NEA MANOLADA (Greece): Nea Manolada was a quiet village in southern Greece unknown to many until a strike by “strawberry slaves” exposed the dark underbelly of one of the country’s key economic sectors.

His face burnt by the sun, 34-year-old Ivan looked around nervously as he recounted how hundreds of migrant fruit pickers stood up to their employers last month and won, briefly.

“Strawberries are particularly difficult to pick,” said the burly Bulgarian who declined to give his real name said.

“You’re squatting down for seven hours, with a break that can be as little as 15 minutes. But the worst thing under those plastic tarpaulins is the heat.” He measures his words. Ivan, in Greece for a decade, only became legal last year after Bulgaria joined the EU, but he is mindful of the lot of many migrant pickers illegal, desperate for work but subject to exploitation that has long met with an official blind eye.

“It’s the definition of modern slavery,” said Ilias Ahmed, a member of the communist-affiliated Workers Militant Front (PAME) who has helped create a union for Bangladeshi workers in Greece.

The problem is not confined to the strawberry farms on the west coast of the Peloponnese, where farmers are dependent on seasonal labourers, many from abroad. When the strawberry season ends in July, the workers go elsewhere to harvest potatoes, olives, watermelons and more.

But for three days in late April, hundreds of pickers in Nea Manolada staged an improbable strike to demand higher pay.

Greek media found out and reports on the “strawberry slaves” and the “strawberries of shame” brought inspectors to conduct raids in this farmland corner.

They found entire families from Albania, Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece’s minority Roma community working in local greenhouses in temperatures up to 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit).

More than 2,000 seasonal workers are employed in Nea Manolada, a community of only 1,900 which a few years ago hit upon strawberries as a lucrative crop now heavily exported to European Union partners.

Most of the migrants were living in squalor inside makeshift huts made from the same plastic as the greenhouses and forced to pay a monthly rent of $93-156 to their employers for the privilege.

The farmers also own the onsite markets where migrants buy weekly essentials which returns even more of their salaries straight back to employers.

“The workers of Nea Manolada are almost all without papers. As such, they have no rights and the farmers can do whatever they want,” said Ahmed.

Still, some say they’re grateful. “In Bulgaria, my wife and daughter would have been prostitutes and I would have been unemployed,” one Bulgarian migrant told the Epsilon weekly.—AFP