Tiny wages and mold barracks
Oxfam: Asparagus seasonal workers are working under scandalous conditions
5/22/2023 5:02 p.m
It’s a problem that has persisted for years: the terrible working conditions that seasonal workers in asparagus growers are exposed to. An Oxfam report now shows how disastrous these actually are. The pricing policy of the supermarkets should also be partly responsible for this.
According to the development organization Oxfam, seasonal workers in asparagus cultivation in Germany are sometimes confronted with “unsustainable” working conditions. “Wages are being systematically depressed, many workers are confronted with a barely transparent combination of hourly and piecework wages and report that targets are difficult or impossible to achieve,” said an Oxfam spokeswoman on the occasion of an Oxfam study on the subject.
“These are not isolated cases,” said Benjamin Luig from the Fair Farming Initiative, which was involved in the study. Employees regularly complained about incorrect information when recording their working hours, which meant they had to work more but were not paid more. According to Luig, wage dumping and massive pressure to perform should not be a business model.
In addition, according to the Oxfam spokeswoman, there is the problem of high wage deductions due to excessive rents for communal accommodation. “One of the companies charges 40 euros per square meter for a shack without a kitchen. The average rent without costs in downtown Munich is 23 euros,” explained Steffen Vogel, Oxfam officer for global supply chains and human rights in the agricultural sector.
Price pressure is passed on
Oxfam described a company in Brandenburg as “scandalous”. The accommodations were like barracks, and mold was growing in the rooms. Oxfam also sees responsibility for these unsustainable working conditions in the German supermarkets, which pay “ruthlessly low prices” for asparagus. “The companies pass the price pressure down: to the workers in the fields,” said an Oxfam officer. Oxfam is therefore demanding that purchasing below production costs be banned. According to the RBB report, the Federal Ministry of Labor is examining whether the incidents are of a systematic nature and whether the legal regulations need to be tightened.
According to Oxfam’s own statements, the basis of the study is its own research and a report by the PECO Institute, for which workers at four companies were interviewed.