Pandemic Makes Europe’s Economies Hungry for Romania’s ‘Strawberry Pickers’

Often despised as unskilled, low-quality migrants that brought little added value to their new countries - while posing a threat supposedly to jobs and welfare services - nationalist political movements such as Brexit in the UK have often used their presence as part of their platforms.

But the general shutdown in most European countries dictated by the COVID-19 pandemic has changed perceptions. Romania's once distrusted "strawberry pickers" are now sought desperately to keep economies moving.

As countries start getting back to a relative normality across Europe, Germany, Italy, Austria - and the same UK that opted out of the EU to reduce its exposure to immigration - have been making exceptions to the movement restrictions to allow in Romanians, to get their economic engines up and running.

Wealthier European countries need these Romanians to do the hard physical jobs that local people have long spurned, and hundreds of thousands of Romanians are still attracted to those jobs, as they pay better than the salaries on offer at home. 

While wage gaps with Western Europe have closed in recent years, the gap remains substantial. 

The minimum wage in Romania in January was around 650 euros a month. Monthly wages for seasonal work in agriculture in Germany or Britain during the pandemic started at 1,500 euros, according to job offers seen by BIRN in classified websites.

Traveling at the height of the pandemic

Their westward movement began at the height of the pandemic in early April, when Romanian seasonal workers started leaving for Germany and the UK to pick their harvests. They travelled by plane, pioneering the resumption of international flights in lock-downed Europe after the governments of Romania and the employers'...