By Richard Mellor in California
Workers here in the US will find this interesting. It is an interview with migrant workers by a representative of the Irish Union UNITE. Keelings is an Irish fruit company that has been using workers from the poorer countries of Eastern and Southern Europe to pick fruit.
There has been some controversy as the company flew in Bulgarian workers which during the pandemic raises the issue of the safety of these workers and the Irish population as well. Shipping workers 2000 kilometres to do what is considered non-essential work in the middle of a pandemic threatens everyone.
The workers are recruited by an agent in Bulgaria, flown by the Irish airline Ryanair to Dublin, and then housed and sent to work in the fields. Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s owner, is a billionaire.
Deductions from wages
The workers pay about one month’s wages in Bulgaria for a contract that supposedly lasts 12 weeks, but with an 8-week probationary period. They earn about €300 a week and out of that but they have to pay €95 a week for their accommodation, and they have other deductions. The union rep calculates they earn about €200 a week after deductions. In the wake of the pandemic, a mandatory €300 a week wage has been introduced.
So the agent in Bulgaria earns money off them and Ryanair and its billionaire owner get a cut. Keelings the fruit company gets a cut and whoever else is in on the deal. So, these workers put a lot of money in the pockets of people who do no work. Yet Forbes’ ‘rich list’ refers to all the parasitic characters in its billionaire club as “self-made”!
Californian agri-business
While the living conditions described by these workers in Ireland do not appear to be as bad as the immigrant workers that are used here in California by agri-business (though I am not sure of that), the nature of the arrangement is the same. Capitalism seeks the cheapest labour power and also the most vulnerable and desperate. The euphemism for a desperate worker used by the mass media is “willing”. They are more “willing” to accept lower wages as well as poor and uncertain labour conditions, the poorer and more desperate they are. Eastern and Southern Europe has more poverty and less opportunity than the west, so capital, just like it does with our southern US border, sucks in these desperate workers.
There are a couple of other aspects of this that are similar. There are always the xenophobic and racial or national arguments involved. Immigrants are blamed for taking jobs away from the local people and in the midst of an economic slump there are Irish people who would welcome work but are kept from it due to the social restrictions brought about by the pandemic. In my early life experience, it was the Irish workers, many of them rural people, who were attacked in the most vicious, racist fashion and blamed for coming to the UK, taking English jobs and placing downward pressure on wages.
Divide and rule
This strategy has its origins in the capitalist class that always needs to keep workers in a state of desperation and uncertainty and unhealthy competition with each other for jobs and life’s necessities, and uses race, nationalism, colour, religion and whatever means at its disposal to make this divide and rule work. And it is made to work in a way that hopefully avoids breaking out into the open – which always opens up the possibility of class unity, threatening the interests of the ruling class. In other words, the same social force that uses them as cheap labour blames them for being cheap labour.
No matter what the colour, religion or nationality of the people on California’s southern border, as long as labour power is cheaper and opportunity for profit abundant, capital will flow there. Capital does not respect borders and does not want borders.
International class solidarity and united action is what will change this situation. Workers’ rights will not be respected until all workers’ rights are respected. If this pandemic teaches us anything, it is that workers of the world have the same interest, so workers of the world should unite internationally to protect and advance our economic wellbeing. Wait, didn’t someone say that once?
From the US socialist website, Facts for Working people. The original blog, with link to video interview with Bulgarian workers, go here.
May 1, 2020
