain human touch has been left out of the equation.

No other industry's advisers are as disdainfully unkind in their treatment of the poor cogs who keep the wheels of the machine turning.

I'm probably shooting myself in the foot here big time because I cherish an ambition to become a consulting officer one day if I get through my degree.

If I do, I hope I never see my fellow man as a figure on a rinky-dinky little chart, only to be compared with kilos of milk solids and cows per hectare.

I don't care if they call us man hours, personnel hours or worker hours.

I can see that for the purposes of investigating business efficiency, there has to be some unit (aagh!) of measurement to have fair comparisons between different operations, but at least the above terms recognise that behind the unit, there's a person - a real, live man or woman - who does the job.

And, by acknowledging that person, the writer or speaker shows consideration and respect.

* Louisa Herd is a Wellsford farm worker.