"Neither the Greek state nor the afentiko (boss) care about our lives or health. Only our cheap labour matters," says Ahmed*, an undocumented Bangladeshi migrant strawberry picker.
In Greece, the strawberry growing season, over for this year, has left a bad taste in the mouths of the over 8,000 undocumented Bangladeshi migrant men who are the bedrock of this sector.
In early March 2020, Greece was one of the first European countries to announce a stringent country-wide lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The lockdown, coming right in the middle of harvest season, hit the Greek commercial strawberry sector and its daily-wage pickers hard as the movement of harvested fruit ground to a total halt for 10 days. When production did resume again, it was on a smaller scale due to diminished local and international demand.
