STA, 10 April 2020 - The Agriculture Ministry has announced that the expected arrival of almost 200 Romanian seasonal workers to help at Slovenian hop farms has been cancelled due to coronavirus concerns. The ministry is looking for solutions involving domestic labour, but the hop growers are sceptical and worry the crop will be lost.
While the head of the Slovenian Hop Growers Association Janez Oset had announced on Thursday that several buses of seasonal workers from Romania would be brought in in agreement with authorities, the ministry said in the evening the plan was too risky.
The ministry said it was working hard on the issue and was in touch with temping agencies for students and the Unemployment Service to activate domestic labour.
However, Oset has told the STA Romanian workers are usually hired because Slovenian unemployed persons shun work at hop farms, as it involves long working hours and is poorly paid. He says that hop trellis construction work is urgently needed across 800 hectares of hop plantations, meaning roughly half of the total in Slovenia.
The representative of the growers, who suggested on Thursday that an improvised quarantine scheme would be organised at the farms to comply with the 14-day quarantine demand for individuals entering the country, said the costs involved in growing hops amounted to EUR 15,000 per a single hectare. He wonders who will be held responsible if the crop is lost.
The association, which had planned another major arrival of Romanian workers in about ten days, has sent another appeal to the relevant ministries to allow the Romanian workers in.
Agriculture Minister Aleksandra Pivec has however called on students, temporary redundant workers, unemployed workers and younger pensioners in Slovenia to come to the aid of what are 120 hop growers in Slovenia, who operate on 1,596 hectares of land.
"I call on everybody who is healthy, can work and likes to spend time outdoors or is located where the growers are currently most in need of labour - Slovenian farmers really need you now. You are also needed by those for whom quality health domestic food is a key source of survival. We need to join forces to preserve Slovenian food production," she told the press today.
The problem is not limited to hop growers, as foreign seasonal workers are also lacking in orchards and vegetable farms.
Echoing Oset's concern, Tatjana Zagorc, the head of the agriculture department at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GZS), said for Friday's edition of the newspaper Dnevnik that experience so far had shown not many Slovenian workers could stand the strain involved in fruit picking.
In response to the minister's call on workers in Slovenia to help with seasonal work on farms, Goran Lukić, the head of the Counselling Office for Workers, urged the minister to raise the minimum hourly wage for this type of work and provide legal security to seasonal workers.
Asserting that the minister should be ashamed, Lukić noted that the new coronavirus crisis mitigating legislation lifted time restrictions on temporary and odd forms of work in agriculture.
The minimum hourly wage for this type of work for 2019 was 4.95 euro, which means that it was below the statutory minimum wage, and the same is expected to apply this year, he said.
"Let me remind you that the amount of the lowest gross hourly rate is determined once a year by the minister in charge of agriculture," Lukić wrote in a public letter.
He accused the minister of having extracted temporary and odd jobs in agriculture from the framework of labour legislation and set rates below the minimum wage.
