New book about migrant workers

Last year I met Jozef och Elvira, two migrant workers from Poland and Slovakia that was employed every summer for ten years in a farm in southern Sweden with agricultural work. They told me about long work hours (from six in the morning until 8 sometimes 10 or 12 at night) and work conditions that few Swedes would cope with. They also told about how the farmer himself harassed them and called them “my niggers” and “my pigs” when they got back from work full of dust. Which in fact happened all the time as they didn’t have a shower they could use at work, in fact they didn’t even have a toilet or a room where they could have their meals. Instead they were sitting directly on the ground or on a lorry trail.

There are approximately 200 million migrant workers in the world. Not more than 9 per cent are refugees, the rest of them are simply trying to get a better life. They are often working for less money and with worse working conditions than the majority population. The third world has moved in to Sweden and other European countries, a cucumber grown in southern Sweden leads to almost the same kind of exploitation as vegetables grown in countries in the third world. Sweden is full of construction workers, cleaning ladies, taxi drivers and others with an origin in another country that are doing work no native would even think of accepting.

My new book, written together with Mats Wingborg, deals with Migrant workers and their rights ("Migrantarbetare - grundkurs om rörlighet, rättigheter och globalisering", the editor is Premiss förlag and we were doing it for the Olof Palme International Centre with Support of the Decent Work Campaign (Solidar). We have studied the whole situation with migrant workers in Sweden and the rest of the world, not only those without documentation. We are particularly looking at what effect migration has on what usually called “the Swedish Model”. (Photo from southern Sweden, outside Kristianstad, by Anna-Lena Lodenius)