Abstract
The Swedish berry industry relies today on two categories of agricultural seasonal workers: ‘third country nationals’, commonly from South-East Asia, who are granted seasonal work permits for berry picking; and another category designated as ‘free pickers’, mostly EU citizens who sell the harvested berries directly to Swedish berry buyers. With regard to both categories of berry-pickers, successive scandals have plagued the industry. Workers who arrive in Sweden hoping for lucrative employment have ended up with large debts, not able to return home, or have become trapped into ‘forced labour’. This article builds partly on results from our previous research projects on berry pickers in Sweden that centre upon recurrent crises, highlighting the social invisibility of berry-pickers that both enables and adds to their precarity and exploitability. In this paper, our research objective is to study the visibilisation of the pickers' situation of socio-economic precarity and their need for substantive rights. The empirical data comprises interviews and observations collected in 2010–2013, and additional follow-up interviews gathered in 2019–2020. The analytical approach follows theoretical notions of ruptures and acts of citizenship, leading to visibilisation and mobilisation. Key findings identify the occurrence of ruptures contributing to a visibilisation of the berry pickers' plight and to civil society calls for the improvement of their employment rights. Berry-worker protests that make their situation visibile are acts of citizenship which have led to wider mobilisations, but in recent years these have been counteracted, not least, by co-ordinated (local and national) authorities and by landowner responses to such challenges. We argue that these counter-responses can add to invisibilisation, thus becoming pre-emptive bureaucratic actions.
Highlights
Commercialised harvesting of non-cultivated wild berries harks back to the 19th century in Sweden due to ‘the right of public access’ (Swedish: allemansratt), which may be understood as a form of social and spatial citizenship that permits unlimited harvesting of non-timber for est products
Berry picking is marked by seasonal temporariness and spatial isolation in often remote forest areas where the ‘invisibility’ of the berry pickers operates in tandem with the reproduction of harsh working conditions and violations of labour rights
We look for when berry pickers perform claims to rights that constitute activist citizenship, which relates to struggles in which people enact citizenship by performing their ‘right to claim rights’ whilst challenging ‘injustice’ (Isin and Saward, 2013: 22–25)
Summary
Commercialised harvesting of non-cultivated wild berries harks back to the 19th century in Sweden due to ‘the right of public access’ (Swedish: allemansratt), which may be understood as a form of social and spatial citizenship that permits unlimited harvesting of non-timber for est products (see Stens and Sandstrom, 2013). Berry picking is marked by seasonal temporariness and spatial isolation in often remote forest areas where the ‘invisibility’ of the berry pickers operates in tandem with the reproduction of harsh working conditions and violations of labour rights Recently has this concern become centered on berry pickers’ citizen rights. The new law introduced a work-visa requirement for seasonal foreign workers – as a permit prerequisite it mandated a valid employment contract tied to a minimum wage stan dard set by the Municipal Workers’ trade union Following this date, recurring berry-picking scandals have generated numerous alarmreports on slave-like working conditions endured by South-East Asian and East European berry pickers in Sweden (Woolfson et al, 2011). Before proceeding to our analysis, we will detail the methodology employed in this article and offer some insights into labour precari ousness in the industry and the efficacy of the current regime of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ regulation under which berry picking in Sweden is conducted
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