At the beginning of the asparagus season, around a quarter of a million harvest helpers from abroad are required. Many suffer from unfair working conditions. But there are also positive developments.
It is a good news for asparagus fans: due to warm temperatures, the first asparagus has already been pierced in southern Hesse, a few days earlier than planned. A particularly busy time now begins for farmers. The asparagus must be fetched, sorted, cleaned and sold from the ground. All of this can only be done with the help of seasonal workers.
At the Tannenhof in further town in Hesse, for example, 50 harvest helpers are currently helping, says Lisa Meinhardt, whose family has grown the asparagus for generations. Soon up to 200 seasonal workers will work there: “There are mainly people from Romania and Moldova, some of them have been with us for many years, sometimes ten to 20 years. We are simply a really big family.”
Most helpers come six to eight weeks. You get minimum wages, if you get very good asparagus, but you earn much more, says Meinhardt. There are rooms for the workers in the farm, as well as rental containers that are delivered especially for the time. According to Meinhardt, they are inexpensive.
The Fair Agriculture Alliance
The alliance “Fair Agriculture” consists of the union-related advice centers Fair Mobility, the European Association for Hiking Labor Questions (EVW) and the “Good work and life” advisory network, the industrial union building-Agrar-Umwelt (IG Bau), church advice centers and the Peco Institute.
High rents take wages
Fair rents and good working conditions are not the standard, says the “Fair Agriculture” alliance when the season report is presented for 2024 in Frankfurt am Main. Many seasonal workers would be treated as “second -class employees”, criticizes Harald Schaum, Vice Bundesters chairman of IG Bau.
A problem for many workers: the high prices for accommodation and meals. According to the alliance, the workers should have paid between 18 and 21 euros per day for bed and meal last year. This rose by two to three euros compared to the previous year. In extreme cases, workers had paid up to 800 euros a month for a bedroom in a three-bed room.
Housing costs should be capped
Some seasonal workers should have paid the rent even if they could not work on the field for days due to rain or floods. The counter -career not only the minimum wage. Some workers “drove back home in fault,” said Anja Piel, DGB federal board member. It demands a lid for housing costs.
In addition, the accommodations would have to be brought to a standard that is decent. In some cases, there are too few sanitary facilities in the accommodations, often simple barracks or uncomforted metal containers. The alliance speaks of “devastating conditions”.
Sexual exploitation by foreman
Since 2018, the alliance has also focused on working conditions on the field. For the first time, the annual report was about sexual assault. Around 44 percent of harvest helpers are women, some of them lived in “difficult and dangerous situations” and were exposed to sexual exploitation and violence by foreman in individual cases. Social isolation and the dependency on the supervisor are exploited.
The alliance recommends at least lockable rooms for prevention and sanitary rooms separated from men and an auxiliary reference point. The alliance for field visits check the conditions on site, where they distribute flyers and inform the workers about their rights. Around 31,000 workers were reached directly in 2024.
Overtime, not sufficient health insurance
The workload in the already exhausting field work is high, and there was also up to twelve hours of chord work last year. It will be problematic when the labor is injured: the group insurance for the people who come especially from Eastern European countries are not sufficiently the initiative and did not cover what statutory health insurance in this country offers.
Another problem is how the workers are recruited at all: there are always private intermediaries who asked for an illegal fee from the seasonal workers. Some of them would then not be given complete employment contracts in which working hours and conditions can be understood.
Print from the EU?
But there are also positive things: the helpers are also increasingly employed by social security contributions, the alliance praised. And of course there are also many courtyards that offer good conditions for the helping hands. After all, a lot of German farms are dependent on them. Not only asparagus, but also cucumbers, berries, grapes and pumpkins have to be brought from the field by hand. 28 percent make up the season workers.
The alliance hopes for an improvement in working conditions through pressure from the European Union with the so -called implementation of “social conditionality”. Subsidies to agricultural companies are thus linked to compliance with labor law. If there are violations, for example in occupational safety, EU funds could be reclaimed.
On the farm in Weiterstadt, you get ready for the high season in asparagus. 1,500 kilos a day are already rattle through the conveyor belts around Easter, even green asparagus. Meinhardt emphasizes how close she is now with the harvesters: “They earn money for their families at home. Nobody has to come – people come voluntarily. And without the harvest helpers who come from Romania, there is simply no German asparagus.”
