To let your people raise a problem before it blows up, give them one agreed place to take a complaint, name the person who receives it, and set a deadline for answering. Then keep a notebook: each complaint goes in with the date it came in, and later you write next to it what was done. Make sure at least one place to complain does not go through the boss the complaint might be about, such as the foreman.
This is not a favor from a generous owner. GLOBALG.A.P., a farm certification that many buyers ask their suppliers for, has a module on working conditions called GRASP. A farm assessed under GRASP must have a confidential complaint process that is “simple and available to all” workers and “free of any retaliation or penalty”. Even if none of your buyers asks for it, the GRASP requirements make a useful list of what a complaint channel needs.
You have probably seen what happens without one. A worker has a problem with the foreman they answer to. There is no agreed place to take it and nobody knows who would receive it, so they keep it to themselves. The complaint stays put, and it reaches you late, twisted, or all at once on the day the person quits. Gregorio Billikopf wrote a farm labor management handbook for the University of California. In it, he describes how people “suffer for a long time before bringing issues up” and “sweep problems under the psychological rug until the mound of dirt is so large” that everyone trips over it.
Why does a problem reach you late, or as a rumor?
Because without an agreed channel, a complaint goes one of three bad ways, and each one makes it worse. The first is silence. At the start, nobody wants to be the one who complains, so people wait, which is the long suffering Billikopf describes. By the time the problem is finally said out loud, the cheap fix is gone.
The second is rumor. People in a conflict, Billikopf writes, “enlist others to support their perspective and thus avoid trying to work matters out directly” with the person involved. The problem passes from worker to worker as a story before it reaches anyone who could fix it, and with each retelling more people pick a side.
The third is the messenger. One damaging way to avoid a conflict, Billikopf notes, is to “send someone else to deliver a message or confront another on our behalf”. That puts a third person in the middle of a dispute that was never theirs, acting as its judge. A channel with a known person to receive complaints avoids all three, because the problem goes straight to someone whose job is to answer it.
What does a working channel have to have?
It has to be confidential and simple, in the language the crew speaks, and clear about who answers and by when. Under GRASP, the farm has to state “how and where to file the” complaint. It also has to give the “time for resolution, who will answer” and make clear that using the process brings no penalty. When a problem can be sorted out in a conversation, that conversation has to be “conducted in a language understood by the worker”.
| Part | What it means on the farm |
|---|---|
| Confidential, no penalty | The person who raises a complaint is not punished, and their name is not passed around |
| Simple, in the crew’s language | Anyone can use it without help; someone who cannot read can tell the person who receives complaints, or call the phone number |
| A known person to receive complaints | Everyone knows who receives complaints, so it is never just “tell someone” |
| A deadline for answering | Short-term workers get a shorter one, so a picker who leaves after a month still gets an answer before going |
| Posted and said out loud | Where and how to complain is posted where the crew can see it, and also told to them in person |
New workers need to hear about the channel before they need it. GRASP requires that “Any new worker shall be instructed in the complaint process” at the first working instructions. On a farm, that is the first morning, when you show them the gate, the tools and where to park.
Why does one place to complain have to be independent of the boss?
Because when the complaint is about the boss, the boss is the last person the worker will take it to. If the foreman is the only person who receives complaints, a complaint about the foreman stops there. GRASP requires “one or more well publicized places to file” complaints, “at least one of which should be independent” of the supervisors. The point is that a worker “cannot be intimidated as if the company” representative were the only person they could turn to.
The independent place is the step above the boss, and it has to exist before anyone needs it. It does not have to be elaborate. It can be a person on the farm who is nobody’s boss, a trusted phone number outside the farm, or a box only you open. The one thing it cannot be is the person the complaint is about.
What goes on each line of the notebook?
Each complaint goes in with the date, what it is about and the name of the person handling it. Later it gets its answer: what was done, or why nothing can be done. Written down like this, a complaint stops being something said once in anger and becomes something you can follow until it is closed.
Under GRASP, the farmer has to “endeavor to resolve a complaint while” the worker is still employed, “in a timely manner” and “proportionately to the nature of the complaint made”. A complaint counts as resolved when there is an “answer, or no resolution with explanation of why there was” none, which means an honest no, with the reason, closes it. A complaint that simply disappears is not closed.
The person who raised the complaint has to know what happened to it. GRASP requires that “evidence of resolution notification shall be documented”, so you keep proof that you told the person the answer. An anonymous complaint gets an answer too: “When complaints are anonymous, the answer shall be included as a general notice” posted where the crew can read it.
Over the months, in the notebook you can see what memory misses: the same complaint coming back a third time as if it were new. When that happens, the first two answers did not solve it, and the problem is in the way the work is set up, not in the person who keeps raising it.
Why set one up if no buyer asks for it?
Because being able to raise a problem and get an answer is part of what keeps people on a farm, and pay alone does not do that. The certificate is the smaller reason.
In a study of workers’ views in the Australian banana industry, published in the journal PLoS ONE, Roy and three colleagues found that “a supportive work environment exerts a steadier influence on perceived attractiveness than salary”; that is one industry in one country, and the effect on your farm may be different.
What you gain is hearing about a problem while it is still cheap to fix. Hear about the problem with the foreman in the first week and it costs you a conversation. Hear about it the day a good worker quits and it costs you a new hire. Farm employers, Billikopf writes, “can respond with effective policies and increased education”, and a complaint channel is the first of those policies to put in place.
What is the channel not?
The channel is not a staff survey, the kind where once or twice a year the whole crew answers the same questions anonymously. If you run one, the survey is a snapshot of how people feel at that moment. The channel carries the problems that come up between snapshots, one at a time.
Nor is it the list of what your manager gets to decide alone, which another article in this library helps you write if you have a hired farm manager. That list gives the manager room to decide without asking you. The channel is its counterweight: it gives the crew a way around the manager when the manager is the problem. Catching a problem early and answering it by a set date also works outside the crew, in the rest of farm management, with a buyer who complains or a machine that keeps breaking down. More on hiring, keeping and leading a crew is in the library’s section on people.
What the law in your country requires of a formal complaint or whistleblowing channel is a question for your lawyer, and it differs from one country to the next. Where a law adds a required step, add it on top of the channel described here.
And the notebook is not a file against the person who complains. The point is to weigh the problem, not the person who raised it.
Where to start
You need one notebook, an afternoon to set it up and one conversation with the crew. Within a week, the channel can be working.
Why is the second complaint the real test?
The channel is tested by the second complaint, not the first. The person who raised something once and got an answer by the deadline is the one who raises the next problem early, while it is still small and cheap to fix. The person who raised something and watched it vanish tells the rest of the crew not to bother, and you are back to hearing about problems on the day someone quits. The box on the wall is the easy part. What keeps the channel working is you answering what goes into it, every time, by the deadline.