Much of this year's fruit and vegetable picking has been done by east Europeans, some of whom are being exploited. Niamh Kavanagh reports
'We couldn't get Irish workers because the very bottom of the labour market is picking fruit. Nobody wants to do it." John Green, owner of one of the biggest fruit farms in the State, was delighted to hear from Mikolaj Nowosad, a young Polish man who was working 12 hours a day for £3 an hour on a lettuce farm in England when he saw the Wexford farmer's job vacancy on the internet and phoned him.
That was in 1999. This year, Green employed 65 east European workers, predominantly from the former Soviet Bloc, at the height of the strawberry season in mid-summer. And he's been turning away people looking for work all summer, about 10 a week, he reckons, mostly from Poland where the rate of unemployment is as high as 20 per cent in some regions. Some 41,000 Poles alone have come to Ireland since the expansion of the EU last year and the amalgamation of 10 new member states. In October, Mikolaj (26) will return home to his solicitor wife and his final year studying sociology in the city of Lublin.
Green gets almost all his workers from an agency in a town in Slovakia. He's been to Slovakia a number of times and likes it. The fruit-pickers are predominantly female, aged in their 40s and used to farm labour, having worked on state farms in the former communist country.
The majority of the fruit-pickers live in a large restored farmhouse and outhouses owned by Green, where he also runs a bistro-style restaurant which is also staffed by eastern Europeans.
The women are paid 17½ cent for every supermarket-sized punnet of strawberries they pick, he says, thrusting the weekly wage sheet forward to show a list of foreign names with amounts of up to €650 beside some names. The women can earn about €4,000 to €5,000 each for their summer work. Back home the money is used to pay college fees, buy food for the year or renovate houses.
While Green is a good and fair employer - and migrant lobby groups are keen to stress that there are many good employers - there is also evidence of exploitation throughout the country. Trade unions and campaigning groups have encountered exploitation of agricultural workers and migrant workers in traditional low-skilled jobs in every industry from construction to services to the unregulated domestic work sector.
Catherine Cosgrave, legal officer with the Immigrant Council of Ireland, says: "We regularly see breaches of the labour law legislation such as failure to adhere to the minimum wage - and that would be the least of it - not providing a written contract, not providing pay slips. But the more serious breaches are things like being required to work very long hours - sometimes upwards of 17 hours a day, no overtime, no extra pay for working weekends or bank holidays or no time off in lieu, no holiday pay, instant dismissal for being sick."
Since last year's EU expansion, 85,114 Personal Public Service (PPS) numbers were issued to workers from the new member states who now no longer require a work permit.
Mushroom farms are notorious, says Anton McCabe, of Siptu, who cites the experience of two Ukrainian women on a mushroom farm in the midwest. He met them "behind an old garage at 11.30 at night because they were fearful that I would be seen talking to them. In their country unions were corrupt. The first question they asked was why I would want to help them and would they be deported?" The women were being paid as little as €70 for 60-hour weeks.
In 2000 McCabe was put in touch with a couple who were living in a shed and caravans on a farm in Co Westmeath with just a cold tap in a galvanised shed for washing, and a cooker that doubled as a heater in winter. They had no contact with the outside world, except for two hours on a Saturday afternoon when they were driven to town to do their weekly shop.
The farmer discovered the workers had spoken to a union representative and sacked them on the spot. Siptu managed to secure "the minimum of help from the Department of Social Welfare" for the couple until they arranged an alternative employer.
Since McCabe first became involved in helping migrant workers in 1999, "the situation has got progressively worse". There are only 31 labour inspectors here and he has seen just one employer fined - and that was €9,000 for sub-letting workers and breaches of the work permit laws. He says the work permit system is akin to "bonded labour".
Under present legislation, people outside the EU or European Economic Area (EEA) coming to work in Ireland need visas or work authorisations depending on nationalities, and workers with either of these are free to switch jobs within their sector.
But under the work permit system, a permit is issued for 12 months, after which it is renewable by the employer. Some 47,551 permits were issued in 2003 and three quarters of these were for relatively low-skilled jobs.
However, if a person wishes to change jobs, he/she must firstly find a new employer, and the new employer must apply for a permit which costs €500. In some cases, the employer passes on this cost to the worker. It is the fear of not having the permit renewed - in which case the worker goes undocumented - or of being deported that leaves the worker vulnerable.
"It is a charter for exploitation. Workers don't know any better," says Delphine O'Keeffe of the Migrant Rights Centre.
According to Kieran Leddy, horticulture and potato secretary with the Irish Farmers Association (IFA): "Unfortunately in these jobsyou will get employers who will take advantage. But it is a small minority. I know of many farms where migrant workers are choosing to stay, are moving up to management positions, are marrying someone from the locality and buying a house."
Sixty per cent of the horticulture sector (fruit, vegetable, nursery producers) workforce is composed of migrant workers, primarily from the accession states.
Leddy says for a farmer to claim that they don't know the employment legislation is "not a defence". In response to claims that some farmers have used work permits as a threat to keep workers, he says "that is unacceptable". The IFA introduced a policy document with the Equality Authority last year and launched an employment law service to educate farmers on the issues surrounding employment.
Now that EU workers no longer need permits, new problems have arisen as workers scramble for too few jobs. Highly educated workers, lured by the promise of a more lucrative job even in a low-skilled sector, are leaving their jobs and coming to Ireland. But the workers are not entitled to any welfare benefits for two years.
"When they get here, the reality is different. Sometimes, there is no job and some end up in emergency accommodation or destitute," says O'Keeffe. It is a new trend also witnessed by the Immigrant Council of Ireland, who say people do not realise the cost of living here and find that their money runs out after two or three days. But when many have spent all their savings to get here or borrowed heavily, going home is not an option.
The campaigners say migration is a long-term necessity and that the Government has to address the needs of migrant workers.
"Our economists are telling us that we need 20,000 economic migrants outside of the EU in the coming years to sustain our economy. If horticulture is to survive here, the Government seriously has to look at monitoring the welfare of the people that are driving that end of the economy," says McCabe.
Mark (not his real name), a South African, was so furious at the pay and treatment he received here that he walked out on his dream job. He came to Ireland two years ago when a vacancy for a milker for a large dairy farmer in the midlands came through a recruitment agency in South Africa.
He borrowed money for his air fare but soon he found himself working from 7am until 8-8.30pm every day and most weekends. He got two half-hour breaks a day, and was not paid overtime for extra hours or for weekends, when he worked all day Saturday and two shifts on Sundays - 7am to 10am and 3pm to 7pm. He was paid a flat rate of 405 a week and never received a pay-slip.
Mark was also expected to get up in the middle of the night during calving season. He lived in accommodation on the farm and was charged €50 a week for this and €10 extra for electricity. The nearest shop was a 45-minute walk away.
After two years, Mark finally left his job, but he wants to give Ireland another shot and is taking his case to the Labour Relations Commission.
Mark is adamant that he will never work in farming again.
"I've learned my lesson," he says. " Farming was my passion, but I will never do it again. I wouldn't recommend farming to anyone."
He adds that his friends have also been treated badly.
"Things have got out of control here; the working conditions and the price of living compared with wages," he says. "People get promised the world to come here, but they don't get a quarter of what they've been promised."