Gang labour has repeatedly been a means of exploiting workers and suppressing wages driven by a food system that loads costs to the producer creating a race to the bottom on the value of labour.
Rural class structures are very misunderstood. A popular history I was taught was that these people migrated to cities to work. This is a little misleading as in fact that they migrated into industry to work, not all industry was city based, especially coal mining as any visit to the former coal mining villages of the Midlands, Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland will reveal.
