Working as fruit pickers

Workers in gardens and orchards are doing a heavy job for little money and with no insurance.

Some are from Adana, some have been forced to emigrate from their land for various reasons... All of them have one thing in common, they are agricultural workers.

Women, men, and sometimes children, who work as harvesters in gardens also share slave working conditions.

Getting up at 3.30 in the morning, workers even before the prayer has been read are ready for the ride on the dolmush.

When they arrive at the pomegranate orchards, the day has not even born yet. In the morning, they start to work at 5 o'clock after having been warmed by the fire they burned in order to be protected from the frost.

The workers have no fix working times, their job is done when they have filled 3 lorries of fruit. And on average they can fill the lorries by 4 in the afternoon. The daily wage of these workers, who state that the working conditions are almost the same in Çukurova, is 60 Turkish Lira.

But apart from the wage, they are not given a meal nor the road fare and of course nothing of insurance. The work they do often lead them to suffer from hernia problems, especially in the neck and lumbar area.

If at least we had insurance…

Pınar Çakın (23), who has been working as a garden picker with her sister for 4 years, says that the working conditions are not acceptable but that she has no choice other than work.

Cakın says they have to knee in the mud when it’s raining and adds that they suffer from many diseases.

“Not always - she says - there is work. Sometimes it happens that we have to work every day without using a permission for one entire month. We earn an average of 1300 Turkish Lira per month. It’s little money, but enough for now. Of course, if we had insurance, we could work more comfortably”.

Aysel Yilmaz, 40, who started this work when she was still a child, provides for her family with this work.

Mother of four, Yilmaz said: “I started to financially help my family before I got married. All the women and girls in the neighborhood would have gone to the fields for collecting work. After marriage, I realized that the living conditions were very expensive. I started to work again when my children had grown up a little. Now, I have to postpone retiring myself as I have a debt for the house and my four children’s school expenses”.

İhsan Yerlikaya, 36, stated that the work in the gardens they go to nowadays is easy and that the hard part is in orange and tangerine gardens in the winter.

“In winter - he said - it gets so cold that our hands got frozen when collecting the fruits. When it rains and gets muddy, we'd all be cursed. But we only know this job. At least, if we earn our labor’s worth, we will be grateful. But this is not the case despite all the difficulties we are being through.”