Some workers still crossing borders
Seasonal hands, led by Romanians, toil at Italian harvests
ROCCA DE’ GIORGI, Italy — Her hands were hardly visible, so quickly did they press the clippers before dropping grapes into plastic bins. Some distance behind her, in the next row over, Italian students subbing in due to a pandemicfueled worker shortage tried vainly to catch up.
Though from a Romanian region famed for its wine, Alexandra Ichim had never worked in vineyards before traveling to Italy’s Lombardy region for the September grape harvest, known in Italian as the vendemmia — the pay is too low in Romania and the working conditions too harsh, she says. For the Italian work, the 20-yearold came on a 12-hour bus ride and returned by plane to her native Arad region when the harvest was done.
Eastern European seasonal workers, led by Romanians, are considered essential to getting food on the table throughout the continent. Their willingness to work hard in uncertain jobs for lower wages is sought after abroad, and their income is desperately needed at home. At a time when travel for work is seen as dangerous for everyone, they are among the world’s last regular border-crossers.
Unlike the farms that so desperately need them, there are no subsidies from the European Union or special protection should they fall sick.
Around one in five Romanians works abroad. In Italy, 1.2 million of them have made a home, with thousands of others traveling back and forth for temporary jobs. France and Spain are not far behind as destinations for work. And when coronavirus struck,
around a million people from across Europe returned to Romania, ignoring the Romanian president’s plea to stay in place and avoid bringing the virus already raging in Western Europe. For many, it was the longest homecoming of their adult lives.
Workers can make around 1,200 euros a month working eight-hour days during the vendemmia in Italy, versus around 700 euros for a month of 10hour days in Romania.
Ichim has lived off and on in Lombardy with her mother since 2006. She was in Romania with her father when the coronavirus outbreak first struck Italy earlier this year, which later sent her home during Romania’s virus lockdown. She left to join her mother nearly as soon as the borders reopened. At the time, Romania’s infection rate was low and no quarantine was re
quired, but within a few weeks, a 14-day quarantine was required in Italy for travelers from Romania and Bulgaria.
One province, Trento, allowed farms and vineyards to put in place “working quarantines,” where masked seasonal laborers could work outside in their own clusters and stay in housing on site.
“A company cannot afford to keep a foreigner for 14 days without putting him to work. This is obviously an unsustainable cost,” said Roberto Caponi, of the Italian agriculture confederation. Nor can the fruit itself wait, as Ottavia Giorgi di Vistarino knows well.
Her family’s land spans four hillsides in Rocca de’ Giorgi, about 37 miles south of Milan. The harvest starts with Pino Nero f or Spumante, then comes the Chardonnay and Pinot Grigio, followed by more Pino
Nero for red wine.
Ichim joined a crew for the first Pino Nero harvest in mid-September. The winery’s full-time foreman, Christian Florisan, also is Romanian from the Arad region, as are many of the men who work the presses.
“Corona has brought the agriculture business to its knees more than any others. Everywhere, at home in Romania and here in Italy, we are having difficulties f i nding people,” said Florisan, who has lived in Italy for 14 years. “They are not coming because they are afraid of COVID, and they are afraid that they will have to do two weeks of quarantine and when they go home, their pockets will be emptier than they were before.”
He estimated more than half his workers are Romanian, but the numbers are down by 25% this year. Across the country, winer
ies are down 36,000 workers, which means not all the fruit will be harvested in time and many will stay home, unpaid.
All who came from Romania had medical checkups, Florisan said, but he said not everyone had the nasal swab test.
As many as a million seasonal workers cross EU borders every year, according to the guidelines put in place in July by the European Commission. When the virus first broke out, Romania’s president asked citizens not to return from their jobs abroad but was widely ignored by people who either needed or wanted to return home for what promised to be weeks of confinement. Back in Romania, suspicious neighbors called authorities to report returnees from Italy or Spain or France.
Romania’s first coronavirus case was traced to
Lombardy, the northern Italian region that suffered Europe’s first devastating wave of death, according to Gabriel Hancean, a sociologist who led a team of researchers that traced the country’s early infections. Now it’s Eastern Europe where the virus is spiking to unprecedented highs, with Romania enduring the continent’s highest weekly death rate after Spain.
Ichim and her boyfriend, Dennis Sirca, were already planning the trip back to Arad, not knowing if they would face quarantine there. It didn’t really matter to either of them, because they made two to three times as much during the harvest as they could have in their “real” jobs. She’d do it again.
“In Romania we do not make money, we cannot make money working so we came here to do the grape harvest,” she said.