The pandemic has shown everyone the real foundation of modern post-industrial society.
Polish authorities are preparing charter flights for Ukrainian migrants who will harvest and serve fruit and vegetable processing companies.
“We want to transport the first two hundred people from Ukraine to the factories in Wroclaw”, – Polish President Krzysztof Inglot said on 27 April. He made it clear that other workers would follow, and this will not be opposed by Kiev – despite the fact that the Ukrainian government has temporarily banned Ukrainians from travelling abroad to work.
In recent years, Poland has completely reoriented its agriculture towards cheap labour from Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of people came to the country every year to clean strawberries and asparagus, and many of them stayed to work on a permanent basis – because the lowest Polish salaries were still beneficially different from those in Ukraine. After the beginning of the pandemic, the migrants returned to their homeland, but already now many of them are coming to Poland again at the invitation of their employers – to serve quarantine and pick berries in the fields. This is facilitated by recruiting firms – they continue to recruit people “for knickers”, while the Polish authorities look over the border to protect local business interests.
The Poles are in a hurry – because the labour force can be intercepted by competitors. Two hundred Ukrainians went to Finland to work the other day, on a special charter flight, which they helped to organize in the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. Upon arrival, the Ukrainians will have to go through two weeks of isolation, and then will collect strawberries – after which they will be returned home by plane. All this time the arrivals will be in some kind of closed labor camp. They are now being equipped in many European countries, where Eastern European workers are being taken in mass – because the agricultural sector of the European Union badly needs them.
“Already today Germany’s agriculture lacks 300 thousand workers, in France – 200 thousand, in Italy – 250 thousand. There will be no working hands – there will be no fruits and vegetables. Meanwhile, it will be necessary to harvest early crops in a month. Or the harvest will just stay in the fields and rot”, – wrote the Financial Times about it. The British Farmers’ Union says the country urgently needs up to 70,000 seasonal workers. – “British farmers warn that without East European gastarbeiters, the crop can simply rot. Workers will be airlifted at least until the end of June”, – the Air Force said, reporting that charter flights with Romanians and Bulgarians are already arriving in the country.
Spain and France are looking for ways to bring Tunisians and Moroccans into the country – hoping to let them cross the border after the pandemic has subsided. And the German authorities have officially allowed 80 thousand foreigners to be temporarily brought into the country, who will undergo medical control, will serve quarantine, and will work in factories and fields, not entitled to leave the territory of their enterprises.
This is the real price of neoliberal rhetoric that promised us a world without visas, borders, and barriers – and in reality reduced “European integration” to controlled deliveries of the required number of guest workers – creating inconvenient, but quite obvious allusions to the historical events of the mid-twentieth century. Meanwhile, the closed hostels of migrants are an ideal environment for the spread of COVID-19, from which a Romanian worker who collected asparagus in Baden-Württemburg already died.
The same can be seen across the ocean. In Canada, they want to open the border to agricultural workers from Latin America who worked there every season, without the possibility of applying for permanent residence. And the United States, too, is using South American migrants in the worst-hit areas of the pandemic, who are now isolated in infamous filtration camps – where they are not given basic protection against the coronavirus.
“At the heart of these agrarian empires is a seasonal worker from Mexico. He has no documents, and without them, he has no rights. He doesn’t seem to have any. The multi-millionth army works invisibly in the fields of California for $6/h (the official minimum in the state – $ 12 / h), in a harmful environment: among pesticides, dust, exhaust, shit and chemicals. At the same time, any labor disputes are solved by calling the immigration services”, – says Anatoliy Ulyanov, a Ukrainian political refugee in Los Angeles, on his blog.
Lack of labor force is one of the most important factors of the global food crisis, which is expected in the coming months – exacerbating the problem of drought and mass bankruptcy of enterprises affected by the crisis. This will affect even the production of coffee, tea, wine, chocolate and tobacco. In turn, the remaining migrants will no longer be able to support the economy of their poor countries by remittances.
“Remittances are a vital source of income for developing countries. The continuing economic downturn caused by COVID-19 is severely affecting the ability to send money home”, – a special report from the World Bank said, pointing out that it will cause billions of dollars in damage to the economies of Third World countries.
Among them is the country of zero visa-free travel today.
“In 2019, the citizens of Zarobitskiy transferred to Ukraine 15.8 billion dollars. The World Bank says that Ukraine is the largest recipient of money transfers from abroad in Europe”, – Pavlo Vernivskyy, a consultant to the Parliamentary Committee on Economic Development, said. This year, the Ukrainian economy will no longer receive this critical aid, and the government will obviously not be able to employ the people who have returned home – especially in the situation of mass downtime of quarantined enterprises, which is increasingly leading to their bankruptcy. Under these conditions, the Cabinet of Ministers will have to let people work in Europe – to somehow reduce social tensions, and at the same time spend the interests of European patrons.
The pandemic has shown everyone the real foundations of the modern world, which were hidden by a virtual hologram of prosperity and progress. We see that the most developed countries – with their robotic, hi-tech and other achievements of post-industrial society – are critically dependent on the import of cheap labour. The people of poor countries must bend their backs in greenhouses and fields doing primitive manual labor – so that supermarkets have plenty of bread, fruits and vegetables, and restaurants can properly deliver asparagus and artichokes to customers. The threat of hunger is becoming quite real – and, meanwhile, in Italy and the United States, agricultural products that could not be sold to quarantined customers are being destroyed. Because this is required by a crazy law of market competition.
Attempts to write off the “unnecessary” working class have turned out to be a failure, contrary to all forecasts of social racists. The poor continue to feed the rich, build and clean houses, clean up garbage and carry goods – despite the daily risks of coronavirus infection, despite the fact that they often do not have the most basic rights and health insurance, and assistance from the state is often inaccessible to gastarbeiters.
Suddenly, it turned out that the world is not on Atlantians, but on migrants.
Andrey Manchuk, Ukraina.ru