Online event: “Labour exploitation in agriculture is a European phenomenon”

Generation 2.0 for Rights, Equality & Diversity and the Italian association Terra! are happy to invite you to the online event “Labour exploitation in agriculture is a European phenomenon” which is going to take place on September 23, 2021, from 16.00 to 17.30 EEST. The event will focus mostly on the working conditions that land workers face in the agriculture sector in Greece and the rest of Mediterranean Europe.

With the coronavirus pandemic gradually prevailing in 2020, European Member States started opening their borders, depending on the harvest seasons and the manpower needed to cover harvesting demands. The interconnection which surfaced between Member States regarding the management practices, led to understanding that the exploitation of agricultural workers cannot be tackled in national terms, but it requires a unified approach on a European level.

In this context, the recent report of Terra!, “(Eu)xploitation. The gang mastering: a Southern question. Italy, Spain, Greece”, analyses the chain of exploitation in the agri-food sector (ranging from the countryside to the supermarkets) on the European level. The curator of the report, Maria Panariello and researcher Apostolis Fotiadis, author of the chapter regarding Greece, are going to present how the recruitment process of workers is managed, how declination rates affect land workers’ exploitation, but also how the market’s power is distributed along the agrifood industry chain in the various European countries examined.

Manolada will be presented as a case study on the working and living conditions of migrant land workers in the strawberries’ cultivation in Greece, through Manolada Watch, an initiative of Generation 2.0 RED launched in 2019 for the monitoring of those conditions in this area.

The social & legal aspects of the phenomenon of the agricultural workers’ exploitation in Greece is going to be analyzed by Apostolis Kapsalis, Postdoctoral Researcher on Labor Migration at Panteion University and by Vassilis Kerasiotis, Supreme Court Lawyer and Director of HIAS Greece.

Ιn addition to the above topics, the report “Modern Slavery: from production to consumption” will be presented as it focuses on the role of the consumers, their perception of exploitation in agriculture and on their confidence in certification labels of ethical agricultural production in relation to labor conditions. The report was produced by Generation 2.0 RED (conducted by researcher Iordanis Paraskevas under the scientific supervision of Andreas Chatzidakis, Professor of Marketing at Royal Holloway University of London and the production supervision of Ismini Karydopoulou).

You can find the event’s agenda, here and the link to join the event, here.