THE FORGOTTEN WORKER PROTESTS

THE SITUATION OF THE POLISH FARMWORKER

AT HOME AND ABROAD

February 2003. In the last week of the month, thousands of farmers around Poland took part in radical actions. Well over a hundred road blocades occurred, scuffles with the police took place and government offices were stormed. In Wroclaw an amusing action involving a pig and one involving a mock tribunal took place. Although these actions were nowhere near the scale of the anti-war demonstrations earlier in the month, they were widespread enough to warrant a place in the news. Except as we know, the news is not always indicative of what is newsworthy.

For all the noise made about “Polish farmers” in respect of Poland’s accession to the EU, there is actually surprisingly little information available on many aspects of their situation; try to find out about the influence of big agricultural on them or how their domestic markets have been effected by the rise of supermarkets and/or imported foods and you find that few people have actually bothered to investigate this. Even less is known about the working conditions of Ukrainian seasonal farm workers in Poland. It’s as if everybody knows that the situation is bad - and getting worse - but they don’t really want to know about it. Recently, it seems the urban elites in charge of the media don’t really want to talk about it anymore either.

It’s a shame because very interesting information is out there.

One thing that struck me at the end of the year was something Eurostat put out: EU15 real agricultural income per worker down by 3.0%. Eurostat included Poland (and other candidate countries) for the first time in their statistics in 2001 and we find that income declined for Polish farmers over 10%. In 2002, income declined another 23%. In other words, already poor farmers have seen their incomes drop by one third in two years. Poland is not really alone in this trend; Czechs took a similiar income decline this year while the income of German farmers also decreased dramatically. It is important to note that the changes in Poland and Germany are related as agricultural markets and, more importantly workforces are strongly interconnected. (We will come back to this in a while.)

There is no secret that the EU and the multinational agribusinesses have long started their war against farmers; up to 25% of Poland’s population live on farm land and that is just too many for business. The key to driving up profits is reducing labour and producing more technofoods that don’t spoil at the market. Factory farming is also to be introduced large scale in Poland.

The story of the battle with Smithfield is already quite well known. They tried to introduce “vertically integrated pork production” to Poland but unfortunately made the mistake of inviting people to the States to see how it works. Horrified, people returned to Poland to battle factory farming. Smithfield turned on the political pressure, urging the government to shut down local slaughterhouses. They had hired new staff in Poland, thousands of people, and fired them as a warning. Finally, a corrupt vet turned politician (who once arranged for tens of thousands of tons of imported chicken to “disappear”, in other words, a thief) working on behalf of the EU told the parliament that the Polish slaughterhouses do not conform to EU standards and that at least 70% would have to be shut down. Up to 70% of Polish meat production would have to be done in 24 state of the art factory farms.

The links between these large slaughterhouses and disease have been shown in both UK and US studies. Consolidation of the meat industry had led to a 500% increase in food poisoning and made meat packing the most dangerous occupation in the US. 1 Not to mention the suffering of the animals.

In other words, despite a rather strong campaign and even the general support of the media, the government supported big agro. No mass outcry took place. This was exactly what big agro was hoping for.

Despite the fact that an overwhelming number of people want to buy organic foods from small local farms, agrobusiness is stepping up its war on small Polish farmers, supported by the EU, the state and the supermarket. Why the supermarket? Because as supermarkets mushroom around the country, small markets go under. Even if supermarkets want to but Polish produce, they will only do it if the price is lowest - and it isn’t always that way when you take EU subsidies into account. When supermarkets do buy Polish produce, they tend to both demand lower and lower prices and to pay many months in arrears. Many Polish suppliers have experienced debt crises while waiting to be paid by HIT or REAL, GEANT or CARREFOUR. It’s not hard to understand that only larger farms are able to withstand such delays. Smaller farms simply cannot afford them --- but with ever shrinking local markets for their goods, they may not have many options. (Another factor that is leading to smaller markets are municipal authorities’ attacks against local open-air markets.)

What is a Polish farmer to do? There aren’t many jobs available; non-farmworking rural inhabitants in Poland have a 28% percent unemployment rate (32% for women), although it’s generally conceded that this rate is even higher as some people who formerly worked in some nearby towns and have become unemployed have had to return or turn to rural relatives to help them out. Owning and running a farm, even a small one (for example 1 hectare), means you are not “unemployed” and, as Janina Sawicka points out, the rate of hidden unemployment in the group of small farms is the highest. 2 Not being able to compete with corporative farming, people are selling off their farmland or employing modern business methods to compete such as hiring even cheaper labour (Ukrainians) and going off themselves to work abroad.

Given the absolutely abyssmal situation of Polish farmworkers in their own country, we can certainly understand how a few months in Portugal, Germany, the UK or Sweden can help them to survive and thus can be views as a “golden opportunity”. However, in the overall scheme of things, supporting small-scale agriculture locally, allowing people to remain landowners - not seasonal workers - is immensely preferable to the current state of affairs with labour in the farm industry.

The history of migrant farmworkers in the US and their struggle to organize is something that has exposed a long history of abuse, including slavery, in that part of the world. In Europe, it seems that few people (the notable exception being the anti-immigrationists*) are interested in bringing the situation of the migrant farmworkers into sharper focus and in trying to do anything about it. It seems that even when people do try to help, the capitalist imperative undermines all efforts anyway, as illustrated by a story told by Nicholas Bell at a conference on Border and Migration held in Austria last year. He told the story of racist riots which broke out in 2000 in Andalucia. 3 Most farmwork there was being done by Moroccans who would work for a small fraction of what the local population would earn. A study was carried out and it was found that 92% of farmwork in the Almeria area was done by immigrants, mostly illegal and mostly Moroccan and that this alone accounted for its “economic miracle”. Most of these people were found to live in unsanitary conditions, squatting makeshift huts without water, electricity or toilets. They work in extreme heat and are exposed to pesticides. After fighting for slightly better conditions, and after obtaining legal status for 100,000 Moroccan farmworkers, employers started moving increasingly towards more docile and cheaper workers, for example Poles and Romanians. (Prior to the riots, the Moroccans actually had organized themselves and held a few strikes. Farmowners responded by sending agents to Lithuania to see if they couldn’t find some “nicer” workers.)

*In the UK, the government used “Operation Gangmaster” as a pretense to deport tens of thousands of illegal farm workers, including thousands of Polish seasonal workers. It was found that the gangmasters had trafficked workers, often deceiving them and charging exorbitant fees for this service, as well as for housing, food and other expenses. “Visa services” and sometimes passports can cost between 2500-4000 euros each, thus people arriving on this scheme arrive as identured servants.

The fact that these people are white also plays a role as anti-immigration moods are flamed by racism. We can assume that these Polish farm workers suffer from the same bad treatment and get even less money to do it. (Most of these workers were women. Some stayed on off-season and apparently were encouraged to work in prostitution.)

Polish farmworkers have a good reputation for doing lots of hard work for little money. In France, in the Lot et Garonne region, fruit and vegetable producers organised a demonstration in July 2001 with the slogan "We want Polish workers!". They were demanding an increase in the number of International Migration Office (French OMI - not to be confused with IOM) contracts allowed in the area. The local president of the Rural Coordination, a farmers union, explained to the press that "the employment agency says that there are thousands of local candidates for employment, but we know that this workforce is not adapted to our needs.” 4 In other words, they have lives and contacts there, they don’t want to work 10 hours/ 7 days a week and complain more.

It’s no coincidence that as German farmowners advertise for hundreds of thousands of seasonal workers from Poland to come and unemployment amongst German farmers goes up. The border between Poland and Germany represents an incredible difference in income - more than the US-Mexican border does for example. Few Polish workers will complain about their working conditions when they can’t even make a living at home.

Of course, a lot of their situation also depends on how much noise and pressure consumers make. Public support is vital, as is the building of alternative, cooperative consumer patterns which support small farmers. This is why we encourage every person who eats to understand the labour behind the supermarket and why information campaigns are necessary. Small farm cooperative movements can easily be supported by anarchists and others who are concerned with undermining the capitalist imperative to drive down wages and maximalize profits and with substainable agriculture. It is also important that immigrant workers do not remain isolated from local populations so many incursions into the world of these workers need to take place. We are hoping that as the situation with agribusiness becomes worse and worse that we can attract many more layers of society to support small agriculture and that the labour movement focus more and more on immigrant workers who are usually the most exploited in any country.

Laure Akai

Workers’ Intiative, Warsaw

contact: cube@zigzag.pl Workers’Initiative Page: www.ip.hardcore.lt

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1 Preserving Poland's Family Farms, Tom Garrett AWI

2 Report, The Role of Rural Women in Agriculture and Rural Development in Poland by Janina Sawicka.

3 See Contribution by Nicholas Bell to the Conference on Borders and Migration organised by the Austrian League for Human Rights. Vienna, 29-30 October 2002

4 Bell