Migration statistics do not tell us much about people who leave their countries and loved ones to work in poorly paid and physically demanding jobs. Often we don't even see them - because they live somewhere out of sight in hostels and spend their days working.
For several months in 2022, I went undercover and worked with some of them to report on the shocking conditions faced by EU nationals doing the lowest paid jobs in Western Europe - often invisible.
Five years earlier, in 2017, I was undercover in my home country, the Czech Republic, working in some of the worst-paid sectors. I worked in a hospital laundry, a pork factory, as a cashier and in a waste sorting factory. That project of mine was translated into a book and a film.
During 2017, I noticed that most of my colleagues from poorer countries, such as Ukraine or Romania, who found work through employment agencies, have much longer working hours than employed Czechs and that they suffer much worse conditions, which local residents would not tolerate.
I decided to expand the project to assess the conditions for Eastern European workers in some of the lowest paid sectors in Western Europe.
The European Union forms a single labor market that enables easier labor migration, but inequalities between the 27 countries create a number of problems. Migration flows within the EU increased dramatically after central and eastern countries joined the bloc between 2004 and 2007, gaining rights under the EU's free movement policy, as well as after the 2008 financial crisis. However, the real driver of east-west migration is that there are still large differences in wages, living standards and incomes. One could say that Europe is still divided, not by an iron curtain, but by a "wage curtain".
As a Czech, it was not difficult for me to find jobs for unskilled workers: on a German fruit and vegetable farm, as a hotel maid in Ireland and in the social welfare sector in France. I spent several weeks looking for a job in the UK, but Brexit has made it much more difficult to legally employ EU citizens without a work permit.
The jobs I did were very different, but they all had one thing in common: if local people worked in those places, they would have a hard time making ends meet, and the employers' demands regarding their working hours would make it impossible for them to run any what a normal family life.
The willingness to work long hours for relatively little money appears to support entire sectors that depend on cheap migrant labor in various countries.
In theory, in German agriculture you cannot work more than eight hours a day, five days a week. However, German labor law allows seasonal workers to work 10 hours a day. Even this flexibility in the law is often abused, and migrants are asked to work longer than what the law prescribes. Of course, those overtime hours are not registered anywhere.
The jobs I did were very different, but they all had one thing in common: if local people worked in those places, they would have a hard time making ends meet, and the employers' demands regarding their working hours would make it impossible for them to run any what a normal family life.
However, none of this explains the psychology of a worker who has the same labor and civil rights as any other worker with an EU passport and who remains at a workplace where he is robbed, sleep deprived and often denied statutory breaks.
As I learned from talking to my colleagues, the essential paradox - and a great advantage for employers in sectors that depend most on migrant labor - is that people who leave their families to work abroad do not want to work fewer hours. If they are paid by the hour, they want to work most of the time they spend abroad. They want to make up for the feeling of abandoning their children or parents by earning as much as possible and limiting the time they might spend in self-destructive thinking. And often with alcohol consumption.
That's how they accumulate working hours, but sooner or later the body reaches its limits, especially when the working conditions are inhumane. I felt the effects of that when I was working 14 hours a day, six or seven days a week. The number of working hours alone leaves too little time for sleep.
Employers who pay minimum wage, or even less, often have trouble retaining workers. But for every migrant worker who leaves, there are plenty of others ready to come, until they too reach the point of exhaustion. Because they are easily replaceable, there is little incentive to improve working conditions or create a more pleasant work environment.
Nevertheless, my Polish colleagues voluntarily returned to a place they considered hell, a German farm where they worked seven days a week, often 14 or more hours.
I now consider separation from families to be among the worst aspects of labor migration. Many, if not most, of the women I met who were doing extremely hard work for little money came without a partner or children. Usually, the process of family separation started earlier, when their partner left, say Poland, to earn money in Germany or some other western country.
Long periods of separation often resulted in the man leaving the family. Women then find themselves in the position of single mothers and cannot support their children. Therefore, they entrust them to relatives, usually mothers or sisters, and go to earn money abroad. First, the closest family falls apart, and then the rest.
Many of these women cope with the pressure of work and the sadness of being separated from their children and family by turning to alcohol. As a result, they themselves gradually break down. Hard physical work and the unhealthy lifestyle that it entails have an impact on health over time. The irony is that migrant workers often return home for treatment, which is paid for by the health systems in Poland or Slovakia.
Many of my colleagues dreamed of buying a house or an apartment in their homeland, to provide for their old age and help their children. However, some of them stayed abroad forever because their work destroyed their life at home. On the days they don't work, they get drunk.
I used a hidden camera to record some of those I met, including Sabina and Evalina, a mother and daughter from Poland, who are on their feet 14 hours a day on a German farm to send money and support their family. There is also a Dane, in her 60s, who likes to show photos of her children and grandchildren - all of whom are in Poland. A Slovak couple, Sara and Sebastijan, with high school diplomas and a good command of English, endure terrible working conditions in an Irish hotel.
The hotel management relied on agency offers of cheap labor from Eastern Europe. The fact that the hotel is located in a remote location and extremely long working hours practically make it impossible for them to actively look for better jobs.
On the farm and in the hotel, I noticed that much of the pressure to do the work is internalized. If I did something slowly, I would be criticized, not by the boss, but by a colleague.
I was fascinated by how many people want to be good at their jobs, even if they get little benefit from it. During communism, we had the Order of Heroes of Socialist Labor, which was awarded to citizens who achieved exceptional results in industry. The behavior of today's migrants in the EU reminded me of those days.
The author is a journalist from the Czech portal Denik Alarm.
Text taken from "The Guardian"
Translation: NB
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