EPISODE 15 TRANSCRIPT

TINA:

Today, I wish to warmly welcome Giulia Laganà from the Open Society Foundations EU advocacy office. Welcome, Giulia.

GIULIA:

Thank you very much for having me.

TINA:

Can you first tell me a little bit about Open Society…what you do?

GIULIA:

So we are a global foundation working in almost 100 countries worldwide. And the bulk of our work is grant making so we provide support to NGOs ranging from very small grassroots ones to the large international organizations. And we have a number of offices around the world, and two advocacy offices, one in Washington for U.S. policies and one in Brussels EU policies. And I’m part of the latter.

TINA:

And what you do in your office in Brussels?

GIULIA:

So we’re about 25 to 30 people, currently 25, working on a range of policy areas from geographic ones, sort of the Western Balkans and Africa to thematic ones. And I specifically oversee work on asylum and migration policies. So that’s where the interest in agriculture and migrant exploitation agriculture came about.

TINA:

How would you describe the situation for migrant farmworkers prior to COVID-19?

GIULIA:

So it was already pretty bad, I’d say overall in Europe, and the crisis has exacerbated a number of those trends. When I say it’s, it was pretty bad. I think one can generalize to the whole of the European Union. Because even though the conditions are particularly exploitative in southern Europe, we see patterns of abusive working conditions in the north as well. So it is a generalized system, which is sort of structurally set up to foster that kind of practice in terms of labor conditions.

TINA:

Tell me a little bit about the countries in the south first. Spain, Italy, what is the situation and what are the challenges?

GIULIA:

There the situation is extremely severe. And I want to include Greece as well, in the group, so, for a couple of decades, really, when I first started working on migrant exploitation and agriculture in 2005. So that’s 15 years ago with MSF in the south of Italy. And they’ve been well documented by the international media. I mean, the BBC had a report on Spain out two or three weeks ago. The same applies to Italy and to Greece where there was an infamous incident in the mid 2000s, where a farmer shot migrant workers who were demanding better paying conditions. And the system there, especially in the south of those countries, but also across the countries relies on really conditions which are akin to slavery in many cases where people are paid around 20 euro a day, excuse me for 12 hour working days, where they live with labor without any protective equipment or gear. And where they are essentially exploited and controlled by gangmasters, or by the farmers themselves, it depends very much on the country. And this applies to all kinds of crops really not just the oranges and tomatoes and strawberries, which perhaps are the most infamous in terms of the media coverage. But if you look at Italy, specifically, for instance, in the north of the country where in Piemonte prestigious wines are produced, but all on a better and so on, and farmers have paved the way Prices buy by the people they sell their produce to the conditions are still extremely exploitative. So there are a series of factors which are ingrained, which create that system of exploitation.

TINA:

Can you tell me what the factors are?

GIULIA:

So there are a number of factors, the primary driving one in the case of Italy, Greece and Spain is, of course, very restrictive migration policies. So, in the early 2000s, especially in Italy, in Greece, there was more possibility for non EU nationals to go to these countries to seek employment This was restricted throughout the years. And what that has led to is a quite a large number of undocumented migrant workers who are of course, much more exploitable, because they can be blackmailed very easily by threatening to report them to the police because of their lack of papers. The other sort of structural factor that’s common to all the countries is an agricultural system which is based on this very seasonal type of agriculture which means that there’s a demand for a workforce which is highly mobile, and can move around the country at great speed, and can be easily sort of moved around by illicit intermediaries like gangmasters. And other broader factors which are common to the whole of Europe actually, which include the way the EU’s agricultural policies function. And the fact that they’ve rewarded over the decades when they’ve been in operation. They rewarded large scale farming, intensive agriculture, and not the small scale agriculture, which often exists in these countries. And the third macro factor is price compression is probably the most important one. And it also applies to Northern Europe. And what I mean by that is large supermarkets and retailers driving prices down so low, that even bonafide and sort of well meaning farmers are unable to pay a living wage, because they’re getting paid below production cost in some cases, for their produce, and therefore it’s impossible, if not very difficult for them to pay a decent wage.

TINA:

Who are the workers? So where do they come from?

GIULIA:

So in southern Europe, as I said, they used to be predominantly from non EU countries, so Sub Saharan Africa and North Africa, I mean the case of Spain, Italy. And in the case of Greece, there are still a lot of migrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Over the last five to 10 years, there’s been a bit of a shift. So there’s been an increase in the number of workers from new EU member states like Romania and Bulgaria. And what’s interesting to see there, and it’s a pattern, which is replicated in Northern Europe is that being an EU national does not protect you from exploitation. And in some cases, actually, it makes things worse, as is the case in in the south of Italy, for instance, where Bulgarians and Romanians are now in some cases, more severely exploited than the sub Saharan Africans. There’s a number of reasons for that. One of them is that the Africans and the North Africans have unionized and the Eastern Europeans have not. So that’s one of the factors. It is a mix, I would say predominantly non EU with a growing number of EU nationals as well.

TINA:

And what conditions are they working under and living under?

GIULIA:

I’m generalizing very broadly because of course, the contexts are different, but they work very, very long day’s normally doing very, very heavy work picking oranges, for instance, tomatoes in often very hot conditions as far as the tomato harvest is concerned. And they have to fill crates that are paid by crate rather than by working day. And on average, in Italy, at least the pay is around 20 to 25 euro a day for a 12 hour working day. The same roughly applies to Spain. There is no provision often of food or if there is detracted from the already very low wages. They’re violently controlled by gangmasters. There’s a lot of coercion sometimes violence. There are threats of blackmail, in the case of women workers and this is particularly the case in the province of Almeria and Cuenca, in the provinces of Almeria and Cuenca in Spain, but also in Italy, female migrant workers also sexually abused and harassed by the employers and by the gangmasters. And they have no protective equipment, which of course is a problem at the best of times, because you’re prone to injuries. But now in the context of a dangerous pandemic, it means that they’re exposed to additional risks of contracting the virus. And in the case of all three countries, like I’d say, many of these workers live in really abysmal conditions. So in informal settlements and shacks, in the fields where they work, where they’re exposed to pesticides, not just while they’re working, but also when they sleep and rest. And where in the winter conditions get incredibly difficult because of the cold fires are often lighted and this leads to the migrants losing their lives as their shacks burned down. So I’d say the conditions of what one would expect some Third World countries or developing countries, similar conditions have been reported in Bangladesh, for instance, in the garment industry, and they’ve led to an uproar and campaigns to stop. You can have clean clothes and so on. But we’ve seen less of that for the produce from Southern Europe. And that’s paradoxical because we sort of assume that in Europe, rights are respected, broadly speaking, and things are okay. The paradox that got us to work on this was that you can buy a fair trade banana in Europe, but you can’t buy a fair trade tomato, because there is no sort of certifying system to make sure that you haven’t purchased a tomato, which has been effectively picked by a slave.

TINA:

I’m going to get back to that. But first, you mentioned gangmasters I know from many people that may not be known term. Can you explain what gangmasters are?

GIULIA:

So, so a gangmaster is somebody who acts as an intermediary between the employer and the employee in the informal economies, so we’re not talking about people who have contracts, generally speaking, and I’ll specify why I say generally speaking in a minute, and they’re normally same nationality as the migrants themselves, and sometimes they’re not, or they’re the nationals of the country they live in. But what they basically do is they provide a service and in a legal form, this is what you would call an employment agency or a recruitment agency. But in the illegal form, it means that there’s a lot of extortion and violence involved, that the people they control are often physically controlled, and that they take a cut of the already very low wages. It’s illegal in all EU countries, but it still happens a lot, especially in southern Europe.

TINA:

Why is this practice happening? What allows this to happen?

GIULIA:

It has both historical roots and also more contemporary ones. So the historical ones are very, very deep and do they go back to the end of the 19th century and the end of large scale landholding, but the more immediate cut routes are the sort of globalized agricultural system, and the fact that because of globalization and because of the EU common market, there’s a lot of competition on prices and this has driven wages down very low. And the profit margins for farmers are incredibly small or inexistent in some cases So they seek out the gangmasters who are effectively offering a service. It’s an illegal service. It’s an awful service. But in a capitalistic agricultural system, it’s nonetheless a service – it’s intermediation between demand and supply of labor. And the problem is, of course, that that exists in the form that it exists in. In a functioning system, you would have agencies doing that and respecting all the standards, but you know, dysfunctional system. The outcome is the gangmasters system.

TINA:

You talked a little bit about the migrant workers immigration status. Is there a safety system for them at all?

GIULIA:

No there isn’t. So the problem with Italy generally speaking, is that over the last decade, there has been virtually no legal migration So all the migrants who have arrived have done so irregularly and have been largely become asylum seekers, many of them have never been able to obtain protection from the Italian state and therefore they become a undocumented. In the case of Spain, there is seasonal migration from Morocco, most notably, but this has not lessened the exploitation because the system is still controlled by the employers. Labor inspections are very scant. And the result is there is still widespread exploitation. So, in theory in the agreements that some governments like the government of Spain draws up with Morocco, for instance, there are provisions to you know, sort of enforce respecting workers rights but in practice this hasn’t been very useful. And so that’s the situation is the one that we’ve described.

TINA:

You talking about the fact that the price pressure in the supply chain is a major cause for this. So what needs to shift as far as you’re concerned?

GIULIA:

Why don’t need to be a number of shifts. The first one is awareness, of course amongst consumers. And that’s very, very low. I mean, here in the north of Europe, Belgium, there is a lot of an increasing demand, for instance, for organic produce. There’s an increasing demand for fair trade produce from outside Europe. But people are not aware of the fact that we even when they buy, you know, beautiful pesticide free, organic strawberry, it still has, in all likelihood, been picked by somebody whose labor rights are not respected. So that that’s the first step and there have been some small campaigns but it’s been rather marginal so far. They’ve been a bit more widespread in the UK, but unfortunately, with the UK leaving the EU, sort of the the pressure of British consumers is going to grow a lot less in the single market. The second thing which needs to change, I guess, is cracking down on sort of the monopolistic and power of large retailers and supermarkets. They act like cartels in a lot of cases and they’re the ones really driving the prices down. So they do practices which are sometimes outlawed and sometimes not in member states, one of them, which is sort of double auction, which is practiced by the German supermarkets in particular, I won’t name any food, but it is it is very widespread in which they ask producers do to give a price in a tender for their product. And then they do a second round where they set the bidding price at below the lowest price they’ve received. So of course, that inevitably leads to exploitation. So those things can be fixed. And there are initiatives at EU level as a new directive, which is an EU-wide type of legislation on unfair trading practices that will have to be rolled out in all EU member states in the next couple of years. And hopefully that will start to change things a bit. And then the third thing which should change is the EU’s, infamous in some cases, Common Agricultural Policy or the CAP, which is the largest chunk of EU money – it’s 40% of the budget. And so far, the subsidies have been given to farmers, the money that’s given to support European farmers with very limited conditions, and the only conditions that do exist that are being strengthened now with the attention to climate and to the environment are the environmental standards. But we are trying to make sure that there will also be conditions on labor standards. So if you want to receive EU funds, you need to prove that you’re paying your workers the right wage, and that you’re respecting their rights. So this is hopefully something that will be pushing an EU forward for the next year.

TINA:

Could you say more about the EU Fair Trade Directive and the process with that – where does that stand?

GIULIA:

The act that I mentioned is the Unfair Trading Practices Directive. It’s been approved at EU level it was approved in the autumn of last year. And it now has to be rolled out in member states. So states have some leeway in terms of how long they can take to transpose sort of the technical term, EU law into international law. And so we’ll start to see the results of that, probably in a couple of years or two, three years. And it basically outlaws the type of situation that I was describing. So where big buyers can basically put a lot of pressure on small producers. So it should get rid of the worst type of practice. But there are loopholes. And so we’ll be vital to see how the different states implement that law and whether they go for the harder sort of more stringent terms or the ones that allow for more loopholes.

TINA:

You mentioned that there are a lot of similarities, particularly with the Southern European conditions for migrant workers in agriculture to situations and circumstances you see in countries like Bangladesh and where there are widespread garment production. Yet that industry, the fashion industry and garment industry, has had a lot of consumer focus a lot of campaigns and initiatives around that. Whereas as you mentioned in there hasn’t been much when it comes to agriculture and the food that we eat as consumers. Why do you think that is and how can that be shifted?

GIULIA:

I think there’s a number of reasons for that. And there has been some attention. But as I said, it’s just on goods which are produced outside Europe. So the fair trade movement effectively was born out of scandals around conditions for cocoa pickers, for instance, or the people who were harvesting tea and coffee beans in developing countries. But that awareness hasn’t expanded to all the goods that are produced. I don’t know why the reasons for that would be I mean, there is a cultural reason, probably in different contexts. Another one is a very practical and I mean, if we start thinking about how ethical the stuff that we eat is, that’s very difficult to handle, right? If we are suddenly aware of the fact that most of the fruit and vegetables that we’re eating involves conditions which are akin to slavery. So probably it’s also a case of trying to dodge an issue, which might be problematic to deal with, but we’re seeing a bit of a shift in that but I think there needs to be a lot more awareness of the situation. And the other thing is probably, you know what I mentioned a bit earlier, which is the fact that in Europe, we pride ourselves on being the continent of human rights, a place where human rights are generally respected. And so we tend to think that that kind of condition is particular to the developing world, but doesn’t exist here. So again, it’s also about the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are.

TINA:

You mentioned that there are similarities across the EU. Yet there are also some differences with the southern countries to the north, what would be the the similarities and differences when it comes to workers and their conditions?

GIULIA:

So basically, we first started working on this topic two years ago, and we commissioned research from the European University Institute on a situation in Italy primarily but also with a comparative sort of eye on Greece and Spain. And then, the end of last year we commissioned further research, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. We did that because we really wanted to see the similarities and differences between the contexts in order to improve our advocacy here in Brussels, because the stereotype is amongst people who are aware of the exploitative conditions to say, well, it’s a Southern European problem, they only have gangmasters there, they only have those horrific conditions there. In Northern Europe, it’s fine. We have strong unions, workers rights are protected. And what we found out was that actually, that isn’t really the case. There aren’t the same conditions of every sort of horrific exploitation in terms of both the work and the living conditions and accommodation and so on that, that we’ve been referring to in southern Europe. But there is sort of this what one of our Dutch researchers calls legalized precarity, which means that basically you have these gray areas where people do have contracts, but they’re still being exploited. Employers will declare a number of hours on their payslips or actually get the workers to work much longer than that and only pay them for less or they’ll be offered accommodation is part of the package to go and work in those countries. And then accommodation will be substandard, it will be a shack somewhere or camper with no proper tidence or washing facilities. So there’s a lot of cutting corners and trying to drive prices down so as to increase profits. So in that sense, the similarities are quite striking. Also other factors driving those similarities. So the price compression primarily on the on the part of retailers and the way the EU subsidy system works for farmers. And then of course, the differences are the ones that I mentioned, you don’t get generally speaking, the very in your face exploitation that people you know, physically threatened, forced to work very long hours for very little pay, and no food and in general terms, you don’t have gangmasters. What you do have in in those three countries as recruitment agencies and in some cases tread a very fine line between the legal and the illegal. In the case of Sweden, most of the recruitment is done in Thailand. And the conditions are set by the recruitment agencies, not by the employers or the Swedish state. So of course, that allows for a lot of exploitation to occur.

TINA:

Your organization have been advocating for change for migrant workers towards the EU. Has this recent situation with the pandemic made any changes? And if so, what are they?

GIULIA:

The plight of migrant workers suddenly was front page news in a lot of international papers and international media, because countries like Germany, primarily, but also the UK, were reporting labor shortages because of the pandemic a nd because of travel bans, they couldn’t get the seasonal workers that normally would be going to those countries to pick strawberries, for instance, or asparagus in the case of Germany, in the spring. So that sort of sort of brought the issue to the attention of many people. What’s interesting is that even though in Italy and Spain, there were similar calls about labor shortages. That actually is a bit of fallacy because the work is already there. As I said, the problem is that most of them are undocumented. So what that means is that employers would rather import more seasonal workers from Eastern Europe than actually address the fact that they’ve been exploiting the undocumented for many, many years. And there has been a push from civil society and as you know, to regularize the workers, and this has had that success initially, so Italy has just approved an amnesty or regularization of agricultural and care workers. And this is the first step in the right direction to give papers and rights and hopefully, contracts and long term stability to work as you’ve been doing that, that worked for a very long time unrecognized. And in the north of Europe there’s been special arrangements put in place by a bilateral agreements for instance, between the UK and Romania, between Germany and Romania, to bring the workers in, regardless of the travel bans that are applicable to everybody else and the EU stepped in as well. So in their sort of broad EU travel ban, they have a series of exceptions, medical workers are one of them, and seasonal workers are another crucial one. So they’re allowing seasonal farm workers to come in. The problem is that despite all this sort of extra scrutiny that’s come with a pandemic, the conditions haven’t changed in the fields. And what, for instance, the unions have been reporting from Germany is that in some cases, it gotten even worse. So not only did we see scenes that are reported on a variety of media, of Romanian workers who are sort of herded like cattle into airports in Romania, and then crammed onto plains with no distancing at all, and so on. But then once they got to Germany, the fact that they are isolated because of the pandemic and that they have to quarantine means that unions have even less access to them to explain their rights and monitor the conditions. So it’s created additional vulnerabilities. And that’s the case also for Sweden, where the unions normally have a very strong role. So in a lot of cases, actually, it’s exacerbated existing trends. And in another way, it has also, as I said, exposed the hypocrisy of this model. And the fact that, you know, these workers are essential workers in the pandemic, we talk a lot about ensuring that people are mainly to eat throughout locked out, well, the only way they’re managing to eat is because of those workers. So they’re just as essential as the health workers, yet they go largely unrecognized. And I think there is an opportunity there to really push this message and say, you want to get treated if you get COVID, but you also want to carry on eating. And if you do the people guaranteeing the food on your table have to have labor rights.

TINA:

A group of NGOs and others including your organizations have recently put forward a joint call towards the EU. Can you please explain what this call is and what are your requests?

GIULIA:

So in April as the situation was sort of unfolding, we joined forces with the Confederation of European Farm Workers Unions, and a number of other organizations. Some work on migrants rights others work on a sustainable food production next-gen food and some environmental groups as well. And we really tried to set out through the statement that we made, but also through sort of the link advocacy that we’ve been conducting with EU policymakers to drive the message home about how essential these workers are in the context of a pandemic, and how their rights need to be protected in the short term and medium term throughout the pandemic. But also in the longer term, the structural factors that I was mentioning before really need to change so that this situation doesn’t carry on the way it has been so that it can be improved. So we sort of congratulated the EU on imposing loopholes and allowing seasonal workers to come in and we said if they do come in, there has to be a lot more done to protect their rights. And the first one is really ensuring that at the national, at the member state level, there are proper monitoring systems in place: labor inspections, inspections of worker accommodation and living spaces. And make sure that the informal settlements that have really been very, very widespread in Southern Europe are addressed for these workers primarily. But also from a public health perspective, if you have people living in these cramped unsanitary conditions, it’s going to be very difficult for them to access health care. And it’s also a very potentially breeding ground for the virus to spread. And then I mentioned some of the things I’ve been talking about. So reform of the contract or cultural policy so that there are conditions on the subsidies that farmers get to make sure that labor conditions are also respected. And not just the environmental standards that the EU is, quite rightly now very keen on. And then also ensuring that proper contracts are in place. And that means that for the undocumented that they have to regularize, that they can work legally, and for the document and that they have contracts that have all the right guarantees and safeguards included, including remedies. Workers have to have the right to go to unions, and they have to have the right to report you know, workers rights abuses, without fearing retaliation, and that applies to nationals and applies to migrants as well.

TINA:

In recent years, there’s been a lot of development with business in human rights laws. We’ve seen the UK and Australia introduce modern slavery laws. France has introduced the duty of vigilance law, and the Netherlands is introduced a child labor due diligence law. There’s also initiatives happening with an inquiry in Norway. There’s work in Finland, Canada, Hong Kong, and also at EU level. How important do you think these laws are at national and EU level? And what impact will they have on the migrant workers situation in Europe?

GIULIA:

Having businesses on board is absolutely crucial. In my previous remarks, there was a bit black and white and I was sort of predicating the big supermarkets as an evil giant, but actually businesses has been keen pushing for improvements in the system. So in some countries, for instance, they have spearheaded initiatives to clean up their own supply chains with their own sort of labor inspection systems, and in other countries, they have been pushing governments and now increasingly pushing EU policymakers to rule out legislation to make sure that there’s a level playing field so that all businesses have to ensure mandatory due diligence, checking out their entire supply chain down to the smallest supplier to make sure that there are no human rights abuses and conditions of labor exploitation. So right now in Brussels, there’s a big push and there’s a lot of momentum towards an EU directive or regulation, which is a form of binding EU legislation, which the Commission has promised will be presented in 2021, so next year. And that is a very big cause of optimism for a lot of people. Because what it would mean that of course, the most of the abuses that are discussed at the events you go to or any of the discussions that happen around this topic, refer to problems like we were mentioning before in the garment industry or and, for instance, the cocoa industry is a big one or timber is another big sector with massive abuses of both human rights and environmental standards. If there is an EU law on due diligence, that would apply not just to things which are traded into the EU, but also things that are traded within the EU or produced within the EU. So it would inevitably, if properly applied, lead to the supply chains being cleaned up within Europe as well. And I think the climate emergency has really brought us to the fore as well, because of the sort of groundbreaking way in which this is being seen by the European institutions. The environmental side is very much included in the human rights one. So environmental rights are seen as human rights and the standards will be set out for both. So you won’t be able to, you know, log pristine forests in Poland or West Africa, and the same time you won’t be able to employ child laborers or exploited workers in the south of Italy picking oranges, so it’s really very broad and very, very promising and it’s something else that we really have been trying to push.

TINA:

Do you have any idea of approximately how many undocumented migrant workers there are in the EU? And what solutions do you see best fit for their situation?

GIULIA:

Unfortunately, the last data collection on the EU undocumented population was 10 years ago. And since then, for a variety of reasons, most of them political, the policymakers have shied away from sort of that kind of estimate, unless, you know, they hail from the far right, and then they have all the interest in claiming that there are millions of undocumented living amongst us. The credible estimates that are generally used refer to populations of around 600,000 in Italy, and similar numbers in Spain. There are less than documented in other countries and they’re normally in other sectors as well, not just in agriculture, of course, but also very much in domestic care, construction and others sort of at risk factors. And the main response that we as being demanded now from civil society as a pandemic unfolds is to regularize their condition. And that means giving them the papers that they often had most cases they had and have lost because of a variety of restrictive laws, for instance, or of changes in their designation, or of the fact that in most cases, legal status is linked to employment. So if you lose your job, and in Southern Europe, because of the recession, economic crisis, a lot of people have lost their jobs, you lose your legal status. So that link needs to be broken. And it’s one of the things that, for instance, civil society has been demanding in Italy. They say the amnesty is all very well, but the fact that it ties migrant to a specific employer means that if that employer blackmails the migrant, they will still be exploited. And it also means that if they use their job, they will lose their papers. That’s one key link. And then other countries have in the last few weeks rolled out a series of measures. Portugal, for instance, has extended people whose permits were expiring. He has allowed more categories to sort of have temporary status throughout the crisis, has been rolling out measures, for instance for the young people who arrive in Spain as as minors as children, so as younger than 18, and then turn 18 and normally lose their papers. So they have granted them longer cover to stay in Spain as a documented migrant, and in many cases allow them to work as well. So there are a number of fixes that can be done. And amnesty regularization is the broadest and probably the most rights compliant, but there are a number of elements that can be taken into account. And then the final one, of course, is there have to be legal ways for people to come to Europe, and in many countries that is very difficult, if not impossible, or in other countries like Sweden, it’s generally seasonal work, which also is problematic because of a number of reasons.

TINA:

What will the picture be if these changes are not implemented for the group which we know is the most precarious group of migrant workers?

GIULIA:

Well the conditions of exploitation will continue as they have for a very, very long time, as I said, have been working on it for 15 years and, and unfortunately in southern Italy in southern Spain a situation is the same as it was 15 years ago. But because of the pandemic, they will get even worse and the health risks which these workers are exposed to are enormous because of the proximity in which they live because of the unsanitary conditions in which they live in, because of the work itself, which often cannot be done with distancing. And so there will be consequences both in social and rights terms, but also in health terms. And it will largely become unsustainable. I mean, what’s happened, for instance, in southern Europe, in Italy and Spain has been picks and harvests have not happened, because of the lockdowns, the workers were basically not not able to work. And the reason for that is because they couldn’t show a contract demonstrate that they were going to their workplace because they didn’t have any contract. And so again, that just shows that you know, without the proper legal guarantees that only you’re going to have violation of human rights. But in the long run, you’re not going to have enough food on your tables. So that’s kind of the, I think, the wake up call for Europe. I mean, it’s quite as it exposed the fact that without proper rights and without proper sort of legal safeguards, you know, we’re not just talking about idealistic human rights or abstract issues like human rights, we’re talking stuff, which is very concrete. I mean, if these workers rights are not guaranteed, in a number of months time, we won’t have any more strawberries on tables, we won’t have tomatoes, we won’t have potatoes, we won’t have grapes and wine in the autumn. So I think, hopefully, my hope is that this terrible crisis has shone light on that situation and will and will maybe change things for the better.

TINA:

Giulia Laganà, thank you so much for that, and all the best for your work.

GIULIA:

Thank you. Thank you very much for having me.