Indonesians wait for UK farm jobs after paying deposits of up to £2,500
Indonesians dreaming of working in Britain are understood to have paid deposits of up to £2,500 to a Jakarta agency to “guarantee” jobs on UK farms that have not yet materialised.
Labour experts say a deposit is considered a work-finding fee, which is illegal in the UK and Indonesia.
One worker told the Guardian he made a £1,000 down payment in July to a Jakarta agency to guarantee an agricultural job with a British recruiter, but he had not even had a job interview.
He said he was one of several people left unemployed and out of pocket on the hope of a farm job in the UK.
“We stopped working to be able to seriously follow the recruitment process for a new and better job. Now we are unemployed and our fate is increasingly unclear,” he said.
Official Indonesian government documents from late August suggest about 170 workers were stranded in Indonesia having been assigned jobs on 19 farms across the UK.
Most have been unemployed for several months, waiting for jobs they believed were imminent, and almost all have been given visas to come to the UK.
It is understood there are plans to bring some of these workers to Britain, despite it being so far into the harvest season.
It follows revelations in the Guardian that Indonesian labourers harvesting berries on a farm that supplies Marks & Spencer, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s and Tesco had reported facing thousands of pounds in charges from unlicensed brokers in Bali to work for a single season in the UK. Brexit and the war in Ukraine have pushed desperate recruiters and farms to search for labour thousands of miles away.
A presidential taskforce in Indonesia is investigating the circumstances of the recruitment of fruit pickers after experts said the high fees alleged could leave workers at
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