Berry picking jobs not pick of the bunch

Villagers from the Northeast should be wary of jobs offering high wages for picking berries in Finland and Sweden, the chairwoman of the Finnish-Thai Association says.

People who sign up for these promising jobs often end up getting scammed into doing heavy labour for no pay, Bunchuen Koskela said.

Many northeastern farmers are looking for seasonal work as they have just harvested their annual rice crop.

"We don't want them [Thai farmers] to be cheated by unscrupulous job agents," she said. "Their life there [in Finland or Sweden] will not be as easy as at home."

The association, set up three years ago, helped some 60 Thais return home from Finland last year after they had ended up in dire straits when working as wild blueberry and raspberry pickers, she said.

Mrs Bunchuen said about 200 to 300 Thais, mostly from the northeastern provinces of Loei, Udon Thani and Chaiyaphum, travel to Finland to pick the wild berries each year.

Each person would typically pay about 150,000 baht to a job broker promising monthly earnings of hundreds of thousands of baht, she said. But the promises of high wages typically turned out to be lies.

Most of the pickers were rice farmers. They began travelling in June and stayed in the forests to pick wild berries for three months from July to September before returning home to Thailand, Mrs Bunchuen said.

But their lives there were not easy. On arrival the Thai pickers would be lodged in vacant schools in the forest. They would also have to prepare their own food, she said.

Those who did not want to stay in the overcrowded camps would sleep in tents deeper in the forest.

She said the Thai pickers the association helped leave Finland last year had paid about 1,400 euros (63,000 baht) for their travel and accommodation. Many had borrowed money for the trip.

They had hoped earnings in Finland would be better than in Sweden as there were fewer pickers, she said.

The employers in Finland provided them with housing and vans.

But she said the group returned home without any money because they had to pay fines for carrying more than three passengers in each van, which violated the Finnish traffic law.

"Each of the workers ended up with 70,000 to 80,000 baht in debt from mortgaging their land with the agents to take out loans to pay for their travelling," she said.

Finnish berry farmers have hired foreign pickers to help harvest the fruit for a number of years.

Most of the foreign workers came from Russia, Estonia and Thailand.

Foreigners with a tourist visa are allowed to pick wild berries and sell them. They are not required to sign an official labour contract, and can stay for up to three months on their visas.

Wild blueberries and raspberries fetch about two to three euros a kilogramme. But most agents deduct about one euro a kilo from the sale without notifying the pickers, she said.

Mrs Bunchuen said Thai and Finnish authorities in charge of labour and immigration should discuss measures to prevent job seekers from being cheated.