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Australia. Newspaper reports highlighted the use of contractors to act as risk absorbers in fruit-picking in October 2009. Interviews with workers find that many claim to be dependents of foreign students or working holiday makers. Most earn A$13 an hour, but have to pay up to A$80 a week for lodging and often rides to work.

Labor contractors profit from the difference between what they receive from farmers and what they pay workers as well as the provision of housing and rides to work. Immigration raids during fruit and vegetable harvests north of Melbourne often result in the arrest of workers but not contractors or growers. Under laws enacted in 2007, employers can be fined up to A$66,000 per illegal worker hired.

Immigration Department agents referred their first case against a contractor to the Director of Public Prosecutions in October 2009, accusing a contractor of hiring workers whose short-term visas had expired and foreigners whose visas do not allow work in Australia.

Unions say that unauthorized foreigners, working holiday makers, and quasi-students are displacing the previous seasonal labor force, which included locals, students, backpackers and nomadic workers.

Australia admitted 134,000 Working Holiday Makers (WHMs) in 2007-08, young people who work in agriculture and hotels to support what are primarily tourist visits. There are two types of one-year renewable WHM visas? 417 visas for persons 18- to 30-years old from 19 countries with which Australia has bilateral agreements, and 462 visas for 18- to 30-year olds from five countries: Chile, Malaysia, Thailand, Turkey and the US.

Almost two-thirds of WHMs are from four countries? the UK, South Korea, Germany, and Ireland. Over half of WHMs are university graduates, and almost 90 percent are between 20- and 30-years old.

Britain. Workers employed on British farms are supposed to earn at least œ5.74 ($9.40) an hour. However, a July 10, 2009 report found that many workers from Eastern Europe were earning less. The Independent newspaper found that many foreign fruit pickers are taking home as little as 45 pounds, about half the minimum wage.

S&A Produce (also known as S&A Davies), which hires a peak 2,400 mostly Romanians and Bulgarians under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS), deducts charges for their lodging that can reduce net pay below the minimum wage on weeks when there are few hours of work. Poor weather in 2009 limited many workers to four hours work a day. S&A, which replaced hops with fruit crops in 2002, produces 13,000 tons of strawberries, a third of Britain's production.

Some 21,000 Romanians and Bulgarians were admitted under the SAWS for a maximum six-month's work in the UK in 2009.

Andrew Rule, "Exposing the lie of the land," The Age, October 10, 2009. Jerome Taylor, "Scandal of Britain's fruit-farm workers," Independent, July 10, 2009.