Curicó, Maule region, Chile: Cherry harvest season 2024-2025
We hereby publish an unofficial translation of an article by Prensa Chiripilko.
Cherry harvest season 2024-2025 in the province of Curicó. Combat and Resist the abuses for our lives!
In the face of job insecurity and employer abuse: Seasonal workers, struggle! Combat and Resist!
A video recorded by workers showing a van transporting 12 seasonal workers, many of them in the pick-up truck without any safety measures, has caused a stir on national level, revealing one of the many precarious situations that seasonal agricultural workers experience every day.
We are in the middle of the cherry harvest season, with the Maule region being one of the main fruit producers. Harvesting tasks require a massive seasonal workforce, which forces thousands of men and women to give their sweat and often their blood to improve their economic situation at the cost of sacrificing many of their rights and their own lives.
The seasonal workers in the video were traveling along the “El Peral” slope, in the municipality of Teno, in the province of Curicó, where they were exposed to serious injuries or death. Another case occurred days later, where an accident occurred on the J-60 route, leaving at least 4 seasonal workers injured and with multiple fractures when a van (minibus) carrying agricultural workers overturned near Palquibudi, in the municipality of Rauco, also in the province of Curicó.
These accidents show, first of all, the lack of supervision and regulation of compliance with the minimum safety measures in private transport of seasonal workers, which according to Supreme Decree No. 20 of the Regulation of seasonal agricultural work requires that agricultural workers can only travel in buses and minibuses, properly seated, with their doors closed and clean.
The responsibility for complying with these measures lies with the contractors and vehicle owners, and the entities that should supervise are the Labor Department, tax inspectors, municipal inspectors and police.
Clearly, neither the obligations of the contractors nor the inspectors comply with the minimum required by law, especially the latter where serious oversight by the authorities of the old State has rarely or even never been seen, especially during harvest seasons. Let us remember the tragedy in Peumo where 9 seasonal workers died in 2021 on the “fruit route” when their minibus collided with a truck and whose driver did not even have a driver’s license. There are also hundreds of work accidents in packing plants and fields such as mutilations, electrocutions or falling from ladders that occur every year.
It is not only in the transportation sector that there are serious violations and abuses by the latifundium and contractors towards the seasonal workers. This cherry season is registering lower wages compared to previous years, paying on average 230 pesos per kilo of harvested cherries (0.24 USD per kilo according to the value of the US currency at the time).
The vast majority of workers, both migrant and native, are faced with decadent manifestations of semi-feudalism, such as punishment and harassment by employers and contractors. In cases where agricultural workers refuse to work on holidays or Sundays for the same amount of money as on working days, bosses leave them without work for days and apply abusive measures and humiliation against seasonal workers. (Note: By law, holidays and Sundays should be paid 50% more than normal days, it is always voluntary and subject to prior agreements between employer and workers.)
In light of this, the work of real democrats and revolutionaries is being debated. There are those who call for “businessmen” and contractors to take an ethical and responsible view of the lives of seasonal workers. Our opinion is that while it is just and necessary to demand compliance with the minimum requirements of the law, expecting the ruling classes in agriculture, represented by employers and contractors, to give up, due to ethics, their ability to reduce expenses to maximize their profits (even if it violates the law) is an illusion.
We live in a class-divided society and this is class struggle! If they could, the rich would enslave us if necessary to serve their petty interests!
For this reason, we believe that we must promote the organization, mobilization and struggle of seasonal workers to defend and achieve fundamental rights, especially to safeguard their own lives.
We achieve this by widely denouncing these acts, which are despicable acts promoted by the big landlords, protected by the State itself, and which only benefit an economy at the service of imperialism. Let us remember that Chile is the main exporter of cherries worldwide (with fruit exports being the second main activity of the national GDP), almost 80% of which is sent to a single country: social-imperialist China.
But we must do more. We must be among the seasonal workers, live, work and struggle with them and promote multiple actions that gradually generate movement among the peasant masses: that all abuses be claimed and reported to the Labor Inspectorate, that massive strikes be carried out for vans and better wages, that oral and written propaganda be multiplied in fields, streets and towns where the seasonal workers live, calling for unity, action and struggle for rights. Little by little, we must lose the fear of rising up against the bosses, contractors and all abusive big landlords.
Every conquest we make today, tomorrow the boss will try to snatch from us. That is why it is necessary to understand that this old democracy, with its rotten State and institutions at the service of the big bourgeoisie, the landowners and imperialism, is condemned to die. In its place we must build a New Democracy at the service of the working and peasant masses mainly. The poorest are the majority and the big magnates are the minority. The times stir up voracious winds of change and rebellion.
In the face of abuse and low wages:
COMBAT AND RESIST!
SEASONAL WORKERS TO THE STRUGGLE!
DOWN WITH OLD DEMOCRACY AT THE SERVICE OF BIG LANDLORDS AND THE BIG BOURGEOISIE!
LONG LIVE THE NEW DEMOCRACY!
Committee of Seasonal Workers in Struggle – Province of Curicó
