The director and two employees of a French employment agency who recruits grape pickers for winemakers in the Champagne region are convicted of human trafficking. The correctional court of the northeastern city of Châlons-en-Champagne has determined this on Monday, reporting French media.
Svetlana G., the director of employment agency Anavim, was sentenced to four years in prison, of which two years are conditional, for facilitating ‘black paid work’ and the employment of foreigners without permission. Anavim also paid too little or nothing for the services provided. The two employees of the company were sentenced to one year in prison because they recruited the grape pickers.
Picking grapes on a picturesque vineyard in the Champagne region, in the midst of UNESCO World Heritage, sounds idyllic. But for about 57 men and women, especially from West Africa and often undocumented, it was a miserable harvest in 2023.
After hours of grape picks by hand in the September sun and barely a break, employees had to spend the night in a unfinished building With a muddy surface. There was no question of privacy in the departure without windows and doors: the beds with rusty frames and smelly mattresses were drawn up a few centimeters of each other. Visiting a toilet or the sweat from your washing with clean water was impossible according to the employees. They should live on moldy bread and rotting rice, victim canouitié djakariayou told the French newspaper La Croix: “I never thought that the people who make champagne would put us in a place that even animals would not accept.”
After complaints about noise pollution from residents from the village of Nesle-le-Repons, the police found the employees in the derelict house. “Tatty and disgusting,” the Labor Inspectorate called the living conditions afterwards.
Spray
Every year, 120,000 seasonal workers work on 34,000 hectares for two weeks on the grape harvest in the vineyards of the Champagne region. With the harvested grapes, the more than 16,000 local wine growers can fill on average 300 million bottles per year. They are mainly drunk or emptied by Americans, British, Japanese and Germans.
According to Maxime Toubart, president of the Géndicat Général des Vignerons de la Champagne (SGV), a wine trade union founded in 1904 that, in its own words, represent 99 percent of the winemakers in Champagne, die every year a two -grape pickers through heart failure or aneurysma’s dying.
“More and more [druivenplukkers in Champagne] Do not have the physical condition that is needed for work in the open air. Some young people do not have breakfast, do not hydrate, take medicines or work with bare torso, “Toubart said in 2023 The Guardian. Six grape pickers died in that year, presumably by a sun stroke.
To prevent repetition of abuses, trade union members of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CBT) handed out flyers to grape pickers in September 2024. In Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Italian and French, the reader was updated on the French minimum hour wage, the right to a break and the maximum number of working hours in a day. The wine union also called on members to monitor human working conditions. According to news site France24 Last year, 22 labor inspectors and 84 agents were also called to see if the grapes are being picked fairly.