In the final article of a three-part series, examining the history of agricultural workers’ conditions of employment, we look at the continued case for the Scottish Agricultural Wages Board.

Trade Unions among farm workers are notoriously difficult to organize, and the sporadic attempts at combination before 1870 produced weak and generally short-lived organisations.

The Combination Act of 1799 and 1800 prohibited trade unions and collective bargaining by British workers. The first attempt at combination among farm workers in Scotland was in the Carse of Gowrie in 1805. Public notices were put on church doors requesting ploughmen to meet in Perth to discuss their wages and hours of working. That led to the four ringleaders appearing in court and confessing their guilt under threat of imprisonment. While no further action was taken by the sheriff he sent out a clear message that such activity would not be tolerated.

The Combination Acts were repealed in 1824/25 so trade unions were no longer illegal.

In 1833, six men from Tolpuddle in Dorset founded the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers to protest against the gradual lowering of agricultural wages. They refused to work for less than ten shillings a week, although by this time wages had been reduced to seven shillings and were due to be further reduced to six. The Tolpuddle Martyrs, as they became known, were subsequently sentenced to penal transportation to Australia under an obscure law, the Unlawful Oaths Act 1797, because they had sworn a secret oath.

There were short-lived attempts at combination by farm workers in Scotland until the first national union, the Scottish Farm Servants Union, began life in 1884 as the Scottish Farm Servants', Carters' and General Labourers, but merged into the Scottish Ploughmen's Federal Union ten years later.

The Scottish Farm Servants Union was formally registered as an independent union in 1913 with 7,477 members. It joined the TGWU in 1933, which subsequently merged with Amicus to form Unite.

Pressures on food supplies as a result of the First World War led to the establishment of a form of centralised wage setting in Scottish agriculture in 1917.

Early campaigns of the Scottish Farm Servants Union included reducing the working week to 50 hours, getting half-a-day a week off and in 1917 a campaign to end "Feeing Markets". Support for strike action among farm workers has always been poor, as they were widely dispersed and faced the risk of being evicted from their "tied" house by vindictive farmers if they went on strike.

The Scottish Agricultural Wages Board (SAWB) was established in 1949 and, along with one in N. Ireland, is the last of the wages boards. It has come under fire from farmers and landowners who want it abolished. NFU Scotland and Scottish Land & Estates say it is no longer needed, because agricultural workers are already covered by laws on the National Minimum Wage.

The SAWB meets twice a year to determine the minimum gross wage payable to agricultural workers, apprentices and qualified workers as well as overtime rates, conditions for holiday and sick pay entitlement. Other conditions of employment covered include the daily rate of the accommodation offset for accommodation other than a house and rates of allowance for working dogs.

The "Board" comprises 5 independent members appointed by Scottish Ministers (including the chairperson), 6 representing workers' interests nominated by Unite and 6 representing employers nominated by NFU Scotland and Scottish Land & Estates.

One of the great advantages of the Board is that it relieves farmers and their workers of the daunting task of negotiating pay settlements face-to-face from scratch, as it sets an independent baseline to work from. As former Cabinet Secretary Richard Lochhead said: "The nature of many farming businesses makes coherent bilateral pay negotiations difficult."

Without the Board, there would be no mechanism to work with employers to improve the conditions of the 25,000 workers in Scotland who are covered by the SAWB collective bargaining agreement - about half full-time and half part-time or seasonal workers.

NFU Scotland has argued that the SAWB puts Scottish farm businesses at a financial disadvantage to their counterparts south of the border where the agricultural wages board was abolished in 2013. That implies that agricultural wages south of the border are now lower than those in Scotland where the Scottish Government decided in December 2015 to retain the SAWB. That announcement followed shortly after it published analysis showing that without the Board wages would be driven down for agricultural workers, with young apprentices and migrant workers thought to be particularly at risk.

As Rab Stewart from Unite once said: "The employers seem to understand the necessity of regulating the welfare of the animals that people look after, but they do not understand the necessity of regulating the welfare of the employees who do that work. There is something vastly wrong with that."