I’m lying in a clean bed. There are two triple bunks in the room; six beds. I try to sleep, but it’s quite warm, and through the wall next to my head there is a huge TV blaring in Polish, which no one is watching but is probably never turned off. Still, now I’m finally here, a lot of stress has lifted.
Earlier I reached the farm after a long train journey and a lift from the station. I was greeted by the boss, Edyta, whose husband, Marcus, owns the farm. Edyta took my heavy suitcase – full of food – and carried it upstairs to the living quarters, under the roof of a large barn.
The decision that a farm would be one of my destinations was not difficult. The food industry in Europe would probably collapse without migrant labour. I had searched for jobs on a Polish website because Poles go in huge numbers to Germany for work.
I replied to an ad and from the follow-up phone calls, I learned that I would be working seven days a week, that they guaranteed work for at least 10 hours a day and that I would be paid €6.20 (£5.27) an hour. I would have to pay the agency a fee of €200 and a one-off sum of €105 for my bed. I would buy and cook my own food. They also told me to bring boots and rubber gloves.
The first day
The morning after I arrive, my roommate, Danka, in her 60s, takes me to a big packing shed, where about 30 women are already at work. They stand by conveyor belts, sorting salad vegetables that go into machines to be wrapped.
I’m given the task of halving peeled yellow onions into plastic bags. Then I have to peel and cut red onions into 3cm by 3cm pieces. I work with different women, one after the other, and they are all nice. One even tells me to just peel the onions and she will do the cutting. Standing in the same spot for so long, the hours until the lunch break drag. Even going to the toilet feels embarrassing because it is made clear that we shouldn’t do it very often.
Back at the hostel, everyone crowds around the two stoves to make their lunch. I chat with Sabina and Ewelina, a Polish mother and daughter. Sabina has three other children back in Poland. One is a single mother and another, Nela, is 12 years old. When I ask how Nela copes with her mother being so far away, Sabina says she is used to it and now considers Sabina’s sister, who she lives with, to be her mother. Sabina’s husband left her and the children years ago, so she needs an income. She sends money to her sister, and also to her daughter and grandchild.
We chop and peel onions, peppers, tomatoes, root vegetables, pumpkins, white cabbage and cucumbers. My wrists start to hurt and the piles of cabbage seem to never end.
That first day, the shift finishes at 6pm. Sabina offers to go to a store with me to get a few things I need. She washes her hair and puts on high heels, even though we’ll have to walk 3km – almost 2 miles – on the road to get there. I understand that sometimes she wants to look nice and feel like a person.
Along the way, she explains how the contracts are organised. It’s simple: you work a certain number of hours, but a lower number is recorded. As a result, you meet the legal requirements for the number of hours and the minimum hourly wage.
The contract I sign on about day three probably corresponds to the German labour code. But I receive two work report sheets. On one I write down the actual hours worked and on the other, the official sheet, I sign those that are recorded: a maximum of 10 hours of work a day, six days a week. I’d already heard about double reporting, but here they present it to me as a matter of course. No one explains what is going on. According to the official record, I might work until 4pm today, and there was no work at all on Sunday.
No fixed hours here
One of the worst things about this job is that no one can tell you when the shift will end. “Please understand,” one of the women replied when I ask if we would get Sunday afternoon off, “that there are no working hours, there is no Monday to Friday. Here they just tell you to go to work, and you never know when it’s going to end.”
My sore thumb hurts like hell, my hands are completely numb, my wrist hurts and I have to write home to get ibuprofen. The pain has come from chopping big, hard vegetables as fast as possible, from carrying heavy crates full of vegetables and from having perpetually wet hands.
Not only is the work physically demanding, but you are on your feet for 14 hours a day. Then there is at least an hour or two of cleaning and cooking and then yet more cleaning up before bed. We share a bathroom, so it is full in the morning and in the evening. My work clothes already stink, probably from the onions, but there’s only one washing machine so I will have to wait until night-time, when the machine is free. But I’d rather sleep.
It’s strange how normal this weird existence seems after a while. Maybe that’s because by the evening, everyone is completely exhausted. There are a few young people and a few women in their 40s like me, but most are in their 50s. Some look older, but maybe they’re just wrecked – it’s hard to tell.
Inspectors arrive
It’s Sunday morning and Danka comes running to say that there is going to be a visit from the labour inspectorate. She explains the routine: when the inspectors ask us how many hours a day we work, we should say nine or 10, and most importantly, that we get two breaks. Danka has bought a new tablecloth for our kitchen so that it will look nice for the inspection. We have to pay her €3 each for it.
Danka lost her job at a factory in Poland in her 50s. One day her boss called her in and told her that she was too old for the job, so she went to work in Germany. She shows me photos of her children, husband and grandchildren in Poland. Lots of beautiful photos they send her that she is not in. She plans to return to her family in retirement.
In the food preparation hall on Monday morning, the farm owner addresses us in German. We must not leave the hall and we are to work as if there is no stress. So we work slowly, which feels strange. The inspectors, two men, come by about 10am. I look at them, but they don’t see us; they walk past us as if we aren’t there. We finish by 11.50am: we’ve worked six hours straight without food, water or cigarettes. Most of us didn’t go to the bathroom that whole time because we weren’t supposed to do that either.
Almost everyone drinks here. Out of loneliness and also because there is nothing else to do. I have long argued that working conditions never really improve as long as there are enough people in the world to go to another country and work until they drop.
But the reality of being surrounded by people who voluntarily spend 14 hours a day at work, and are grateful for those hours, is a different matter. “At least we will earn more,” they say. And then in the evening I see those torn faces, blank looks and a fatigue that seems to overwhelm them.
This week we don’t finish any day before 8pm. There is joy when it’s finally over, but at the same time, happiness that so many hours have been put in. Here my co-workers hope to realise their dreams of buying an apartment, providing for their old age, helping their children. But some people stay for ever because the work destroys their lives at home. The days they are not working they drink away.
The week from hell
I’ve found the work exhausting for the past three weeks, but now the demands have become hellish. Management says there’s a sale on salads in the supermarkets, that’s why we have to work so hard outside in the field to get as much picked as possible before dark. The rumour is that when we return from the field in the evening, they will send us to work in the packing hall.
Ewelina, working next to me, says we should refuse to go to the packing hall after dark if they ask us. But, she stresses, we all have to refuse. “It is very important for us to be united,” she says. I nod that I understand and promise not to spoil it. Then we get back to work in a hurry to get as much done as possible before dark.
Twelve hours into the shift, one of the bosses turns on the tractor lights and we continue to work in the spotlight, even though we are all so tired we are floundering. With sore, swollen hands, we continue picking the salads, putting them into crates and throwing them up into the truck. We continue like this for more than an hour, and even though some voices are saying that we just can’t do it any more, we all keep working. We miss our chance to stage a rebellion. Defiance drowned in exhaustion.
They look away
I left the farm after a month. I received a cash payment of €1,500 (£1,275). My colleagues hugged me warmly and told me to definitely come back.
On the last afternoon, I look at the shop where vegetables, salads and broccoli from our farm are sold to the public. The shop looks like an organic paradise; it’s beautiful and rustic and smells nice. The vegetables carry a label to say where they come from. Often the label says Germany, but because the shop is on-site, it makes it seem as though the produce is actually grown on the farm. Yet everything, except for the salads and broccoli, is brought in wholesale and often just separated from rotten pieces of vegetables and washed well.
Germans in big expensive cars come shopping here, and if they happen to see one of us, they usually look away. I once noticed a scrutinising look that one of the customers threw at the unsightly dormitories, but we usually don’t move around in the yard when the shop is open. We are at work. I don’t even know if customers would be interested in what our working conditions are.
Saša Uhlová is a staff writer at the Czech online daily Deník Alarm. Reporting for this series was supported by the The Endowment Fund for Independent Journalism. Names have been changed. The project’s accompanying documentary, directed by Apolena Rychlíková, is Limits of Europe
