Boujemaa and his two colleagues on a cherry farm in Almacelles queued yesterday to get a bed in hall 3 of the Lleida Fair, where the City Council has installed, once again, its device attention to temporary workers At nine in the morning and after waiting in line for three hours to check in at the hostel, I was in a hurry to get to the train station. He used to sleep in the back, in the open. From there he goes to Almacelles every day. “At the station a friend picks us up by car to go to work. We pay him five euros a day”, he says. He charges 70.
The municipal elections delayed the Aplec del Caragol, which is held on the Champs Elysees, where the pavilion is located, by a week, and the festival delayed the attention to temporary workers by a week. A week is the time he’s been sleeping in his car, with a friend, Dahou, an Algerian man who places poles of anti-squid nets in a village in Segrià and who got the job through a labor company temporary (ETT). “We can sleep here; in the car you get up full of mosquito bites and tired”, he says.
Most of the temporary workers who lined up yesterday at the door of the hostel are already working, unlike the previous campaigns, in which the majority neither worked nor had permission to work. The City Council distributed 60 tickets to sleep on the first day; those who arrived later, at least twenty, will have to register again today. The City Council, through a company that manages the facility, offers the pavilion 122 beds, showers, self-laundry, lockers, breakfast and dinner. Yesterday’s: lentil salad, chicken casserole with rice and yogurt. Thousands of temporary workers are now expected throughout the province. Last year there were around 18,000.
La Paeria has a single service office for legal advice, intercultural mediation and trade union support, and has 99 places in furnished housing of the Municipal Urban Agenda Company (EMAU). These flats are intended for rural workers in a situation of economic precariousness with an employment contract. They pay a deposit of 100 euros and 5 euros per night to be paid weekly.
The president of Asaja Lleida, Pere Roqué, assures that the temporary workers who arrive and have work permits are all working because fewer are arriving as a result of the extension of harvests in the south, where varieties have been planted in recent years late strawberries, and the coincidence of the Lleida and Múrcia campaigns.
This year there is a good harvest in Segrià and Noguera, areas that, unlike Urgell and El Pla, do not depend on the Urgell canal, which closed the main canal on April 25 and opened this Monday for a tree survival irrigation. Fruita amb Justícia Social agrees with Asaja in the fact that fewer seasonals arrive each year, there are late strawberry varieties and more red fruits and seasonals, if they can, prefer to avoid Lleida, explains its spokesperson, Gemma Casal.
From Joves Agricultors i Ramaders de Catalunya (JARC), its president, Joan Carles Massot, states that this year farmers are having difficulty finding temporary workers because the thinning jobs of some fruit growers coincide with the cherry harvest. “The truth is that, if you turn to ETT to ask for workers when you are not regular, the companies tell you that they do not have temporary workers,” he says.
There are many who arrive with an offer of employment and accommodation at the home of the farmer who hires them. Four Moroccan workers arrived in Aitona a few weeks ago to work on the farm of Jordi Vidal, the coordinator of the Asaja sweet fruit sector. They collect figs with the three workers who run the farm all year. Three of them sleep in a house provided by the farmer and another in the house of his relatives in the village.
In Alcarràs, where between 3,000 and 4,000 temporary workers have arrived, the City Council has made the municipal hostel with 96 places available to companies and farmers in the town. It already accommodates 80. It costs 5 euros per person and night, and includes a place to sleep, electricity and water. The Consistory invoices the service to the company or person in charge of the agricultural operation, which may pass the cost on to the worker.
In order to accommodate temporary workers, the Generalitat announced in March a call for aid for the construction of new private accommodation and the extension and rehabilitation of existing ones for working people with the contributions of Afrucat UP, JARC, and the ‘ Asaja, which the Government expects to come out this month.
