ASPIRING fruit pickers who thought they could make a quick buck abroad better think twice about their aspiration.
UK news portal The Guardian yesterday (Aug 14) carried the plight of an Indonesian migrant worker which goes by the pseudonym Banyu who is £5,000 (RM26,960) in debt to an unlicensed broker in Bali while having to hand over the deeds to his family home as surety.
He only has a six-month visa for the picking season and is scared that the work is not as lucrative as he hoped. Banyu was engaged by Clock House farm near Maidstone which supplies strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and other soft fruit to leading supermarket chains including Marks & Spencer.
As backgrounder, Brexit had made the task of finding fruit pickers for UK farms difficult, a situation exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Last year, a majority of Clock House’s workers came from Ukraine, hence the farm had been expecting about 880 to return.
After the Russian-Ukraine conflict broke out – and men were told not to leave Ukraine – Clock House went to a licensed British agency to find workers from Indonesia and Vietnam.
Imagine the situation: Banyu who is legally engaged to pick fruits has to endure tremendous hardship.
Now compare his plight to those who are doing so without proper immigration documentation, as in the case of Malaysians abusing their tourist/visitor visa to work illegally as fruit pickers in Australia.
Surely, these aspiring fruit pickers will end up at the mercy of agents or middlemen who tricked them into signing up for such jobs in the guise of earning a lucrative income.
“Imagine what will happen if the (Australian) police raid your strawberry farm and find you working there illegally? You will be detained with some procedures to ensue. Probably you will be jailed or deported back to Malaysia and eventually banned from entering Australia (for a couple of years),” shared a Malaysia permanent resident in Australia.
“It’s no fun when one get arrested by the police … more so when one finds himself in the same level as Bangladeshis and Indonesians (in Malaysia) who live in constant fear wherever there’s an operation by the authorities. Their (Aussie) police are very persistent in nabbing illegal workers regardless male or female.”
Likening agents to fraudsters or conmen, the Malaysian whose rambling in the Malay language titled “Please Don’t Come to Australia to Pluck Fruits” (when translated) highlighted how Canberra is ‘migraine sick’ with an exodus of Malaysians who journeyed illegally into the Land of Kangaroos to pluck fruits.
“Their Government is at a loss to manage this issue while at the same time, Malaysia’s reputation has gone down to the drain. The whole episode has made it a hassle for genuine Malaysian tourists/visitors to enter Australia with their immigration officers probing 1,001 questions to ensure that Malaysian tourists/visitors are not coming to work illegally in the country”.
Recall that in November 2017 an undercover Malaysian journalist with a Malay daily, Saiful Hasam, exposed exploitations in Australia’s fruit picking industry where workers were “brainwashed” with religion and trapped in debt to keep them on farms.
Giving evidence to a modern slavery inquiry, he spoke of the “thousand sad stories” he heard during his two weeks at a fruit farm in Swan Hill in northern Victoria.
“Fruit pickers, often working illegally, were lured to Australia with promises of high incomes, but upon their arrival, they were paid a pittance, kept in overcrowded homes with exorbitant rent and effectively trapped in debt bondage,” revealed Saiful.
He was paid A$110 for 24 hours’ work over four days. About A$80 went to pay rent in a small home he shared with 11 other workers, mostly from Malaysia. He was short-changed A$10 by his contractor, leaving him with just A$20. – Aug 15, 2022
