During the grape-growing season in Turkey, many vineyard owners are welcoming an influx of cheap labour as over 78,500 legally-registered refugees (and many more who are likely to have crossed over illegally) have swamped southern Turkey to escape shelling that has engulfed the north of neighbouring war-torn Syria, according to a Turkish report.
When we asked if we could just get five more, he said he’d rather give money to his Turkish workers
The refugees are desperate for work, making them vulnerable to exploitation, such as underpaid farm work on the vineyards spanning the border, as the sheer numbers are a cause to raise rents.
Thirty Turkish lira per day (€12.76) meets the legal minimum wage for the first half of 2012, as agreed by the Government in December 2011, but some workers are being paid as little as 17 lira (€7.26) per day.
One family working in a vineyard said: “We agreed with the boss that it would be 17 lira a day. He told us that he will never raise our wages. When we asked if we could just get five more, he said he’d rather give the money to his Turkish workers. ‘I want to give to my own people and you are foreign here’, he said.”
Despite this, a family member said: “We never tried to complain anywhere. We are looking for a life here. We don’t need any trouble. We have enough troubles at home. We are scared that if we complain, the Turkish Government will make us leave.”
The Azazis are a family of 17, sharing three rooms in a run-down house near the vineyards. Azazi explained: “I’m a trained teacher of English, so I would happily try and do that job here. My uncle here is a plumber, and that’s also a job that I would transfer to. But right now our only option is to work on the grape farm and be paid 20 lira per day, which we know isn’t the regular rate: the Turkish workers are paid 30.”
He also described the working conditions as insufferable. “The weather here is incredibly hot, and we work 10 hours a day in the fields: 5am until 3pm.” The family is keen to ensure they have a steady income, as the cost of living is considerably higher in Turkey, but they dread the onset of winter in a house with no electricity, where one room doesn’t even have a proper ceiling.
One vineyard owner from Kilis said he knew farmers who deliberately exploit the Syrian refugees, but that was not his policy. “In my personal opinion, I’m pretty disgusted that there are Turkish people ripping the Syrians off like this. Even with the houses, they cost three times as much. This is not a good situation.
“The refugees are trapped here and many of them accept the low pay and mistreatment on the grape farms because the work is seasonal, and will soon run out in the late autumn,” he concluded.