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December 1st, 2008

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Bleak house

Czechs lured to Scotland find abusive living and working conditions

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 1st, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO

Migrants are often crowded into flimsy caravans often lacking running water or adequate sanitation, an activist says. enlarge

COURTESY PHOTO

enlarge

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST

Sue Smith runs a drop-in center for foreign workers seeking advice. enlarge

When Petr Adamník learned of work opportunities in Scotland, he figured it would be a quick way out of his inescapable debt in the Czech Republic. As a movie-set builder in Prague, he could see no other way to repay the 100,000 Kč ($4,883) he owed to a health insurance company, according to his brother, Martin Adamník.

Petr picked beets for 10 hours a day, bringing in about £4 ($8/166 Kč) an hour, his brother says. He rotated through a series of jobs reserved for migrant workers and in April found cheap accommodation in a caravan. Three weeks later the flimsy structure caught fire, and Petr died. Police still don’t know what started the fire.

Sue Smith, an activist in Arbroath, Scotland, said that most of these caravans don’t have smoke alarms and are not properly inspected. Moreover, these units are often overcrowded and don’t have running water or adequate sanitation, she said.

Dangerous housing and miserable pay are often the hallmarks of foreign workers’ lives in Scotland, according to Ian Tusker, assistant secretary of the Scottish Trade Union Congress (STUC), which helps migrant workers.

“You could work all day for a pittance, basically. Not even schoolchildren here will do fruit-picking in the summer,” Tusker said. He sees Adamník’s story as typical of workers who are paid so little that they are forced to live in substandard housing.

One Czech man, who didn’t want to be named for fear of incurring a lawsuit, said the fruit-picking job was not at all what he had expected.

“When we arrived there, we realized we would share a room with 10 more people. Some good pickers could earn £7, but when you don’t know the work at all it is really difficult. So my average salary was £6 a day,” he said. “Also, the facilities were poor; there was one shower for 20 pickers. It was awful.”

Bitter fruit

By far, the majority of foreign workers employed in Scotland’s back-breaking fruit industry are from Eastern and Central Europe, according to Anti-Slavery International, a London-based human rights organization. The majority of workers are Poles, followed by Slovaks and Czechs, by the STUC’s calculations.

Paul Millar, a Czech-born honorary consul in Scotland, estimated that about 2,000 to 3,500 Czechs work in Scotland. Often, these people are lured by unscrupulous employment agencies promising well-paid jobs.

“They actually think they’re coming to a good life,” said Smith, the activist. She got involved in the cause of migrant workers after she came across the body of a Czech man who had been stabbed two years ago. She wanted to help the man’s family and set up a fund to raise money for his body to be flown back to the Czech Republic.

“Before I knew it, it was spiraling way beyond what I even thought was going to happen,” Smith said during a recent visit to Prague. Now her life centers around helping migrant workers. She runs a drop-in center from her home and says about 30 or so people come by every week seeking advice as to their rights and for help filling out forms, making doctor’s appointments and the like.

Millar estimated at least 80 percent of Czechs working in Scotland speak no English, and therefore don’t have access to information explaining their rights.

The life many migrant workers find in Scotland is not what they had envisioned. They are frequently abused and coerced into accepting illegal working conditions, said Beth Herzfeld of Anti-Slavery International. The most common form of abuse is debt-bondage, Millar said. This is the illegal practice of paying an employer up-front for work, rent and food.

Sometimes, Smith said, it takes workers six weeks to repay these debts, and then they are fired. Millar said this is a common “trick” employers use to leech money from vulnerable workers.

According to Herzfeld, debt-bondage is one of the tactics used to traffic people. Trafficking is when someone is taken to, or freely goes, from one place to another by means of deception, coercion or violence. Often, as in the case of many Czech workers in Scotland, their passports are confiscated, they have a debt to repay and, being unsure of their legal right to work, they are controlled by threats.

Smith said she confronted one farmer who was keeping all his workers’ passports locked in a safe — a measure he claimed was for the workers’ security.

“[Farmers] don’t register their seasonal employees, and it means they treat you like some illegal nobody,” the anonymous Czech worker said.

Silent suffering

One difficulty in exposing this problem is that the workers are often afraid to speak out. Josef Klíma, an investigative journalist for TV Nova, went to Scotland in September and found the workers he interviewed would not speak on camera for fear of reprisals. But they spoke of crowded living conditions and abusive bosses, Klíma said. “They force them into this terrible situation,” he said.

When Klíma tried to interview a Czech man who runs an employment agency that recruits the workers, the man became so angry that he grabbed Klíma’s camera and broke it, according to Klíma, “because we asked them unpleasant questions.”

This particular company changes its name every year to avoid exposure, Millar said.

There are ways of avoiding these “employment agencies” and landing a legit, if still difficult, job in Scotland, Millar said.

He advises Czechs to have the job agreed, with a reputable agency, before they come; to register immediately with the Workers Registration Scheme, so that they have a personal insurance number and are part of the tax system; or, if they speak English, to visit first and interview at a job center. “There are some success stories,” he said.

However, the stories don’t always end so happily.

“We were too shocked and ashamed to go back home, so we stayed there for two months,” the Czech worker said. “But the money I brought back was the same I would have earned as a cashier in some Czech supermarket.”

— Hela Balínová contributed to this report.

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com

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