At the Door to Europe There’s Slavery

A video by the Guardian’s Felicity Lawrence, in whose book Not On The Label I first read about El Ejido, on migrant farm workers in southern Spain. Quite good, though I have some concerns about her poking around the interiors of people’s homes without their permission (or that’s how the edit makes it appear.) She also glosses over the work that Cherif, and Spitou do with the Sindicato de Obreros del Campo, which I feel does the organizing SOC undertakes for farm workers a disservice. Certainly the workers are in a bad spot, and are victims of exploitation and racism (though the report doesn’t really touch on the racism either) but there is a strong movement to demand worker rights, which SOC is leading, but that migrants are helping to move forward.

Those details aside it’s moving to see the word slavery used, both by Felicity and Spitou. There’s really no other word to describe the situation in Almeria. Of course there was an immediate response from farm owners and big agribusiness in Almeria, but the conditions that the majority of the workers live in can’t be denied.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 7th, 2011. It is filed under Solidarity and tagged with El Ejido, Slavery, Spain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.