[LINK] "Advocates say EU loophole leaves Latin American workers in legal limbo"

[rfmcdonald]

Al Jazeera America's Maggy Donaldson reports on the precarity of Latin American agricultural workers in the European Union.

Along the banks of the Rhône river, just off of France’s “highway of the sun” that runs past legendary expanses of grape and lavender fields, a parade of battered vans pulls up to a gated campground obscured by pine trees. Dozens of Latin Americans pile out, back from another long day sorting fruit harvested from the many orchards that dot the southern region’s rolling landscape.

Marcia Fiel perches on a boulder near the camp entrance, rapidly texting friends in her native Ecuador and talking with coworkers to debrief after spending the day inside Métral Fruits, the distribution facility that employs her and another hundred Latin American migrants who also call this campground home. Behind her, cars head up the hill into the sleepy French village Chanas, about an hour south of Lyon.

Though they work in France, the Spanish company Terra Fecundis employs Fiel and her colleagues. The temporary contract agency delivers on-demand migrant labor, mostly from Latin America, to farmers throughout Spain and France. The nearby vans shuttle workers like Fiel into Chanas, home to approximately 2,300 people, six days a week to sort fruit for 10 to 12 hours a day. “Sometimes we only have a 15-minute break when we’ve worked all day,” Fiel said.

And coming home to the campground isn’t exactly relaxing: “There’s a lot of people living together in a small space, and that’s difficult,” Fiel said. She and her colleagues live, quite literally, in the middle of a forest. “The worst is that we don’t have water,” Fiel said as a group of several women walk up the hill to the hamlet, toting empty plastic jugs.