Exploited and unprotected: Agricultural workers under Corona

By Stefania Prandi and Pascale Müller

VIDC online magazine Spotlight

This article was published in the VIDC online magazine Spotlight 53/September 2020. If you what to receive the quarterly online magazine, invitations and documentations please subscribe here. 

Further readings and links


Palumbo, Letizia and Corrado, Alessandra (July 2020) Covid-19, Agri-food Systems, and Migrant Labour, Open Society Foundations

Müller, Pascale and Prandi, Stefania (30 April 2018) Rape in The Fields, Correctiv

Müller, Pascale and Prandi, Stefania (30 April 2018) Vergewaltigt auf Europas Feldern, BuzzFeed

Prandi, Stefania (April 2018) Red Gold. Strawberries, tomatoes, violence and explotation in the Mediterranean Sea, Settenove

VIDC event

As part of the annual conference of the Austrian Task Force on Combating Human Trafficking, the VIDC, in cooperation with the International Organisation for Migration, is organizing the online workshop “Agricultural Working Conditions – Increased Exploitation and Human Trafficking due to Corona?” (in German) on 15 October 2020. From 5 October you will find more details on the VIDC website.

About the authors

Stefania Prandi is a Milan-based freelance journalist, writer and photographer. She reported from places such as Ethiopia, Morocco, Spain, Albania, Argentina, Switzerland, India, Greece, Portugal, for national and international publications. She wrote the books “Red Gold. Strawberries, tomatoes, violence and exploitation in the Mediterranean Sea” and “The Consequences. Femicides and the gaze of those who remain”.

Pascale Müller is a Berlin-based investigative journalist working mostly on sexual violence and labor exploitation. Her work was published in BuzzFeed News, Deutschlandfunk, Der Spiegel, among others.

 

© Stefania Prandi

© Stefania Prandi

Women working without protective gear in Spanish strawberry fields, Moroccan seasonal laborers trapped without water or electricity in crowded shelters, undocumented workers living in camps without access to washing facilities or health care - the Corona pandemic has worsened the working conditions of thousands of agricultural workers all over Europe.

Widespread border closures in an attempt to contain the virus cut off the constant stream of seasonal workers, European vegetable and fruit production so heavily relies on. With borders locked down, farmers and authorities scrambled to find labor. During the state of emergency in March, the Spanish government declared agricultural workers “essential”, in April Germany and England flew in Romanian workers on charter flights to harvest asparagus and other vegetables.

But although Corona revealed the dependence of most European food production on seasonal and migrant workers, their working conditions - already dire before - only worsened. Women, who make up large shares of the workforce, are particularly affected.

Not a labour shortage, but a shortage of rights for workers

In the Italian region of Apulia, Basilicata and Calabria, in the so-called  area of “Arco Ionico”, where there are around 42,600 companies in the agri-food sector, 22,702 women used to work in the fields. 5,901 were migrants, most of them from Romania and Bulgaria. A survey from the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, CREA (Council for Agricultural Research and Economics) and the NGO Action Aid, revealed that during the lockdown, women foreign laborers were even more in a condition of weakness, vulnerability and precariousness, also due to family and social difficulties, and that they were exposed to blackmail of a job application on the verge of fairness and lawfulness. They became victims of forced labor and labor exploitation.
Italy was the first EU member state to declare a state of emergency closing its borders on 31 January 2020. National farmers’ organizations such as Coldiretti declared that these measures caused a labor shortage because Eastern European workers (mainly Romanians, Poles and Bulgarians) were not allowed to travel to the country. Farmers unions have estimated a shortfall of about 370,000 seasonal workers.
According to Alessandra Corrado, Associate Professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Calabria and Letizia Palumbo, research fellow at the Migration Policy Centre at the European University Institute in Florence, the pandemic “highlighted the dependence of the agri-food sector on cheap and flexible migrant labour, one of the results of power imbalances in long supply chains. However, in many areas this labour shortage was largely fictitious”. Instead, Corrado and Palumbo write: “There is not a labour shortage, but a shortage of rights for workers”. As reported by the two scholars: “In some areas, the labour shortage of Eastern European workers has therefore been offset by a reserve army of irregular migrant labour. In fact, a lack of labour inspectorate controls in the fields during the pandemic has contributed to an increase in recourse to irregular workers”.
In fact, for these regions and according to the survey by CREA, part of the Romanian workers went back to their country and they are unlikely to return in the short term. The reason is that Italy is considered a high COVID-19 risk area. Therefore, a return would entail a quarantine period, with all the problems related to domiciliation and the inability to work.
The situation is different in Vittoria, Sicily, one of the main areas for cherry tomato production in Italy. Up to 5,000 Romanian women still work there as tomato pickers. “Here there was not a labor shortage and workers continued to go to work in the greenhouses. Most of the migrant workers from Romania and Tunisia live here throughout the year”, Giuseppe Scifo, Secretary of CGIL, Italy's largest union, said. Problems that were reported years ago, remain in place. Tomato pickers live in storehouses and shacks in the middle of the fields. Even if women work twelve hours a day, they earn as little as 25 to 30 euros. They are paid less than their male counterparts for the same tasks working in the same fields. Additionally, they face discrimination and sexual harassment.