THE CZECH authorities have helped almost 200 Romanian workers to return home after they clashed with bosses whom they accused of cheating them out of money, threatening them and forcing them to live in squalid conditions.
The Romanians halted their work making Christmas decorations and wreaths late last week, and at least one of them was reportedly injured in a brawl with “enforcers” brought in by their bosses to force them to continue working and to stop them reporting their problems to police.
Police in the town of Plzen were alerted and arrested three foreign nationals and one Czech man for alleged extortion, restriction of the workers’ freedom and assault.
The local council arranged for buses to take the Romanians back home, and said costs would be covered by the Czech interior ministry and ultimately by anyone who was found guilty of mistreating the workers, who had been in the country for about three months.
Members of the group said they had been promised pay of €750 a month, but had received only about €20 a week and had been forced to live in massively overcrowded accommodation with only one shower and a sporadic hot water supply.
“Some of us were threatened in case we wanted to leave. But on the other hand we still hoped that we would get the money that had been promised to us,” one of the Romanians said.
Another said that “security men” or “bodyguards” had beaten up one of their number when they protested against their mistreatment.
Petra Kutalkova of La Strada, an organisation that tries to halt people trafficking, said she believed there might be hundreds, or even thousands, of foreigners in a similar situation in the Czech Republic.
Some two million Romanians are believed to live outside their homeland, and many work in the so-called black economy, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation by criminal groups, unscrupulous bosses and unlicensed gangmasters.
