Migrant labour blood running in the veins of Greece's crisis-ridden economy

29 April 2013. A World to Win News Service. On 17 April the story broke that Greek foremen had fired shotguns and pistols at 200 mostly Bangladeshi immigrant strawberry pickers in the village of Nea Manaloda who were demanding six months back wages. The fruit has been re-dubbed "blood strawberries", a reference to the "blood diamonds" of Sierra Leone. The vicious armed response that landed 29 in hospital, some critically wounded, shined a spotlight on conditions for migrant labour in modern Europe. Photos posted on the Web showed the plastic sheet-roofed shelters without running water or electricity where migrant labourers from Asia and Africa sleep ten by ten. Ordinarily these structures normally "house" strawberry plants. The workers have to drink from a water hose and use a barrel for bathing. Out of the 22 euros ($29) per day they were promised for 7-8 hour shifts (which in reality are often twice that long), farmworkers have to pay "rent" to the strawberry plantation owners; they told human rights groups they must also pay the local mafia for "protection", and have no choice but to shop for food in employer-owned small stores. Reportedly their real earnings are reduced to 5 euros a day. Others say they must dish out part of their wages to pay back the transporters who got them to Greece. Why would Bangladeshis risk their lives to enter Europe to work as poorly or unpaid wage slaves in the fields and be treated savagely by bosses who want to exploit them and by neo-Nazis who want to deport them? Because instead of earning 38 dollars a month in a Dhaka garment factory, they are told they will make fourteen times more in capitalist Europe than at home, where imperialism has dominated and twisted those economies, plundered resources and kept wages too low to live on. They go through this usually in order to be able to send small remittances back to their families. They also may fall into the clutches of a thriving multi-billion human trafficking business in Europe that helps to lower the 'risk' to employers' networks importing cheap labour. This is modern capitalist Greece, an entryway to modern Europe, preying on the labour of very poor and mostly undocumented foreign workers. The industry calls strawberries "red gold", but the gold comes from this exploited labour not from the fruit. In 2008 migrant farmworkers in Manolada organised a strike protesting their conditions and demanding more money. They were violently repressed. In 2012 two plantation goons were finally arrested after they brutally beat up a 30-year-old Egyptian who had demanded to be paid his wages. They jammed his head in the window of a car door and dragged him through the village. There are also allegations that municipal officials had been selling false identity documents to migrant workers. The purpose was both to keep foreign workers in the local fields instead of moving elsewhere or going home, and let farm owners off the hook for hiring "illegals". Some had been prosecuted for that offence rather than for paying slave wages in inhuman conditions backed by violence. A columnist from Multicultural politic described Nea Manolada as a small village situated on the Peloponnese peninsula with "a local population of around 3,500 people, including approximately 1,500 foreign-born migrants... not only from Bangladesh, but since the 1980s also from Pakistan, Egypt, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and other Balkan countries. While most of rural Greece has been crippled by the economic depression, this town and the wider region has been going through an export boom. Nea Manolada is responsible for 90 percent of Greece’s national production of strawberries which is predominantly sold in Switzerland, Germany and Russia. The incomes for local farmers have known to have grown by 30 percent in a single year." In 2011 the former social democratic prime minister George Papandreou praised the Manolada "miracle" for its agricultural innovation and intensive exploitation at a Ministry of Rural Development conference, asking how it could be replicated elsewhere in Greece's sagging economy. Greece is "at the sharp end of the eurozone crisis", as one report put it, and the government has been trying to fulfil conditions set by the European Union for a nine billion euro international bailout. Although it hasn’t "fallen over the cliff", one broadcaster stated, already one in three Greeks are living below the official poverty line and unemployment is at 27 percent officially, with many working very irregular jobs. The informal sector functions according to different rules and the rural economy in Greece is known for circumventing labour laws. More than 40 percent of workers in this sector are migrants. With little or no access to basic rights, they are easy targets for merciless exploitation. This latest attack in Manolada has fanned further social outrage against the government among the already politically aroused and angry Greek population. But at the same time, within this severe recession affecting nearly all sectors of the middle and lower strata, ultra-rightist politicians and their vigilante groups are actively spewing anti-immigrant racist venom, with open references to Hitler’s ovens. The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party holds 18 seats in Parliament and vows to take political power. The rise of racist and fascist ideologies during capitalist crisis is hardly new. Targeting migrants for losses of jobs that Greeks or other Europeans often won’t perform becomes a spontaneous and malevolent reaction of those seeking an explanation and way out of the crisis but not seeing or refusing to see the system as the cause. Despite its sharpness, neither the financial crisis nor official reactionary policies against poor immigrants that encourage popular support for racism and fascist ideas is a Greek "problem". The UK is full of migrant cleaning women earning miserable wages; in the Netherlands the government formed a coalition that included the extreme right-wing anti-immigrant party; and France’s previous president Nicolas Sarkozy expelled 700 Roma back to Romania, although that country is a member of the EU. Spain has what are called "salad hothouses" employing vulnerable migrants, and Italy is known for its "tomato slaves": both countries are active enforcers of the ugly, repressive blockading of large numbers of people crossing the Mediterranean in leaky boats to seek a better life and be exploited in the imperialist "North" that has played such a key role in skewing the development of the countries they come from.