# Escape from the Slave Labour Camps of Cornwall



## boskysquelch (Mar 22, 2006)

A TUC report :::
This was the shocking headline in the Polish press recently. Workers are attracted to the promise of reasonable pay and accommodation for the flower picking season. Faced with recruitment problems, employers offering minimum wages, are turning to Eastern Europe for cheap labour. Often a recruitment fee is charged along with bogus insurance charges, excessive travel and accommodation costs. A big caravan park has been used to house the workers, six per caravan at £50 a week each. This all adds up to a healthy profit for the agencies involved so once the workers have paid off the costs they are sacked. Some workers at the camp near Penzance in Cornwall had worked a 70 hour week for just 21p.
This is the article:

About 70 people from Lubelszczyzna in Poland have been trapped by a British employer, with no money and no possibility to go home but with huge debts which rising every day.

Jacek and Marcin ran away from the hell. They just have been praying to not by caught by Russian bosses. They drove for couple days, sleeping on a rail stations. 'We have run away but there are still a big number left.' they said.

It was supposed to be a very well paid job on a farm in Cornwall in a village of Breage, near Penzance picking daffodils and cabbage. 'But we have been cheated.' Jacek and Maric explained. 'A person who organised our 'trip' to Britain took £260 from each person. When we got there we have to pay for additional 'things' like £100 for first week of our visit on this farm, £50 for finding us job - paid to British person, £75 for insurance, and another £75 to pay 'tax'. For each trip from the yard (camping site) to the field we had to pay £4-5. Nobody had that amount of money. That's why we had to take a loan from the owner of that company. Our debt we had to pay back supervised by Russian 'strong men'. 'They decide who is working each day. When one has paid back the debt, they to take a compulsory off work - usually 1-2 weeks. - so they are back in debt.' says Jarek.

According to Marcin and Jarek, Polish workers on the farm are often ill, sometimes seriously. One of them got a broken leg. All of them have got puffed hands and faces from chemicals used with crops or from the sap.

'My husband called me almost crying asking me to help him somehow.' says Ewa Kowalczyk from Orchowiec, in Poland. 'That the place is like a concentration camp'.


A c&p prompted by an Ex poster from Urb posting somewhere else...totally, totally unsurprising I'm afraid.


----------



## Backatcha Bandit (Mar 24, 2006)

"Daff picking sucks.  I'm outta here!"​


----------



## boskysquelch (Mar 24, 2006)

Backatcha Bandit said:
			
		

> "Daff picking sucks.  I'm outta here!"



Safer than picking cockles in Morcombe Bay tho'?


----------



## Backatcha Bandit (Mar 24, 2006)

Back to work, Bosky...  enough shirking on internet messageboards!


----------

