When Agung* arrived at Heathrow airport in July, he thought it marked the start of a better financial future for his family.
He was expecting six months of lucrative farming work in Britain to help support his mother and siblings back home in Java. He did not realise the harvest was already well under way – or that the pay would be a fraction of what he hoped.
Agung said he paid more than £4,650 to a broker in Java for the job back in April and took on a loan with 3% monthly interest to fund it. His visa finally came through in June but he did not travel for another month.
His first job was at Castleton farm in Aberdeenshire, which supplies berries to supermarkets including M&S, Waitrose, Tesco and Lidl. He had not realised it was so far from London and was shocked when he had to pay £95 to get there, adding to his growing debt.
Once he started picking berries he found the targets impossible to meet. He said they would start work at around 5am and if he had not picked enough by 9am, he was sent back to the caravan for the day. Typically he said this meant he took home little more than £200 a week.
Instead of the riches he hoped for, Agung skipped meals to try to make headway repaying the debt. “I transferred almost all the money I earned to Indonesia,” he said. “Sometimes I did not have enough food for me because all I can think is that I have to pay my debt.”
By September, Agung had been dismissed because he had three warnings resulting in days off for being too slow. He said he made about £1,500 in two months.
“My family really need money. What I got was not enough to help them,” he said.
He paid for his own transport to Kent and started picking apples on another farm. But at the start of November that work stopped because “there was no more fruit to be picked”.
He moved to London with a friend and managed to rent a room, wondering whether to take his chances on the black market or fly home early. He said he still owes more than £1,700 back home and is being charged 3% interest a month.
“I feel some of the treatment is quite unfair,” he said. “There’s no more work but we’re still in debt.”
Ross Mitchell, the managing director of Castleton Fruit, said that the farm did “have a disciplinary procedure, like all employers do to deal with performance-related issues” that was audited annually and heavily regulated.
He said worker wellbeing was of the “utmost importance” and that, of the nearly 1,000 people it employed each year, more than 70% returned. He added that the 106 Indonesians who came to the farm this year worked an average of 41.81 hours, with an average weekly gross pay of £450.68 (before costs such as accommodation were charged) and 70 were still at Castelton.
Mitchell said the farm was concerned about “payment demanded by third-party agents” and that it relied on “approved agents to have carried out due diligence to ensure that the workers are not paying excessive fees”.
Mitchell said they first became aware of the charges made to workers once they arrived at the farm and that they “were very concerned” and immediately reported it to the agent, the authorities and customers. He added: “We had hoped the relevant bodies would have dealt with this issue.”
Mochtar* from Lombok, who worked alongside Agung, is also still in debt over what he paid to come to Britain. He managed to pick more fruit at Castleton but says he still made roughly £300 a week.
He said he only managed to send about £100 home to his wife a month, once he had made payments against debts and factored in his own cost of living. The debt hangs over his excitement at returning home.
“I will be so happy to see my family again,” he said, “but on the other side I’m ashamed.”
* Names have been changed to protect identities.
