Baraka Thomas Mbalakai, 53, is the farm’s namesake––his father established this farm more than four decades ago. At present, they hire day labourers to pick ripe berries every couple of weeks during the harvest season, which runs roughly from June to October or November in East Africa.

There can be a shortage of labor at times during harvest season, he explains, since the cherries all ripen around the same time. Laizer and the other dozen or so women and an adolescent boy at Baraka Farm work from dawn to dusk––nearly 12 hours––and are paid TSh7,500 (~$3USD) a day.

Their remarkably low wages make for a heady contrast to Tanzanian peabody coffee priced at $21.99 per 12 ounce (340 gram) packet in Brooklyn, New York, or a double cappuccino containing roughly 20 grams of coffee going for at least $6 at most third-wave coffee shops in North America.

A Heavy Colonial Heritage

Ujamaa, meaning ‘fraternity’ in Kiswahili––Tanzania’s national language––was the socialist ideology that founding president Julius Nyerere adopted for his country upon independence from the British colonial administration in 1961.

Scholars have described Ujamaa as ‘the most successful [post-colonial] attempt to dismantle the structure of indirect rule; while making strides in social development such as extending life expectancy, had certain catastrophic economic consequences such as declines in food production.

While the baseline of state control of agricultural industries (which accounts for more than a quarter of Tanzania’s GDP, employing the vast majority of the population) finds its roots in colonial control, state interventions continued melding the coffee industry’s  trajectory under the Ujamaa policy’s ‘cooperative economics.’

According to Yustina Samwel Komba, a historian who completed a PhD at Stellenbosch University on the socio-economic history of coffee production in Tanzania, the 1930s  colonial administration promoted cooperative societies under the claimed objective of protecting African coffee growers from exploitation by private middleman traders.

However, Komba indicates how cooperatives were wielded more as a tool of colonial governance rather than a mechanism for producer protection: enabling the state to discipline African producers, regulating production and quality, controlling marketing channels, and securing export revenues.

Rather than dismantling exploitative relations, the colonial cooperative system reconfigured them under bureaucratic state control. In the post-colonial period, these structures inherited and intensified: under Ujamaa, cooperative societies functioned even more explicitly as instruments of state monopoly over coffee production and sales.

Brad Weiss, an associate professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary, argues that “The black market in coffee, then, is most effective in taking advantage of the need for ready cash.”

“Those who have access to cash are able to purchase the prospective coffee harvests of their clients who cannot wait for the state’s payments. In this way, control of the annual procedures (and proceeds) of coffee cultivation is cut short in favour of the immediate requirement of money,” he writes.

Only those like Laizer and her colleagues, who effectively hold no buying power, would take on temporary yet critical roles of seasonal coffee cherry picking.

The Birthplace of Coffee

Although Mbalaki is Maasai––one of the most internationally renowned pastoral communities from the African continent–– he has shifted from livestock herding to coffee farming, growing arabica coffee across 2 acres. He has a small green bean processing and roasting facility at his home, is in the process of building a brick and mortar shop, and intends on passing his farm and shop down to his children and grandchildren.

This part of the world is the birthplace of coffee. Around 850CE, a young Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi noticed how his flock became extra sprightly after chewing on the crop. Somali merchants transported coffee east across the Gulf of Aden, where it became a cornerstone drink in Yemeni culture, before spreading throughout West Asia and beyond.

In the east, the bustling, coastal city of Dar es Salaam––Tanzania’s financial hub and largest city in East Africa by population with nearly 9 million people––is in its nascence of coffee drinking culture. Why is it that Tanzanians—the ones who grow the beans (which are mostly exported)––drink so little coffee themselves?

33-year-old Evance Malleo is committed to changing this. The winner of the national 2024 Kahawa Festival (meaning ‘coffee’ in Kiswahili), he is also the founder of Kahawa Studio Hub, an independent coffee shop in coastal Dar es Salaam. The son of coffee farmers from the Kilimanjaro area, he has labored in coffee fields since he could walk.

Yet his parents, like most East African farmers, do not drink coffee themselves, preferring chai. “Why is this the case,” says Malleo, “When Tanzania produces some of the best coffee in the world?”

Together with his wife, Hilda, they believe that by slowly introducing locals to the art of coffee to their community, they can not only bridge the extant cultural gap between foreigners and locals, but also inject orders of magnitude more income into the Tanzanian economy––upwards of 88%, according to Utengule Roasters, which has been roasting for two decades, and growing coffee since the early 20th century.

Wishful Thinking

According to the Tanzania Coffee Board (TCB), which oversees the regulation (e.g. compliance and quality control) of the nation’s coffee production, 70,000-80,000 tons of green beans are produced annually, with local consumption averaging a mere 3% of total production.

Primus Kimaryo, the director general of TCB, is an agricultural economist and has been involved with the board since 1999. Although Tanzania contributes less than 1% of the world’s coffee, the beans are of exceptional quality, mostly exported to Japan and Europe. “We want to increase production from 1.3-1.4 million bags (60kg each) to 5 million over the next 5 years,” he says on behalf of the TCB. They have embarked on their fourth year of arabica seedlings distribution to Tanzanian coffee farmers (400,000 smallholders on plots averaging 1-2 hectares comprise 95% of Tanzanian growers) to help achieve this mission, providing 20 million seedlings.

“Consumption is directly linked to income and livelihood,” he continues. If Tanzania’s standard of living can be boosted, the culture of coffee drinking may likely also grow, Kimaryo believes.

“But besides promoting mainstream coffee consumption, we are also working to expand into niche markets such as fairtrade, organic, rainforest friendly in alignment with Voluntary Sustainability Standards”, Kimaryo explains.

Kimaryo’s optimistic beliefs that simply increasing coffee consumption may be a marker of a more equitable Tanzanian economy, hides the unavoidable colonial shadows behind coffee making that trajectory anything but straightforward.

“Colonialism was as much about making the centre as it was about making the periphery,” Weiss quotes anthropologist John Comaroff, “Just as Haya (a Bantu ethnic group in northwestern Tanzania) farming communities use coffee to negotiate their local position in a global economy in ways that have been constrained, but never simply determined, by the forces of the global market, so, too has the presence of coffee.”

Weiss writes about how colonial and neo-colonial relations in Tanzania are inextricably intertwined. “Coffee is the original therapy for the micro-management of bourgeois personality,” he argues. “Coffee further permits these attitudes, motivations, and dispositions to be objectified in the capitalist reconstruction of time, as ‘coffee breaks’ become means of temporal reckoning that are routinized in labor practices.”

“Using coffee to mark and make time in this way thereby fulfils a capitalist fantasy, providing a respite from work undertaken for the sake of work itself––and thus the direct conversation of ‘leisure’ into ‘productivity’––made possible through the medium of a highly desired, commodified stimulant,” Weiss continues.

Deforestation, Climate Crisis, and Tariffs

The messiness of US tariffs has complicated business and logistics. Coffee from Brazil, constituting 30% of the global market, was being tariffed at 50% by the United States in July 2025, which ground US purchases of Brazilian coffee to a halt.

Other coffee buyers, notably China, seized this opportunity. “This forces the bags of coffee to move via different routes,” Kimaryo explains. “We’re going to see a lot of side selling, smuggling. Brazilian coffee might be rebranded as Peruvian coffee when it’s still from Brazil, just to navigate the new constraints.”

Meanwhile, erratic rainfall patterns and temperature from rapidly accelerating climate change impacts coffee shrubs particularly hard. As the most traded commodity on earth, and a major export cash crop for Tanzania, an understanding of how to cope with drought and warming trends will be critical to sustaining production.

Climate change has also heralded an onset of higher infestation rates of snails and borer pests.

And with growing demand for coffee, both locally and globally, the need for land increases. The result is that across the continent, human activities––such as coffee cultivation––are driving the decline of forests, which in turn catalyze damages to ecosystem services and subsequent economic and social benefits from the environment, particularly for low-income communities.

The post From Tanzanian Farms to Trendy Cafés: The Unequal Cost of Coffee – A Photo Story appeared first on Untold.

Vicente Campos Rubira is a 54-year-old palmerero, a centuries-old craft involving the cleaning, cultivation, and harvesting of dates. Campos Rubira lives in the rural outskirts of Elche, a small town on Spain’s Costa Blanca. It is home to Europe’s largest palm grove, founded between the 8th and 10th centuries CE during the Arab conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. 

Since 2000, the urban area of the palm grove has been recognised by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, in order to protect it and the traditional irrigation system it relies on from urban expansion and the consequent risk of disappearance. However, this recognition excluded the traditional occupations linked to the Palmeral, such as that of the palmerero. 

Today, this typical profession of Elche is threatened by the European safety regulations, which no longer allow palm trees to be climbed using traditional methods. In response, palmereros are now claiming a new UNESCO designation: to recognise Elche’s city as a World Heritage Site in order to preserve the Palmeral in its entirety, including its traditional crafts and techniques.

On a break from work, Campos Rubira welcomes us into his home, hidden among shrubs and palm trees—a dwelling that blends Gaudí-inspired modernism with eco-architecture. It seems to emerge from the very ground it stands on. The details give it a fairytale charm: a beige wall embedded with pebbles held together by mortar, rounded contours, a chimney reminiscent of a honey dripper, and a column crafted from a palm trunk. 

We step inside and gather around a well-worn wooden table in the kitchen. Holding a terracotta cup in his hands, Campos Rubira tells us his story: “When I started out, most palmereros believed the trade was destined to disappear. It was grueling work, and hardly any sons wanted to follow in their fathers’ footsteps. The tradition was breaking, and there was a widespread belief that a new generation wouldn’t emerge.”

Campos Rubira began the profession at the age of 20, after completing a workshop-school program in the Palmereria, the first course of its kind where he learned the fundamentals. For generations, the palmerero trade was passed down from father to son. For him, who lacked any ancestral ties to the profession, gaining acceptance was an uphill battle. “In their minds, if you didn’t come from a family of palmereros, you couldn’t become one,” he recalls. “For every person who supported you, ten more would rather see you fail. It was as if they wanted to watch you sink, just to see if you had the courage to rise again.”

Ultimately, he endured. Campos Rubira carried on the craft, and even became a prominent voice in the broader fight for its legal recognition. Today, he serves as secretary of the Asociación de Palmereros de Elche (Apelx), an organization founded in 2008 to bring together palm cultivators and advocates for protecting their traditional techniques.

A History of the Palm Grove

Luis Pablo Martínez Sanmartín is a historian, anthropologist, and Cultural Heritage Inspector for the Generalitat Valenciana. It was his commitment that allowed Elche’s first UNESCO recognition in 2000. Martínez Sanmartín recalls that the path to UNESCO status began with a simple question: How old is the Palmeral? Among competing theories, he was able to demonstrate that this sophisticated feat of hydraulic engineering dates back to the 8th–10th centuries CE. Drawing on aerial photography, archival images recovered from the Museo de Puçol—which documents rural life in Elche—and historical records, he concluded: “The palm grove is contemporaneous with the founding of the Medina of Elche.”

He highlights that the Acequia Mayor—the main irrigation canal—irrigates the Palmeral via numerous secondary channels, runs directly beneath the Muslim medina, even passing under the foundations of what was once the residence of the Muslim wali, the Alcázar de la Vila Murada.

The Arabs who arrived from North Africa, under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus, quickly figured out the limitations of the Vinalopó River—its average flow barely reached 0.3 cubic meters per second—and the salinity of its waters. This prompted them to rationalize the use of the available water resources, distributing them for both agricultural and domestic purposes, while also selecting plants and trees capable of thriving under saline conditions. Among these were date palms, pomegranates—one of the iconic symbols of Elche—and alfalfa. “A collective intelligence conceived how to make productive use of lands that, until then, had remained unirrigated,” remarks the historian.

The result was a fortified agricultural city structured around an advanced irrigation system known as the Palmeral of Elche. UNESCO acknowledgment covers only urban huertos (orchards). These consist of some 45,000 date palms spread over 144 hectares. Yet, including the rural palm groves, the number rises to nearly 200,000 palm trees. Although the largest palm grove in Europe has earned international accolades and recognition, threats to its survival are always lurking.

By the late 19th century, a railway line bisected the urban Palmeral. While this development paved the way for Elche’s rise as Europe’s leading footwear manufacturing hub, the urban expansion it triggered—particularly from the 1960s onward—put immense pressure on the palm grove. Homes, schools, and entire neighborhoods were built on land that once formed part of the huertos of the Palmeral. In response, the Law for the Protection of the Palmeral was passed in 1986, followed by the General Urban Plan of 1997, after earlier legal frameworks had proven insufficient. Still, urban sprawl continued unabated.

A Way of Life

The palmerero craft itself has also undergone remarkable changes over the past 30 to 40 years, recalls Antonio García Soto, a 53-year-old palmerero and member of Apelx: “We used to climb using esparto ropes, barefoot or wearing esparteñas—shoes made from plant fiber. A strip of cloth was all we had to protect our kidneys. Then came nylon ropes with thin steel cables inside.” 

García Soto inherited the craft from his ancestors and is now passing it on to his two sons, Alejandro (24) and Toni (20), who work by his side. “In the countryside, agriculture was always practiced hand in hand with the palm trees and all the customs that came with them. It’s always been more than work—it’s a way of life,” he notes.    

Such customs are what gave birth to the tradition of the palma blanca (white palm): each year, between late June and early July, palmereros select healthy trees and clean the base of their central shoot—the heart of the palm. They then wrap the top in an opaque sheath to block out sunlight and halt photosynthesis. Within 30 to 45 days, the leaves lose their chlorophyll and turn white. The palmereros harvest them between August and September, handing them over to artisans who transform them into intricate creations for sale or display during Palm Sunday celebrations.

Every participant in this process embodies an irreplaceable craft in the cultural fabric of Elche, and a living testament to the deep bond between these trades and the city’s palm grove.  

In the past, palmereros had no safety equipment to protect them from the serious risk of falling. Climbing and pruning tall palms was inherently dangerous. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that safety measures—borrowed from mountaineering—were introduced: harnesses, rope anchors, and climbing boots with hooks.

While these systems proved effective, European legislation added extremely stringent safety standards: Directives 2006/42 and 2009/104 of the European Parliament and Council, along with harmonised standards EN 280 and EN 280-2, constitute the legal-technical framework regulating high-altitude pruning. Under this regime, the use of aerial work platforms (AWPs) is mandatory. 

The problem is that AWPs do not always allow reaching the same heights that can be achieved through rope climbing. As a result, the palmereros no longer feel free to perform their work as they used to. This impacts not only the traditional technique of the palmereros, which should be preserved, but also the effectiveness of palm tree maintenance.

According to García Soto’s view, the legal framework is fundamentally incompatible with their practice: “Regulations designed for tree pruning have been applied wholesale to the work we do with palm trees. We’re caught in a legal vacuum,” he explains. “Our trade has a distinct identity here in Elche.”

Regulations vs. Tradition

The European directives—transposed into Spanish national law through Royal Decree 1644/2008 and other regulations, have effectively pushed the profession into a legal grey area. This is because the European directives implemented by the Spanish state include exceptions—that is, it would be possible to climb palm trees using traditional methods where mechanical means cannot be used. However, the law does not clearly define these exceptions. 

Moreover, the European directives directly clash with Law 6/2021, which seeks to protect and promote Elche’s palm grove, and explicitly recognizes the palmerero as an Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC, “Bien de Interés Cultural”). This law should, in theory, safeguard traditional techniques. Yet, a specific protection plan (Plan Especial de Protección) that would give the law concrete implementation has been languishing for years, with its approval repeatedly delayed by Elche’s municipal council.

“The city council itself is dismantling our craft,” denounces Campos Rubira sharply. “If the law declares us a BIC, and the administration is supposed to protect us as such, then it’s obvious they don’t understand what ‘protection’ actually means.”

Meanwhile, José Antonio Román Benticuaga, the Partido Popular (PP) city councillor for the environment, acknowledges the impasse: “We’re in a kind of no man’s land. I’m well aware of the palmereros’ demands, but this is national legislation—it’s not within the City’s jurisdiction. We’re trying to establish contact with the Ministry to find a way forward.”

As they await institutional change, the palmereros have begun taking matters into their own hands. They are now campaigning for Elche to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, hoping to include their traditional know-how among the cultural practices deemed worthy of preservation. “With such status, we could go to the European authorities and push for a revision of the legislation—so that platforms are no longer mandatory. Not to eliminate them entirely, but to leave room for alternatives,” Campos Rubira explains, laying out a pragmatic vision.

If successful, this would mark the fifth such recognition for the Valencian town, after those already granted for the Palmeral of Elche, the double Mystery Play of Elche, and the Museo Escolar Agrícola in Puçol.

Grassroots Resistance

Compounding these issues, in 2006, the red palm weevil epidemic—originating in Southeast Asia—struck Elche as well. Between the civic awareness that emerged in the wake of the UNESCO designation and the urgency brought by the invasive beetle, various grassroots organizations sprang up, including Volem Palmerar. 

Founded by Asunción “Susi” Gomez in 2008, the association fights for the tangible protection of the palm grove. “Many people see it,” says Gomez, 65, “but they don’t really understand it. They don’t grasp why it’s so important.” A retired biologist, Gomez recalls how, during the outbreak of the insect pest, the municipal authorities mishandled the situation: “They had thought that cutting down trees in large numbers would have been enough to stop the pest from spreading. They acted without any scientific advice whatsoever.”

Fortunately, that experience never reached a level that could destroy the palm grove—on the contrary, it remains vigorous and still holds its primacy. Today, Gomez advocates for the restoration of the Palmeral to its original role: a productive agricultural zone where all the traditional knowledge it embodies is actively protected. It’s a vision shared by the palmereros themselves, like Miguel Ángel Sánchez Martínez, 45. Specializing in date cultivation,  Sánchez founded Apelx and later the Association of Date Producers.

On his extensive estate, he cultivates the local Confitera variety in a plot separate from the Medjoul, interspersing them with orange, pomegranate, and almond trees. In the context of Israel’s ongoing tragic genocide of the Palestinian people, Sánchez shares: “I now have a client with over 100 stores across Spain who used to buy Medjoul dates from Israel. As part of a boycott, they now source their dates from us—and have become our largest customer.” Busy with countless tasks, when asked about the political commitment to the Palmeral, he reflects: “To me, it seems no one truly loves the palm trees the way they should. Palms are the icon of Elche.”

For Antonio García Soto, “Politicians use the palm grove and the palmereros for their election campaigns. They showcase the city’s values, the traditional trades with big banners. But a month later, nothing remains.” Still, the future climbs alongside him. Imagining what it’s like to be atop a palm tree like a palmerero, as the city awaits recognition of its UNESCO designation, his son Toni, shares his feelings: “I like working up high. It makes me feel calm—it gives me peace.”

The post A Fight for Survival: Elche’s Ancient Palm Tree Climbers Seek UNESCO Protection appeared first on Untold.

There are indeed certain components aimed at enhancing worker protections, such as the abolition of “Form 6,” a pre-signed resignation form in the old law, often abused by employers, in addition to formally recognizing contemporary working arrangements like remote work, and, notably, broadening the definition of a ‘worker’ to potentially encompass segments of the vast informal economy.

However, a closer examination suggests a more complex and arguably bleaker reality for the nation’s workforce. Far from empowering workers, Law 14/2025 represents a significant regression, functioning as a facade for deepening neoliberal restructuring, a sophisticated tool for enhanced state and private capital control over the labor force, and a profound betrayal of worker rights in the guise of reformist language. 

The new law fundamentally entrenches, rather than alleviates, the already skewed balance of power between capital and labor in Egypt. Critically, as highlighted by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, its passage occurred through an abrupt and rushed deliberation process, violating accepted legislative procedures and lacking actual dialogue or worker consultation. 

This lack of dialogue contributes to what Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly had previously admitted as a growing “crisis of trust“ between citizens and the government. EIPR aptly characterizes the legislation as a “lopsided law” that compounds the flaws of previous legislation, intensifying the government’s favoritism towards employers at the expense of workers.

An Illusion of Progress

Beneath the reformist rhetoric, the new labor law systematically dismantles existing, albeit imperfect, worker protections and introduces mechanisms that deepen economic hardship and job insecurity. Two areas illustrate this regressive trend: wages and contract stability.

The assault on wages is particularly concerning. Article 34 of the previous law mandated a minimum annual raise of 7% of the basic wage. In the new law, Article 12 reduces the annual raise to 3% of the social insurance subscription wage. This change has major consequences, as the insurance wage is often significantly lower than the actual basic wage, leading to a substantially smaller raise in real terms.

Moreover, the state-controlled National Wages Council, outlined in Article 101, a body dominated by government representatives heavily outnumbering worker representation, can exempt employers from paying even this minimal raise during vaguely defined “exceptional economic conditions,” as per Article 102, without clear criteria for such exemptions.

The law also entrenches job insecurity by failing to regulate fixed-term contracts. Articles 88 and 154 leave workers in a vulnerable position, as employers can use these contracts indefinitely, even for permanent job roles. There is little to no protection against the practice of not renewing contracts, which allows employers to dismiss workers without cause under the pretense of contract expiration. Only after five years of continuous service does a worker become entitled to a meager severance payment upon non-renewal. This aligns perfectly with exploitative neoliberal demands for labor “flexibility.”

The Director of the Women’s Program at the Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services, Dr. Amal Abdel Hamid, warns that this permits arbitrary dismissal without fair compensation. EIPR also highlights how ambiguities and contradictions in termination articles permit such dismissals.

Additionally, Article 167 mandates that employees submit a written resignation and await administrative approval. While this may seem like a standard procedural detail, it amplifies the power imbalance during already insecure job situations, limiting a worker’s ability to leave for better opportunities.

Consequently, the system effectively traps workers from both sides; they can be easily dismissed at the employer’s discretion, yet face obstacles when trying to exit on their own terms. The new labor law in effect allows employers to treat workers as expendable resources, with their job security overshadowed by the convenience and interests of private capital.

The head of the economic and social rights unit at EIPR, Wael Gamal, points out that this structure fails to protect wages against high inflation and excludes the majority of the workforce, who are not covered by social insurance and thus receive no guaranteed raise at all. Kamal Abbas, the CTUWS general coordinator, criticized the lack of meaningful dialogue during the law’s development, stating, “dialogue around the law was very limited, and even on the rare occasion of a dialogue, it did not include any worker representation. Instead, it was mostly with the representatives of multinational corporations.”

Dr. Amal Abdelhamid echoed her colleagues’ statements, adding that many of their organizations’ suggestions were either partially addressed or completely ignored and that their repeated requests for worker representation in parliamentary hearings went unanswered.

Given the challenges of an already flawed and outdated law, the new labor law fails to address the existing issues workers face and creates opportunities for further employment abuses and exploitation while suppressing wages. EIPR called on the Egyptian president not to ratify the new law, advocating for salary increases tied to the total wage and indexed to inflation.

Mechanisms of Control

Beyond direct attacks on wages and job security, Law 14/2025 consolidates state and employer control over the workforce. It utilizes ministerial discretion and dismantles collective bargaining rights, particularly the right to strike, diminishing resistance and undermining worker autonomy.

Perhaps the most blatant power grab concerns collective action. The right to strike, a historically fundamental tool for labor, is rendered almost impotent, drawing sharp criticism from labor rights groups like the Center for Trade Union & Workers Services (CTUWS). While nominally recognized, exercising this right requires navigating numerous procedural hurdles.

Article 232 mandates that strikes must be notified to the employer and authorities at least ten days in advance, while strikes are banned entirely in vaguely defined “vital establishments.” Yet another rule-by-decree, Article 234 stipulates that it is yet to be determined by the Prime Minister what qualifies as a vital establishment.

As EIPR argues, these provisions impose further restrictions, removing workers’ “last remaining tool of leverage.” The 2024 Global Labor Rights Index currently rates Egypt poorly in terms of access to decent work, alongside a low score of 3/10 for workers’ right to strike. These new restrictions are unlikely to improve that rating.

A striking element of the law is its reliance on future ministerial decrees to define the specifics of worker rights in several pressing areas. Rather than safeguarding labor protections through legislation passed by parliament, the law shifts significant authority to the Minister of Manpower and other state bodies. Key regulations outline important aspects related to new work models, such as remote and part-time employment, as detailed in Article 100, which covers definition, contract guidelines, and implementation. Additionally, Articles 118, 119, and 123 may permit employers to implement 12-hour work shifts by providing exceptions to standard working hours and rest periods.

This “rule by decree” approach legitimizes state control over labor rights, bypasses democratic accountability, creates uncertainty for workers whose rights remain undefined, and allows the executive branch of the government to tailor regulations to suit shifting economic priorities or employer demands, far from public scrutiny or worker input.

Continuity of Oppression

While Law 14/2025 mainly impacts workers of the private sector, its harshest effects are reserved for the most vulnerable, reinforcing existing structures of inequality and ensuring the continuity of oppression for marginalized segments of the Egyptian working class. The law achieves this through both explicit exclusion and deliberately inadequate inclusion.

The most glaring example is the outright exclusion of domestic workers, like those who perform household services, from the law’s scope (Article 1, Promulgation), continuing the practice of the previous 2003 law (Article 4). This vast workforce, predominantly women, estimated by media reports and Private Sector Workers Syndicate head, Shaaban Khalifa, to be around 800,000 strong, remains entirely outside the scope of legal protection regarding wages, hours, leave, or dismissal. Decades of promises for specific legislation governing domestic work have yielded nothing, leaving these workers subject to the whims of their employers without any guarantees of their labor rights under the law. This deliberate omission, condemned again by EIPR, perpetuates the invisibility and hyper-exploitation inherent in domestic labor.

Similarly, the law’s approach to the massive informal or “unorganized” workforce, estimated by the International Labour Organization to constitute around 67% of the labor force, is deeply flawed. While Article 75 supposedly aims to organize and protect these workers, the actual mechanisms are weak and reliant on ministerial discretion. The law states its provisions apply if irregular workers are employed by an employer, but the crucial rules defining their rights, registration, and access to support are deferred to future ministerial decisions. Even seemingly positive steps, like definitions for workplace bullying or recognizing platform workers, are rendered hollow by a general lack of enforcement mechanisms, a point underscored by EIPR’s observation that the government has utterly failed to enforce its own minimum wage decisions in the private sector, making such laws effectively meaningless for workers.

Beyond these excluded groups, the law’s primary targets are the majority within the formal sector. Workers trapped in uncertain employment contracts, those reliant on the minimal annual wage increase now subject to employer exemptions, and those in sectors deemed “vital” who have lost the effective right to strike—these constitute the bulk of Egypt’s formally recognized workforce. By design, the law systematically dismantles workers’ bargaining power, leaves them more exposed to employer coercion, and diminishes their ability to organize collectively when their rights under the law are violated. 

This serves the dual purpose of ensuring a compliant, low-cost labor force attractive to private capital investment while simultaneously reinforcing the state’s political control by suppressing potential sources of organized dissent. The arrest and detention of nine striking workers from the Turkish-Egyptian Ready-Made Garments Company in Qalyubiyya—accused of inciting an unlawful strike after demanding better pay—illustrates how security forces criminalize basic forms of labor rights and resistance to employer violations, and extend repression beyond the factory floor into workers’ homes. It is merely one episode among many comparable cases in recent times.

The state’s prioritization of cheap labor as a key selling point to foreign capital was made explicit when President Sisi recently met with and brazenly told US business leaders, “We have labor whose cost is incomparable to any other place.” 

The “reform” ultimately benefits employers seeking “flexibility,” and the state seeking stability through control and neoliberal despotism, all at the expense of the working class.

Beyond the Facade

Egypt’s Labor Law No. 14 of 2025 is a constructed facade. The systematic erosion of worker rights, the consolidation of state and employer control, and the deepening entrenchment of neoliberal discipline. This law attacks wages, institutionalizes job insecurity through unregulated contracts, eviscerates the right to strike for crucial segments of the workforce, empowers unaccountable ministerial decrees over legislative rights, and deliberately excludes or marginalizes the most vulnerable workers, including domestic and informal laborers, continuing patterns seen in the previous 2003 law.

The passage of this law sheds light on the fact that legislative reforms under the current regime are designed to manage and control workers more effectively in the service of capital accumulation and “state stability.” It represents an intensification of policies that prioritize investor confidence, fueled by the promise of uniquely cheap labor, over worker dignity and security. The severity of its flaws led EIPR to publicly call for the bill’s return to parliament for complete reconsideration.

Real progress for Egyptian workers, and everywhere in the world, will not come from such top-down, state-managed “reforms.” It requires a fundamental shift in the balance of power. This necessitates the strengthening of independent, democratic trade unions capable of challenging employers when their rights are violated; the legislative guarantee of a living wage based on socioeconomic realities indexed to inflation; the inclusion of all workers, including domestic and informal workers, under protective legislation; and the right to organize and strike. Until then, laws like 14/2025 will remain what they are, instruments of repression under the thin veil of reform.

As the Egyptian state touts the new law as a landmark reform, workers across the country know all too well that rights on paper mean little without the power to claim them. In a country where the phrase “البلد دي فيها قانون” (this country has laws) is often wielded by authorities to coerce, silence, and intimidate, it has long been understood—especially by the most marginalized—that the law often serves power, not justice.

Even if Law 14 had offered stronger protections, its implementation would still depend on a system designed to deny workers the tools to demand their rights. True justice for Egypt’s working class requires more than legislative reform; it demands dismantling the structures of coercion, exclusion, and repression that define the current labor regime. Until then, “reform” will remain a hollow slogan, and the law another instrument to keep workers in check rather than set them free.

The post Law Without Justice: The Neoliberal Trap of Egypt’s Labor Reform appeared first on Untold.

Since arriving in Grenoble several days earlier he had been alone — the friends he made on his journey from Istanbul seven weeks earlier had gone separate ways, and he was left alone again for the final leg of his journey, bored and anxious for his journey to end. This time he was taking public transport — the risk of arrest and deportation in southern France and Spain was low. The days of hiding indoors and sneaking across borders were behind him. He had no idea what to expect, but knew that he had to do whatever it takes to make this work — it had cost him everything to make it this far, and it had to work.

Back in Morocco he could never have imagined the scale of the greenhouses laid out before him. The bus lumbered past hundreds of plastic covered greenhouses, momentarily exposed by vehicle headlights and street lamps. The repeating patterns of white plastic held in place by taught metal wires and chains made him dizzy, so he turned his attention to his mobile phone — his one link to home. He wondered what his mother was doing at that moment, if his nephews and nieces were thinking about him. He hoped he could make them proud and send them money to help with spiralling living costs back home. His attention snapped back to the present as the bus stopped abruptly — San Isidro de Níjar. His stop. His future.

* Rachid’s name has been changed for his protection.

“All my assumptions were wrong”

Rachid is one of more than 100,000 migrants living in Almería, in southern Spain, working in the vast expanse of greenhouses known as the Sea of Plastic. The province contains over 33,000 hectares of tightly packed, low-lying greenhouses covered in decaying plastic sheeting to keep the harsh wind at bay and maintain a warm and humid environment year-round. These conditions have made Almería the vegetable garden of Europe. It has flung the 15,000 families who own the land here from poverty in the 1940s to one of the richest provinces in Spain. And its success relies on the continuous supply of desperate, readily exploited migrant workers.

Almería produces over 3.8 million tonnes of fruit and vegetables each year, with 80% of production destined for export — mainly Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Chances are, if you go down to any supermarket or greengrocer, especially in winter and spring, and look at the label on boxes of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and aubergines, much will come from Almería. But this convenient access to year-round, low-cost fruit and vegetables has a cost. Fragile wetland and desert ecosystems have been stripped and sterilised, covered with plastic. The ancient aquifer up to a kilometre below the ground has been overexploited, now tainted with salty seawater and agrochemicals. Over 33,000 tonnes of thin plastic sheeting is discarded every year — it litters the landscape, clogging temporary riverbeds and drifting into the nearby Cabo de Gata Natural Park like dystopian tumbleweed.

There are social costs, too. Only two thirds of the workforce here is legally registered and documented — the rest are employed illegally as they desperately wait for documents, exploited and underpaid, and frequently exposed to dangerous heat, chemicals and labour abuse, even physical and sexual assault. But the authorities turn a blind eye to their suffering — cheap labour is vital for the economic stability of the region.

Amongst the greenhouses, I sit with Rachid in his small breeze-block house in the chabola (an informal settlement of very basic dwellings made from breeze blocks and discarded greenhouse palettes and plastic sheeting) as we share iftar during Ramadan. “I thought that I would come here and find easy work, but all my assumptions were wrong” — he explains his difficulty in finding work since arriving in January, working only a few days in his first months before finding work a few days earlier in a greenhouse 8 kilometres away. As we chat, his housemate waves goodbye — “He’s off to break fast with his friends”, he smiles. I ask him about his impressions of the chabola when he first arrived — “I felt a kind of exhaustion and fatigue, and soon enough a lot of suffering awaited me here. But I felt very happy when I saw my friends — they offered me food, drink, and clothes, and I felt joy”. Although he faced an uncertain and challenging future here, a sense of community kept him hopeful. Hope was something that had been missing at home for a long time.

“Leaving wasn’t a choice”

Rachid is from the south of Morocco, a member of the Amazigh people indigenous to North Africa. He tells me how much he loves his country, but that institutionalised corruption and poor governance have left the people of Morocco struggling and with few alternatives. “I came to Spain because of the low income I was making, as well as the lack of responsibility and accountability of the government in Morocco, their indifference to management, and the absence of fairness and justice.” Rachid is an intelligent young man. At 24 years old he is under no illusions about how hard life will be in Almería, but is sure his life back in Morocco would have been much harder. “Before I came here, I was studying law in Morocco. I studied for two years at university, but I saw how even with a degree you have to bribe your way into a job at the end. I lost hope, so I left my degree and then went to work in a hotel. I loved that very much — showing people our beautiful country.”

Despite loving this role, he soon came across the problem so many people in Morocco struggle with. Around two thirds of employment in the country is informal, resulting in poor labour protections, low wages and exploitation. Youth unemployment has been steadily increasing over the past decade, reaching almost 40% in 2024. Young Moroccans seem to have little hope of sustainable economic opportunities. Over the last half century, Morocco has become a significant source of migrants to Europe, and stricter EU immigration policies have had little effect on the numbers of immigrants, with irregular migration increasing substantially. Countries like Italy and Spain, with relaxed approaches to regularisation of their undocumented migrant labour force, are seen as particularly attractive solutions for generations of Moroccans (and other African people) facing increasingly uncertain prospects at home.

The economic uncertainty in Morocco stems partly from primary industries that are easily susceptible to shocks, like tourism and agriculture. Morocco’s own greenhouse agriculture is experiencing a steady increase in area, but much of this growth appears to be through foreign land grabs, resulting in offshoring of income. In addition, there is a mismatch between education and labour demand, meaning that the few students in tertiary education, like Rachid, typically face high competition and limited employment prospects upon completion. Morocco also has challenging demographics, with 40% of the population under 30 years old, and high competition for employment as a result. The failure of the Arab Spring movement to drive change has also resulted in widespread political disillusionment.

The challenging situation in Morocco is also made worse by strong external influence. The EU-Morocco Association Agreement (2000) opened up trade between Morocco and the EU, but favoured large, foreign-owned agribusinesses, leaving small-scale farmers struggling to compete. Along with the EU-Morocco Fisheries Partnership Agreement, international trade favours the EU and systematically depletes sovereign resources like fish stocks, disproportionately affecting small businesses and artisanal fishers and farmers. Despite the Fisheries Partnership Agreement being ruled illegal by the EU’s own Court of Justice, the profitable agreement persists.

Furthermore, during the 1980s and ’90s Morocco was pressured into enacting Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) designed by international financial institutions to develop a technologically advanced but highly dependent economy, which resulted in cuts to public spending on essential services like education and healthcare. These external influences come straight out of the Food Imperialism Playbook. The inevitable result: an exodus of migrants, many to the vast greenhouses of Almería.

“As soon as we crossed the border, I lost everyone”

Most Moroccans arrive in Spain over land from Türkiye. Almost 100,000 people arrived in the EU this way in 2024, around a quarter of all irregular migration. Moroccan citizens do not need visas to enter Türkiye, so a direct flight puts them directly at the EU border. Whilst crossing the Mediterranean is feasible, few Moroccans travel this way: “The sea is very difficult, and choosing the Mediterranean route means choosing death itself”, Rachid tells me.

The land route from Istanbul is far from easy, with multiple border crossings patrolled by aggressive and violent border police intent on pushing migrants back. Deportations along this route typically involve forcing people back over the last border, meaning that migration is often just a matter of time and persistence.

During my time in Spain I have met many Moroccans who travelled by this route. The challenges they face are typically related to how much they can afford to pay organised traffickers. Those who can afford it are driven in private vehicles and smuggled into safe houses whilst they wait for opportune moments to cross borders. Those less fortunate walk thousands of miles through forest rails and mountains on foot, clinging under truck chassis for hours on end in the hopes of evading capture.

Rachid tells me of his experience crossing into Bulgaria:

“We crossed into Bulgaria at 6 am but maybe one kilometre in, the army found us with a lot of dogs searching for us. Everyone ran in different directions and I lost the group. I ran as fast as I could to escape and then finally collapsed and slept in the forest. At 5 am the next morning. I found a big road going towards Sofia. I walked along it for hours in the cold, without food, without drink, without anything. When I entered a supermarket, one person there told me he would call the police, so I ran”.

Eventually, Rachid found a service station with free wifi and reconnected with the trafficker who helped him cross as far as Croatia, but he was arrested and deported twice along the way. From there the journey became a little easier, with social organisations providing respite along the way, and police violence less of a risk.

“Many people cannot find work”

Despite having made it to Spain, Rachid’s journey is far from over. Whilst vital to the region’s economy, many undocumented migrants live in slums hewn from discarded pallets and plastic sheeting from the greenhouses. Around 120 of these chabolas lie hidden amongst the thousands of greenhouses — of various sizes and construction. Without access to running water or sanitation, they face problems with health and fires occur frequently.

Their undocumented status means that greenhouse owners get away with paying them well below the minimum wage — Rachid tells me he earns 40 Euro per 8-hour day, but pay is docked when heat prevents them from working. Already in March, the greenhouses are 20 degrees Celsius warmer than outside. In the summer they will reach 60 degrees Celsius. Many people are forced to work more days than they are paid. The threat of being fired stops them from complaining. Wage theft is common.

Despite these difficulties, there are far more people here than there are opportunities. “I had great difficulty finding work here in the greenhouses because of the overcrowding”, Rachid tells me. “I know many people who find it difficult to find work when they arrive here”. Moroccans join a host of other nationalities amongst the greenhouses of Almería, and the region’s reputation as an easy place to work without papers has meant a rapid leap in immigrants from West Africa — 46,843 people arrived in the Canary Islands by small boat in 2024, with many heading to Almería. A number of migrants from Senegal explained that many people sleep in stairwells, unable to find work or accommodation.

But for Rachid, two months of searching have paid off — he finally secured a job in a greenhouse 8 kilometres away from his shack. The work is incredibly hard, he explains, but he knows he is working for a better future for himself and his family, to whom he is now able to send money home: “Whenever I am working I just think about my family. I just want to get my papers and go and see my mother”.

There are social organisations here working to support the migrants. A suite of organisations, like the Red Cross and Cáritas, offer vital Spanish lessons in the chabolas and local community centres. They also help navigate challenging bureaucracy in the effort to get papers. A local trade union, SOC-SAT, supports cases of labour abuse and helps workers to organise and improve working conditions. But the demand for exploitable labour is constant.

The greenhouses here are still growing, in both size and intensity of production. As soon as workers get their paperwork and can leave, many move on from Almería to less exploitative opportunities and places. This creates a constant throughflow of desperate, readily-exploited people. Every few years, many of the hundreds of thousands of workers here move on, creating a vacuum that is immediately filled by other migrants. As long as Europe’s demand for year-round, low-cost fruit and vegetables continues without minimum wholesale prices, this exploitation will increase. As long as international trade pressure on countries like Morocco and Senegal continues, the supply of desperate people looking for hope will carry on.

“Despite everything… life is better than in Morocco”

Despite the difficult conditions, Rachid has no regrets: “Would I want to go back to Morocco right now? No, because here life is better than Morocco. Even though it’s my own country, I don’t like what it stands for. There are no jobs there, the government is corrupt”. Spain is beginning to feel like home.

Rachid’s experience is not unique — it is shared by tens of thousands of migrants who leave a lack of opportunities at home only to face new kinds of challenges in Europe. The dangers of the journey are not a temporary hardship, but a glimpse of the exploitation and insecurity that awaits them in places like Almería. However, for many people, this remains their only viable option. Europe continues to benefit from exploited labour to fill supermarket shelves with year-round fruit and vegetables, while the human cost is hidden behind sheets of plastic and institutional indifference. Without coordinated international action and accountability, the system will remain rigged in favour of profit — and the suffering of those like Rachid will remain out of sight, and out of mind.

*This story was originally published in The New Climate

The post Rachid’s Journey: How Our Food System Exploits ‘Illegal’ Migration appeared first on Untold.

As I make eye contact, I’m greeted with deep smiles and an “Hola! Que tal?” (Hello, how are you?). They continue to ferry their belongings out to the roadside – items scattered haphazardly in the dirt.

These men are amongst 50 people ordered to leave their homes in the asentamiento of Cortijo El Uno (informal settlements, called ‘chabolas’ in Spanish), including women and 9 children. This group is from Morocco – one man tells me he’s lived in his house for just over a year, and another has been here for four years. They work in the greenhouses around Almería in southern Spain, helping to produce millions of tonnes of produce each year, like tomatoes, courgettes, aubergines and peppers. 

The men I speak to, like tens of thousands of others in the region, are undocumented – working without legal papers, unprotected and exploited. They live here because they cannot find affordable accommodation in the region.

These people experience hardship and labour exploitation performing vital jobs that sustain Almería’s greenhouse export industry, part of a continued economic growth in multinational supermarkets profiteering from the world’s poorest. 

Precarious Work, Precarious Homes

This is private land, however, and space that could be turned into yet another productive greenhouse. The land owner began eviction proceedings back in 2011, with an eviction notice finally being granted by the local authorities in summer 2024. But the date for the eviction was only set days before, giving the inhabitants little practical forewarning. Having been left in limbo for over six months, there has been a desperate and apparently largely fruitless scramble for alternative accommodation. 

A number of local charities and organisations that support migrants in the region have condemned this process – five religious organisations published a statement expressing their outrage at the lack of alternative accommodation options for the inhabitants and young families who lived in Cortijo El Uno. One of these, the Jesuit Service for Migrants (SJM), was representing the group and actively supporting inhabitants on the eviction day as a formal observer.

A History of Erasure

This is not the first eviction of an informal settlement – in July 2024, the Cañaveral chabola, home to 20 migrants from West Africa, was demolished. In that case, however, SJM had worked for a year with the residents to arrange alternative housing in the town of San Isidro before the local town council bulldozers moved in. 

As the bulldozer moves in, a local activist tells me that the story of El Walili is in the forefront of everyone’s minds. This was the settlement of 500 people that was destroyed in January 2023, with inhabitants given no alternatives. 

The authorities had initially intended to rehouse them in the barracks at Los Grillos, but these have only recently been finished after two years of stalled construction, and a management firm to enact the planned 24-hour surveillance and curfew has yet to be found. Particularly disturbing were the fires that broke out as people were being evicted, sealing the fate of the settlement. 

These evictions are not the result of isolated land disputes – these are part of a plan by the authorities to rid the region of informal settlements. El Walili was undoubtedly targeted because of its location on a main tourist road to the Cabo de Gata Natural Park, but it signalled the start of an official policy to remove all settlements in the region. 

It has been estimated that there are more than 90 informal migrant settlements across Almeria’s Níjar province of varying sizes. The authorities plan to destroy these but have no practical alternatives in place for the thousands of inhabitants working in the intensive greenhouse industry responsible for the region’s economic success.

Meanwhile, a police officer at the eviction of Cortijo El Uno was asked by an activist why they were conducting the eviction, “we’re destroying this place for their own good, they can’t live in these conditions”, the officer responded. The activist replied, “But where will they go now? They have nowhere and the alternative is so much worse!”.

With only a few days’ notice, some inhabitants have temporarily stayed with friends. Around a dozen people were still in their homes when the police arrived shortly after 9am, and half a dozen men are still removing their belongings as the bulldozers begin razing the first dwellings. Despite the mild climate, it is winter here, and inland, temperatures drop well into single digits and the ground is wet. Many people will end up sleeping rough. 

This eviction comes at a time when work in the greenhouses is hardest to find – some inhabitants tell me that there is often little available work at this time of the year because crops are growing slowly and some farmers are pausing between campaigns. 

The Cost of Europe’s Year-Round Harvest

The situation for migrants in the province of Almería looks bleak. More than 100,000 greenhouse workers are needed in the region, with most of these filled by migrants. A little over a quarter of these are filled by undocumented migrants, many of whom share jobs, meaning that more than 25,000 people are being employed illegally. 

A Senegalese man who worked in greenhouses long enough to obtain residency in Spain tells me that there are far more people in the region than there are jobs, and many are without work. A group of Gambian men tell me how hard it is to find affordable accommodation in the region, themselves relying on temporary housing supported by a local charity. 

All of the migrants here have taken long and dangerous journeys in the hope of a better life and a means of supporting their families back home – whether on foot from Turkey or by small boat from West Africa. This latter route can take up to 10 days for the c. 2,500km journey and recent reports suggest a death rate of more than 1-in-5. 

These are gruelling, psychologically damaging journeys, but people take this risk because they have no hope at home – earlier this year, a woman from West Africa gave birth on a boat aiming for Tenerife.

The eviction of Cortijo El Uno is another step towards planned eradication of the unsightly ‘chabolas’ in the province of Almería. Without viable alternatives, their vulnerable inhabitants will be pushed further into the margins. 

Meanwhile, the greenhouse agriculture in the region continues to rely on them for more than 25% of its labour force. This paradox leaves people trapped in the in-between space risking their own lives to sustain a sector responsible for the dramatic economic success of the region and of Spain – almost 3 million Euro is made in the region from horticultural exports. These are the impacts of the cheap, year-round, perfect vegetable systems – we should know their real price.

The post Photo Story – Harvesting profit, displacing lives: The true cost of cheap vegetables appeared first on Untold.

The student uprising that ousted Bangladesh’s fascist prime minister cum dictator Sheikh Hassina on 5 August 2024 has continued to articulate its aims in terms of abolishing inequalities based on any and all forms of discrimination. While an interim government has been formed and includes representatives of, for example, the student movements, civil society organisations and some Indigenous communities from the Chittagong Hill Tracts, representation for Bangladesh’s tea garden workers, remains absent.

Watching Baganiya, we understand why. The film deals with the 150-year-old inequalities of tea garden workers (self-titled as baganiya) labouring in the Champarai tea estate in the Moulvibazar division of Sylhet, a north-eastern region of Bangladesh. 

Colonial oppression

The tea garden workers were brought here from other parts of India in the 1800s by British imperialists and local middlemen. Originally under the British East India Company, Champarai now belongs to the state owned National Tea Company Limited under the chairmanship of Sheikh Kabir Hossein, a relative of the now ousted but active Sheikh Hassina. 

Though Baganiya precedes today’s revolutionary Bangladesh, its scenes and the communities it represents bear the marks of abuse, neglect and continued colonialism which Bangladesh’s student body is currently, and most visibly, challenging. While the movement was triggered by protests against government job quotas, youth unemployment and middle class wealth disparity, the call for an end to a fascist state not only tackles the dictatorial rule of Sheikh Hassina and the Awami League, but also challenges the state apparatus in the way it has functioned since Bangladesh’s independence in 1971. 

The messages being chanted and painted across the country and diaspora remain clear: the freedom of some cannot be sustainably built on the oppression of another.

Baganiya offers a specific but important position to consider in this moment of social and political change. The colonial oppression of tea garden workers in the country necessarily must be part of the change the revolutionary part of Bangladesh’s population wishes to make. To do this, it is necessary to consider the ways the state relates to these communities and society at large. 

The making of a film

Documentary films about tea communities in Bangladesh are a popular focus for Dhaka-based filmmakers, artists, ethnographers and academics, with many being screened locally at middle class institutions and universities in the capital. Humaira Bilkis’ oeuvre joins this canon. 

I first watched Baganiya in 2019 at the Goethe Institute in Dhaka, a space nestled in the older upper class district of Dhanmondi and a popular space for cultural events visited by local middle class and foreign patrons. The film is remarkable in its use of sound, allowing for minimally edited soundscapes of the natural environment in which the tea trees thrive and the communities labour and live. 

Bilkis makes a point not to over explain, or to provide an overly probing narrative, but rather follows the people she has chosen to focus on, like Padmaluv Bunarjee and Sojoy Yadav, who both answer questions and at other times just allow the camera to join them through their days and thoughts. 

On the one hand, this offers a sense of the tea communities from within their homes, at work in the tea gardens, and over adda (chat, conversation) between duties. But given the asymmetrical power dynamics between the filmmakers—who are ethnically Bangali, of the Muslim majority, educated, middle or upper class, and based in the state capital—and the tea workers, the absence of the filmmakers in Baganiya left me with a sense of unease. Why did they come to the tea gardens? Why then? How did they negotiate their access? How did they nurture their relationships with their interlocutors?

Bilkis describes the way her relationships to her interlocutors developed: “I first came to the tea gardens to make a workshop film that was partly facilitated by an NGO around 2007. I had no intention of making a film.” She was just spending time in the community and slowly their relationship developed. 

“I started making the film much later, in 2015,” she recalls. “I initially wanted to make the film about a young orphan girl who was living in the village on her own, and who was supported by everyone, this was really remarkable for me. But I ended up going to India for a year and when I came back she had fallen in love and left the village.” After that, the subject of her film somehow shifted. “I have most contact with Sojoy, he is very active and politically astute, working in the tea garden labour union himself,” Bilkis explains. 

The focus on Sojoy is palpable in the film—he gives us the political context of the space the film is navigating.

Asymmetrical relationships

The unequal social positioning of Bilkis and the tea garden workers and how this affects their relationships are emblematic of the relations of patronage that develop between people of different classes in South Asia working and/or living together. “When the tea garden workers were on strike a few years ago, they were fighting for a 300 Taka minimum wage (EUR 2.30). Sojoy called me during that time and said ‘we need food’. So we put money together and sent them food so they could continue to live. They only reached a 170 Taka minimum wage (EUR 1.30).” 

For Chandon, a teenage boy avoiding school and whom the film follows mostly through his roaming in the tea gardens, Bilkis and her film crew were actively involved in his future building. “We paid for his college fees, but finally he didn’t go. He works now: we really wanted him to be able to finish school. This is really sad for me.” 

Bilkis is well aware of the asymmetrical relationships and how they are necessary both to support Sojoy, Chandon and the tea garden communities, as well as to provide her subject matter as a filmmaker. Like many in Bangladesh, as the student movement has also shown, she is aware that these relationships do not sustainably ensure the autonomy of those oppressed by state and structural violence. Especially given the historical, colonial nature of the oppression of tea garden communities in Bangladesh, more than social awareness, structural change through state policy is necessary to ensure sustainable change.

Having spent time in Sylhet through friends who have generational ownership of tea gardens or family members who are managing them, I have been part of the power structures that hold up the inequalities I lay out here. Many people escape Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka to Sylhet in order to enjoy time in nature and away from the city. Sylhet is teeming with eco lodges, bed and breakfasts, and large scale resorts catering to domestic tourists, who drive or hike through the tea gardens. What for some is a place of generational oppression becomes a leisurely escape from city life to another. 

“The community in Baganiya is far removed from the dominant tourist trails, though many come to visit the waterfalls close by,” Bilkis describes. People trying to capitalise on the touristic potential of the area come from outside the tea garden communities and are met with resistance. “Sojoy is one of the biggest fighters against building tourist infrastructure in their area. Once a man came from outside trying to convince him that they should build housing for tourists. I was standing on the side with my bags and the man pointed at me and said ‘Look, she has nowhere to stay, if there was housing she could stay there.’ Sojoy laughed and said ‘She’s staying at my place.’” 

A struggle for equality

Sylhet distinguishes itself economically and linguistically from the rest of the country. While the language spoken in the area, Sylheti, is considered by some to be a dialect of Bangla, the national language of Bangladesh, it has a different script and many locals and people in the diaspora argue for Sylheti to be recognised as its own language. The region is also known to be wealthy due to the high remittances sent to communities there from abroad, particularly the UK. Nestled within this region, the tea gardens form a microcosm of isolation not only nationally but regionally also. 

This isolation is central to Baganiya. In the first minutes of the film, Sojoy tells us that the British brought or coerced people from different parts of India to the tea gardens that are now in Bangladesh. These people came from vastly different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, so there was little possibility to unite against their shared oppressors. Bringing communities thousands of miles from their original homes, and further alienating them by denying them land rights or access to social development, left the tea garden communities isolated both from their land, their labour and each other. 

In the context of the revolutionary moment in Bangladesh today, Baganiya inadvertently presents an important question: how can Bangladesh develop equality intersectionally across socio-economic strata, genders, religions and ethnic communities? In retaliation for its downfall, the Awami League has instigated violence against Hindu and other religious minorities (though partly this violence is also ‘organic’). The student movement remarkably responded by protecting non-Muslim religious sites, homes and businesses. These are scenes until now unseen in South Asia at this scale. 

The Awami League’s actions show that religious-based violence remains a potential instrument to destabilise community and state. But the actions, art and organising potential of the students and their supporters tell a new story and project a different kind of future. A dismantling of existing power structures should necessarily entail a new beginning for tea garden workers also, no longer defined by their labour alone and state-sanctioned impoverishment, remembered through elite holidays in the tea gardens or film viewings in the city. This, however, is unlikely. 

Asked if the student movement is providing momentum for change for the tea garden communities, Bilkis responds with a bleak outlook. “Unfortunately, I don’t think there is going to be any change for tea garden workers now. The government has been saying for years now that the tea gardens aren’t economically viable.” While their labour has been their yoke for generations, the tea garden workers are also reliant on his labour for their income. Without it, and in the modus operandi of successive and current Bangladeshi governments, they may lose all leverage in their struggle for equality.

BAGANIYA is available for global streaming on Cinelogue– a collaboratively curated streaming platform dedicated to cinema by the Global Majority.

The post Baganiya: The struggle of Bangladesh’s forgotten tea workers – A film review appeared first on Untold.

Many people are now aware of the devastating impact of the recent storms that caused these fatal floods – storms that were made more intense and more likely by the climate crisis.

However, the world is less aware of the impacts this event has had on food production across south-east Spain. As thousands of farmers assess the scale of damage from golf ball-sized hail around the town of El Ejido in Almería, significant and widespread impacts on fruit and vegetables exports to countries like Germany, France and the UK are increasingly likely.

Painfully, as with the recent hurricanes in the United States, media attention will soon turn elsewhere as Spain attempts to move on. However, the impacts of this extreme weather event will continue and dissipate across Europe in the coming weeks and months as the toll on the agricultural sector ripples out.

The province of Almería lies on the south coast of Spain and contains the highest concentration of greenhouses in the world – some 15,000 farms spread over 33,000 hectares. These plastic-covered greenhouses allow farmers to grow crops all year round, producing over 3 million tonnes of fruit and vegetables for export to Germany, France, the UK and others. In 70 years, the province has gone from one of the poorest to one of the richest in Spain. The industry here now produces more than 3 million Euro in income a year. 

As the violent electrical storms passed over Almería, they reached a zenith around the town of El Ejido, where hail the size of golf balls smashed vehicle windows and damaged the greenhouses. 

Between 9pm and midnight on 28 October, emergency services in El Ejido logged more than 50 calls about the storm. 

In some areas, greenhouses collapsed under the weight of the intense precipitation. Most greenhouses appeared to have been pierced to some degree, and many were completely shredded and their crops destroyed. 

These greenhouses are mostly wood and metal structures of varying complexity, encircled with fine mesh, with roofs covered in multiple layers of thin opaque plastic sheeting. This roof plastic is typically replaced every 2 years, with around 33,500 tonnes of plastic waste generated every year in Almería alone. 

Although some of the affected greenhouses may have been at the end of this cycle, the unplanned repairs and replacements will stretch limited construction workers and supplies.

The scale of the destruction is evident from above – of the 13,000 hectares of greenhouses around the city of El Ejido in the centre of the so-called Sea of Plastic, around 4,500 hectares were affected by the hail, with one agricultural cooperative, Ejidomar, stating that virtually all of the greenhouses in that area had suffered “severe damage”. 

However, Ejidomar notes that damage assessment has proven difficult so far, since even those greenhouses not significantly damaged have been affected by flooding, which may take some time to impact the crops through fruit rot.

As farmers continue to quantify and report the infrastructural damage and crop losses, early indications suggest that both will be significant. According to the president of the Ejidomar cooperative, José Antonio Baños, “a direct loss of more than 20% of the pepper crops is expected”, the main crop produced in El Ejido in this campaign. This loss comes during a season where pests had already reduced harvests by an estimated 10%, and already much of the crop was predicted to be of second class quality. 

There has been debate around the likely scale of the crop losses, however: “the total damage is still hard to see…  But it is too early to take stock yet” says Jan van der Blom, from the tomato cooperative Coexphal. The cost of infrastructural damage is clear, though, with the damage already likely to be well into the millions of Euro according to the cooperative Asaja Almería.

These crop losses are not isolated to Almería, of course. The agricultural land around Valencia produces large quantities of persimmon and other fruit trees – here crops were damaged and infrastructure destroyed by flooding and strong winds. A few days after the deadly storms in Valencia, a red alert was issued for the province of Huelva, a major soft berry production region, where flooding has caused significant damage. 

Throughout the south and south east of Spain, the storms have also affected road infrastructure and subsequently hampered transport of harvested produce – one haulage company, Hapag-Lloyd, is continuing to experience problems transporting goods because of the aftermath of the storms.

The productivity and profitability of the greenhouses in the region would not be feasible without low-cost labour. In Almería, this is largely provided by a migrant workforce around 100,000 strong, many of whom are undocumented irregular migrants. 

According to a Spanish government-funded report, “the miracle of Spanish food exports would not exist without labour exploitation”. Many of these labourers work well below the minimum wage with no job security and are forced to live in slums, known as ‘chabolas’. These informal settlements have very limited access to clean water and typically no sanitation facilities, often constructed from discarded greenhouse materials. 

Extreme weather events can be particularly dangerous for people living in these settlements. In Huelva, south west Spain, where the majority of strawberry farms are found, the recent storms have made life for migrant workers even more uncomfortable and dangerous. Here, there have been reports that local social services have provided very limited support to these vital workers whose homes have been flooded. 

In addition to the storm damage itself, the loss of crops and hiatus in the growing and harvesting due to hail damage will have knock-on effects on migrant workers who may have no guarantee of pay despite their employers’ losses.

The impact of this extreme weather event on crop production in the El Ejido greenhouses are one more reason that supermarket shelves in Germany, France and especially the UK may soon begin to run empty for some fruits and vegetables. 

The UK imports the majority of its fruit and vegetables (83% and 45%, respectively), with Spain the single largest exporter at 1.6m tonnes (of 7.9m total). This dependency was highlighted early in 2023, when 22% yield losses in Almería associated with frosts resulted in several supermarkets, including Tesco and Aldi limiting customers to three items for tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers, amongst others. 

Although the UK Department for Environment, Farming & Rural Affairs blamed this on poor weather – in reality, British supermarkets had used aggressive tactics to avoid paying a premium for British produce in favour of a reliance on overseas supply chains. Post-Brexit bureaucracy was also blamed for the low supply, evidenced by stagnation in import volumes and a lack of similar supply issues in the EU. Ongoing yield uncertainty caused by climate change and political upheaval is likely to cause similar issues in the future.

Following a rapid assessment by experts at the World Weather Attribution, this extreme DANA event was made twice as likely and 12% more intense by our current levels of climate crisis. “No doubt about it, these explosive downpours were intensified by climate change,” says Dr Friederike Otto, from Imperial College London. 

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), anthropogenic climate change is causing more erratic and unpredictable weather events with extremes of water, in particular. Water extremes are, to some degree, a natural feature for Almería, which contains Europe’s only desert. But shortages of water (both in terms of accessibility and usability) have become an increasing problem for agriculture here in recent years – also exacerbated by the climate crisis. 

Climate scientists are in strong agreement that anthropogenic climate change will increasingly challenge our current modes of living – globalised food supply chains are likely to be heavily impacted in coming decades. Across Spain, rainfall is predicted to fall between 14 and 20% on average across the year by 2050, which will have significant impacts on food security in the region, let alone long-term sustainability of the agricultural export industry.

These storms have been the worst since the early 1980s, with devastating loss of life and impacts to urban and rural infrastructure alike. As farmers in Almería begin to recover from the hail damage and flooding, planning what they can salvage or grow from scratch, they face an uncertain future – constrained by climate crisis, increasing pests and diseases, and continually narrowing profit margins. 

Meanwhile, people caught in the grasp of these massive supply chains, like the migrant greenhouse workers in Almería, are often left to shoulder the burden. Further afield, it raises questions about the future of our globalised food supply chains and the role of the province of Almería in foreign food security under worsening climate crisis.

The post Greenhouses, waste and exploitation: Spain’s floods and the destructive cycle of industrial food production appeared first on Untold.

The announcement came three years after the military, under Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, seized power in a coup, nullified the results of the November 2020 elections, and detained Aung San Suu Kyi and other senior members of the then ruling National League for Democracy. With these measures, the military put an end to the country’s decade-long, so-called democratic transition.

But when the SAC proceeded to crack down on nation-wide anti-coup protests, killing and arresting thousands in the process, many activists and organisers fled urban areas to join armed opposition groups in the countryside. These groups include established organisations like the Karen National Liberation Army and the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front, as well as newly formed People’s Defence Forces (PDFs), which mostly young people set up autonomously across the country.

The anti-coup movement and migrant workers 

The anti-coup opposition movement—a loose but extensive network of protesters, activists, striking workers, deposed parliamentarians, armed groups, and sympathetic supporters—has come to be known as Myanmar’s Spring Revolution. Its most progressive impulses are far more politically ambitious than the neoliberal, and often reactionary, “democratic transition” that preceded the coup.

Amid this revolutionary upsurge, armed opposition groups have inflicted heavy losses on the Myanmar military. The SAC and its organizational infrastructure have lost effective control of well over half the country’s territory. Meanwhile, desertions and defections from the military have become commonplace. 

The SAC’s move to enforce conscription, which got underway in April, is widely seen as a response to these setbacks.

The announcement triggered a panicked exodus. Many young people joined armed opposition groups, rather than allow themselves to be conscripted into a military that they abhor. But most individuals seeking to evade conscription have gone abroad to join the ranks of foreign migrant workers, adding in this way to the already large number of nationals who have fled violence, persecution, and economic collapse in Myanmar since the coup. 

In one case, fear that the SAC would restrict passports to prevent people from escaping abroad caused a stampede at a passport office in Mandalay, killing two passport applicants and injuring a half dozen others.

Facing this mass movement of young people out of the country, the SAC suspended issuance of foreign work permits under its bilateral Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) system at the start of May for all men eligible to be conscripted. A week later, the military walked back its restrictions, a policy reversal that analysts attribute to the SAC’s financial reliance on migrants’ remittances and tax payments. 

Yet, the largest group of Myanmar migrant workers—an estimated 2.5 million—reside in neighbouring Thailand, and most entered that country without official employment visas and continue to live and work without legal documentation. In other words, undocumented border crossing remains a principal way for Myanmar nationals to evade the SAC’s attempts to control their politics, restrict their mobility, and tax their foreign incomes.

Consider taxation. The February 2024 announcement regarding conscription followed another initiative the SAC introduced the year prior, in September 2023, according to which Myanmar migrants working abroad under the MoU arrangement would be required to remit 25 percent of their earnings through a SAC-controlled financial mechanism at a fixed exchange rate well below the market rate. Soon afterwards, the SAC introduced a separate measure to tax the incomes of Myanmar nationals working abroad at a flat rate of two percent. 

The SAC’s increasingly dire financial situation is a clear motivation behind both initiatives. But also, migrant workers have been key funders of PDFs and other opposition groups. Limiting migrants’ financial capacities to support these groups is another plausible motivation behind the SAC’s attempts to control and drain the incomes of Myanmar nationals working abroad.

The autonomy of migration

The cross-border movement of migrants and refugees is commonly characterized as an effect of other phenomena—of war, for example, or of economic malaise. Indeed, the very categories of “migrant” and “refugee” reduce the multifaceted character of cross-border mobility to a set of mutually exclusive cause-and-effect dynamics. Rarely is the migrant/refugee understood as a political actor in her own right. 

Arguing against this mechanistic reading of mobility, migrant solidarity activists and critical researchers developed, beginning in the early 2000s, a conceptual approach known as the autonomy of migration. The aim was to centre, so as to better support, the political agency of marginalized border crossers.

The autonomy of migration approach became prominent among activists fighting right-wing violence and racist vitriol directed at refugees and undocumented migrants in Europe. For the most part, proponents focused on the tactics by which individuals from Africa and West Asia struggled to circumvent the European Union’s Schengen border controls. Bringing the autonomy of migration approach to bear on the Global South has been far less common, though Ranabir Samaddar and Sandro Mezzadra are important exceptions. 

But also, by focusing on tactics used to circumvent border controls, writing on the autonomy of migration has largely neglected the explicitly revolutionary commitments informing Italian operaismo and autonomia, which provided the autonomy of migration approach with its conceptual groundwork. Consider, for example, Mario Tronti’s seminal 1962 essay Lenin in England or Antonio Negri’s 1978 lectures at the École Normale Supérieure, published in English in 1991 as Marx Beyond Marx. Proletarian mobility, Negri argues in the book, is not just implicitly revolutionary—that is, subversive and transformative in its effects; the conditions of this mobility can also fuel an explicitly revolutionary subjectivity.

In Myanmar’s post-coup moment, migrants/refugees have demonstrated—in their acts of evasion, in their repudiation of military control, and in the unity of subversive mobility and political commitment that they embody—the autonomy of migration at its most revolutionary. As self-consciously political subjects, they give the lie to the notion of an apolitical “economic” migrant. 

Many of those now living and working in neighbouring countries, often without documentation, left Myanmar to escape conscription, or to evade arrest for their involvement in anti-coup protests or the post-coup general strike. Or they fled retaliatory military attacks on their hometowns after supporting anti-SAC forces. 

Even among those who went abroad in search of employment before the coup, anti-military sentiment is rife, as is support for the revolution. These are positions I regularly encounter among Myanmar migrants in Thailand (where I do research) and in Singapore (where I live). 

Myanmar migrants have also been a major source of financial support to PDFs and other opposition armed groups. And in cases, migrant workers have quit their jobs in neighbouring countries to take up arms in Myanmar—joining PDFs and other opposition groups fighting the SAC and its military apparatus.

In the Myanmar revolution, then, the “migrant” is a self-consciously political subject. And her recalcitrant mobility is subversive.

The post How Myanmar’s migrants embody revolutionary mobility appeared first on Untold.

From Tuesday onwards, he prepares, sets up equipment, records videos, edits and distributes them, monitors their reception, and responds to interactions. In between, he keeps up with global trends to innovate constantly and meet platform demands.

“I call myself a multi-artist to encompass more possibilities, but for 4 years, I’ve worked online as a digital influencer,” he says. Known in Belo Horizonte, capital of the country’s southeastern Minas Gerais state, as @alomarilu, Luan gives travel, beauty and fashion tips, as well as reflections on life, recipes, and the daily routines of his pets. In practice, he works on and for digital platforms, mainly Instagram, which he calls “my mini reality show”. 

Digital influencers like him are part of a broader context that researchers call the platformization of work. This global phenomenon impacts various sectors of the digital economy, introducing information and communication technologies into work relationships, thereby controlling and generating service delivery.

“This dynamic is observed in various sectors, such as delivery and ride-sharing services,” explains Nina Desgranges, a Brazilian social scientist and researcher at the Institute of Technology and Society (ITS). “Content creators who bring forth or hope to bring forth income through platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitch can be classified as platform workers and, more specifically, as cultural workers in the platform economy,” she adds.

All digital platform work has a similar contradictory nature, including influencers: on one hand, the promise of flexibility and autonomy; on the other, working conditions that deviate from formal employment relationships, transferring any risks to the workers. This nature raises important issues related to labor rights and the regulation of these platforms and the work they facilitate.

Despite the common perception that influencers are paid to do something easy, lucrative, and enjoyable, their work routine is often marked by uncertainty, irregular pay, fluctuating follower counts, and compromised mental health.

Flávia Pinho, another influencer based in Belo Horizonte explains that digital content creation “is a very complete and complex work.” 

Flávia got into the digital content creation business in 2015 to promote her makeup work: “I started with photos of clients, but as there was no demand I ended up putting on a lot of makeup. I realized that this type of content brought me more engagement and I started to explore this side.”  

For her, “the big challenge is to create a connection with the public in order to reach a place of influence and achieve tangible financial returns. This takes time and dedication.”

“It seems simple, but it involves many steps and, for the most part, we need to master many areas, photography, editing, script development, client prospecting, in addition to the charisma that has to appear without a shadow of a doubt,” she adds. 

Her success on digital platforms – with over 160,000 followers on her Instagram account @__flaviapinho –  allowed her to open her own beauty salon called Glow in 2020. “I am currently dedicating much more of my time and energy to Glow considering the challenges of a new company on the market, but my goal is to return with my content in a more professional way,” she says.

Brazil tops the list of countries with Instagram influencers, with over 10.5 million users, according to annual studies by Nielsen. On TikTok and YouTube, Brazil ranks second, behind only the United States.

Given the large number of influencers, working conditions need careful consideration: over 68% of digital influencers in Brazil work alone, without a team; 53% accept creating content in exchange for gifts or products; 52% worked one to twelve jobs without a contract in the past year; 71% secure one to two jobs per month; 70% have accepted a job for much less than they asked for. These figures come from the Creators & Business survey, a partnership between Brunch and YOUPIX companies.

“It’s work without pay, done in the expectation of making it. In this case, you work imagining that one day you will be an influencer who lives entirely from the income of influence. Until that moment arrives, you work for free for the platforms,” explains Issaaf Karhawi, professor at Universidade Paulista with a Ph.D. in Communication Sciences from the School of Communication and Arts at the University of São Paulo.

Given these dynamics, platformized work is created without ethical and regulatory precedents in one of the most content-producing and audience-influencing countries in the world. While some countries have initial experiences of regulation, Brazil is beginning to discuss its solutions.

The debate about solutions and platform work regulation often focuses on delivery drivers and app-based drivers, but according to experts influencers should also be included in this long conversation.

Luan sees positive impacts in regulation and the debate it foments. “We are discussing what the work is and what it will become, given AI, for example… I think it’s important to regulate because of market saturation and the need for future security, even considering retirement,” he says.

For Flavia, the debate about regulating platforms is very important but there needs to be a balance: “I imagine that regulation can help guarantee some benefits, bring a little more transparency, financial protection, but it is important that these rules do not stifle creative freedom or make things too bureaucratic. It would make life very difficult, especially for small creators.”

Recognizing content creation as a profession and regulating it can not only legitimize the work but also open doors to essential protections and rights, leading to the development of ethical codes applied to the category, all to prevent the silent precarization of influencers’ work.

For Issaaf Karhawi, demands should start with transparency. “There are many discussions about monetization, of course, but… the essential thing is transparency in the relationship with platforms because influencers report not fully understanding how they work,” she explains.

Platforms often do not disclose how algorithms work, affecting the visibility of influencers’ content without their knowledge. Moreover, they collect vast amounts of data on influencers and their followers but do not always clarify how this data is used or shared.

Nina Desgranges, a researcher at the Institute of Technology and Society in Rio de Janeiro, highlights another item on the content creators’ list of demands for regulation: “policies that protect influencers’ intellectual property and provide mechanisms to resolve contractual disputes.”

In Brazil, where union culture has deep roots, association should also be considered an important topic in strengthening the Creator Economy. “Collaboration between influencers, unions, civil society organizations, and legislators can be crucial for developing effective policies that protect digital workers’ rights and interests,” Desgranges emphasizes.

Brazilian laws need to evolve alongside digital transformation. The process of the Bill 2630/2020 started in 2020, when it was presented and debated by the Brazilian Congress.

The bill creates the Brazilian Internet Freedom, Responsibility, and Transparency Law and proposes regulating digital platforms like Google, Meta (Instagram and Facebook), X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok, in addition to instant messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram. The proposal has caused significant political instability and public lobbying movements among big tech.

The bill does not solely concern creators; it is broader and focuses mainly on controlling the spread of false information and hate speech online. The idea is to hold platforms accountable so that accounts or posts with criminal content can be more easily identified, removed, or flagged.

One key proposal is holding companies responsible for content published by third parties. Currently, there is no Brazilian law allowing their punishment in case of offensive or criminal content on their platforms.

Although not focused on creators, the bill promotes public debate and an environment filled with new ideas. Despite being processed under urgency, the bill has been stalled in the Brazilian Congress for a year.

For public debate to advance, legislators and society can use public consultation as a vital tool to understand the needs of content production professionals for and on platforms.

Collaboration between legislators and the creator community is key to effective and adaptable regulation, which, when done collectively and with concern, can promote a creative, healthy, and prosperous ecosystem.

“I believe it is possible for our lives to be transformed by this profession. But beyond the specialists, we, and especially Gen Z, need to be heard as well and commit to this debate”, opines Luan, while producing his “mini reality show” on Instagram.

The post Brazilian influencers: We are precarious workers too! appeared first on Untold.

Fast forward to 2019, and Fatma, now 21, was living with her family in a refugee camp in the Bulgarian capital. While assisting her father at the camp’s hairdressing salon, she also worked part-time for the data-labeling company where I was conducting fieldwork. Interestingly, she was recruited by the company at the refugee camp. Following initial training in “digital skills” and English, Fatma was ready to assume her role as a data worker. During our initial conversation, she was at the company’s office, seated alongside Diana, another Syrian asylum seeker who was engaged in labeling images of people based on race, age, and gender. In contrast, Fatma was immersed in a project that involved satellite images and semantic segmentation—a critical task for computer vision that involves the meticulous separation and labeling of every pixel in an image. This form of data work holds particular importance in generating training data for AI, especially for computer vision systems embedded in devices such as cameras, drones, or even weapons. Fatma explained that the task basically consisted of separating “the trees from the bushes and cars from people, roads, and buildings.” Following this segmentation, she would attach corresponding labels to identify each object.

Data Work Requires Skill

Explained in this manner, the work might seem trivial and straightforward. Such tasks fall under what is known as microwork, clickwork, or, as I refer to it, data work. This constitutes the labor involved in generating data to train and validate AI systems. According to the World Bank, there are between 154 million and 435 million data workers globally, with many of them situated in or displaced from the World Majority. They often work for outsourcing platforms or companies, primarily as freelancers, earning a few cents per piece or task without the labor protections, such as paid sick leave, commonly found in more traditional employment relationships. Data workers generate data through various means that range from scraping information from the internet to recording their voices or uploading selfies. Similar to Fatma, they frequently engage in labeling tasks. Additionally, data workers may contribute to algorithm supervision, such as rating the outputs of recommender systems on platforms like Netflix or Spotify and assessing their usefulness, appropriateness, and toxicity. In other instances, data workers might be tasked with plainly impersonating non-existing AI systems and be instructed to “think like a robot” while pretending to be a chatbot, for instance.

Despite its crucial role in the development and maintenance of AI technologies, data work is often belittled as micro or small, involving only a few clicks, and dismissed as low-skill or blue-collar. In fact, the platform Clickworker, a prominent provider of on-demand data work, claims on its website that “the tasks are generally simple and do not require a lot of time or skill to complete.” However, this assertion is inaccurate. During my fieldwork in Bulgaria, for instance, I attempted to segment and label satellite imagery, finding it extremely challenging. The work demands precision when drawing polygons around different objects in the pictures, which is also strenuous on the eyes and hands. Moreover, it requires contextual knowledge, including an understanding of what vegetation and vehicles look like in specific regions. Following the segmentation and labeling process by Fatma and her team, a rigorous quality check is conducted by a woman in the client’s company. Fatma’s manager in Bulgaria mentioned that the quality control person was “remarkably fast with the quality check and feedback” and added, “She’s able to do this quickly because she knows the images and the ground.” While taking note of this, I wondered how well the quality controller knows the ground. Does she come from the area where these images were taken? Is she, like Fatma, a refugee? Has her displacement been leveraged as expertise? 

I asked Fatma if the satellite images she was working on could be of Syria. She said she thought the architecture and vehicles looked familiar. Staring at the screen, she whispered, “I hope this isn’t for weapons.” Neither she nor I could be certain.

The Known and the Unknown

Fatma’s fear of the satellite images being used for AI weapons is not unfounded. The proliferation of autonomous drones and swarm technologies has experienced exponential growth in recent years, facilitated by the integration of AI in reconnaissance, target identification, and decision-making processes. Illustrating a poignant example, facial recognition technologies have been utilized to uphold the segregation and surveillance of the Palestinian people, while automated weapons have played a crucial role in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Companies like the Israeli SmartShooter boast about their lethal capabilities with the slogan “One Shot, One Hit.”

Surveillance drones, predictive analytics, and decision support systems are utilized for strategic planning in “threat anticipation” and real-time monitoring along border regions. For instance, the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) employs image biometrics for identity identification and voice biometrics for dialect analysis to ascertain asylum seekers’ country of origin and evaluate their eligibility for asylum. This system purportedly recognizes dialects of Arabic, Dari, Persian/Farsi, Pashto, and Kurdish. As revealed by BAMF in response to a query initiated by German MPs, data workers subcontracted through the platform Clickworker (the same platform that claims tasks are simple and low-skill) participated in producing the voice samples required to develop the system.

Fortunately, the data company in Bulgaria has a strong policy in place to reject requests related to warfare technologies. Fatma’s manager explained that “we have rejected projects related to (…) training artificial intelligence for different types of weapon applications. So, I felt that this really did not fit with our social mission, and when I responded to the client, I said that we’re working with conflict-affected people, and that’s why (…) But it was also a kind of boycott of such projects to be developed at all.” She added that the satellite imagery labeled by the team had been commissioned by a central European firm developing autonomous piloting systems for air transportation, not weapons. This information correlates with the client’s website. However, the website also states that their technology is additionally used for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), commonly known as drones, with applications including surveillance. 

Workers’ Ethical Concerns

Privacy infringements and the potential for discriminatory profiling are among the most obvious concerns related to AI systems applied to border surveillance and warfare. Despite these risks disproportionately affecting their own communities, sometimes with lethal consequences, most data workers are kept in the dark concerning the ultimate purpose of the data they contribute to producing. The outsourcing of data work to external organizations, often situated far away from the requesters’ geographical location, complicates workers’ efforts to navigate the intricate supply chains that support the AI industry. Instructions given to data workers seldom provide details about the requester or the intended use of the data. Consequently, most data workers do not know the name and nature of the companies seeking their services, the products that will be trained on the datasets they generate, or the potential impacts of these technologies on individuals and communities. AI companies frequently rationalize the veil of secrecy as a means of safeguarding their competitive edge.

The fact that data workers are integrated into industrial structures designed to keep them uninformed and subject to surveillance, retaliation, and wage theft does not mean that they do not have ethical concerns about their work and the AI applications it supports. In fact, there have been instances where data workers have explicitly alerted consumers to privacy-related and other ethical issues associated with the data they generate. For example, in 2022, Venezuelan data workers reported anonymously that Roomba robot vacuum cleaners capture pictures of users at home, which are then viewed by human workers.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, I piloted a workshop series with fifteen data workers, this time located in Syria. The three-day event was designed to understand work practices and relationships in geographically distributed data-production contexts, creating a space for workers to discuss concerns. The workshop activities revealed that receiving information and having spaces to voice and discuss the ethical implications of the data they handle were of the utmost importance to the workers. They worried about the protection of data subjects’ privacy and advocated for a mandatory clause that would compel requesters to disclose the intended uses of the data. Additionally, the workers expressed concerns about the mental health implications of working with violent, offensive, or triggering data.

Data workers possess a unique vantage point that can play a crucial role in the early identification of ethical issues related to data and AI. Encouraging consumers and society at large to align with them in advocating for increased transparency in the AI data production pipeline is essential. Workers like Fatma and her colleagues could offer valuable insights into the utilization of satellite images for surveillance technologies, for instance. Similarly, the native speakers who contributed their voices to generate audio snippets for dialect recognition may shed light on the applications of such systems against asylum seekers in Germany. 

Unfortunately, the challenge lies in the fact that the AI industry, for evident reasons, has structured its production processes for data workers to function more as silent tools than as whistleblowers.

The post “I hope this isn’t for weapons.” How Syrian data workers train AI appeared first on Untold.