The settlement of Palos de la Frontera, in Huelva, was devastated. A fire had razed a large part of the shacks, as happens from time to time, and many men spent the afternoon rebuilding their fragile homes, constructed from pallets, cardboard boxes, and plastic sheeting.

The soft fruit companies charge 1.5 euros per pallet; a shack can cost between 300 and 500 euros. Most of the men and women living in the settlement come from Senegal and Morocco and share the status of undocumented migrants.

This leaves them in a situation of utter destitution. They have no electricity, water, or gas, and their extreme vulnerability makes them targets of all kinds of abuse. For example, being charged 500 euros to register their address, or several thousand euros for an employment contract that might one day allow them to obtain legal residency.

Until they achieve this, the harsh conditions of working in the fields are often their only option. Around 3,000 people live in settlements like the one in Palos de la Frontera in the province of Huelva.

In May 2021, a Feminist Observation Brigade, organized by the association Jornaleras de Huelva en Lucha (JHL) and the feminist research network La Laboratoria , learned firsthand about the situation of those who work in the greenhouses of the strawberry and red fruit industry.

The construction of hate

The aim of the trip was to bring a team of lawyers and journalists closer to this silenced reality, guided by the day laborers themselves, and particularly by two women, Najat Bassit from Morocco and Ana Pinto from Huelva, who, faced with the void left by traditional unions, try to give visibility to the abuses and inform the seasonal workers of their rights.

Ana Pinto says that when she started working in the fields of Huelva in the late 1990s, “the work wasn’t bad.” The pay was always meager, but the atmosphere was pleasant and she enjoyed the work.

Everything began to change in the mid-2000s: “People started arriving from elsewhere, especially from Eastern Europe and Morocco; most of them were women. They kept them separate from us, we weren't grouped together. And we began to see that, for us locals, there was less and less work.” A discourse of hatred took hold in Huelva, which, tied to the argument that “migrants are taking our jobs,” fueled the conflict between local seasonal workers and migrants.

abuses of all kinds became more frequent : “We have gone from camaraderie to competition, largely due to productivity lists, which mean that those who pick the least fruit are exposed to being punished; in addition, they don't let you talk to your colleagues, they shout at you, they insult you,” Pinto recounts.

Among migrant seasonal workers, both those who arrive from Morocco with contracts of origin – which force them to leave the country when the strawberry season ends – and those who live in shantytown settlements, the situation is even worse; and, as the day laborers have been denouncing for years, sexual abuse has become the norm rather than the exception.

The complaints

In 2018, Moroccan seasonal workers dared to denounce these abuses. It was then that Pinto and Bassit, who at the time worked together at the same strawberry company, began to channel these complaints.

Thus, they became the visible faces of the JHL association, which this year obtained, via crowdfunding , economic resources to continue shaping its struggle: on the one hand, denouncing the situation and making political advocacy so that labor inspections work and put an end to the impunity of employers.

On the other hand, advising seasonal workers about their rights and channeling complaints, in a context in which, as the Feminist Observation Brigade witnessed, nobody dares to take a step forward to denounce the employer: they know that they risk not only losing their job, but not finding any other in the greenhouses of Huelva.

The Day Laborers of Huelva in Struggle have joined forces, through the Andalusian Workers' Union (SOA), with other sectors forgotten by conventional unionism, such as the association of African workers, metal workers and the kellys.

The SOA, by the way, defines itself as a “class-based, unitary, feminist, and assembly-based union.” Furthermore, JHL builds networks with diverse actors, such as agroecological movements and sectors of academia. This is no coincidence.

Pinto analyzes the situation in the fields of Huelva, “it is fraught with many problems: labor and sexual abuse, racist hate speech and also environmentalism, because the monoculture of red fruits in mega-greenhouses is drying up our water resources, and that is already affecting the aquifers of Doñana.”

Erased women

JHL's struggle not only demands a revaluation of work in the fields, but also emphasizes that, in order to improve the working conditions of Spanish workers, it is necessary to demand respect for the rights of migrants.

They thus serve as an antidote to fascism in times of rising far-right extremism. And they point to feminism and the left the need to question immigration laws that leave thousands of people in a situation of extreme vulnerability, exposing them to overexploitation.

“Women are the most exploited and they are also the ones who do the most essential jobs,” concludes Pinto, who insists on one idea: it is the farm workers, the migrants, the sex workers who have been “erased” for a long time.

The truth is that the pandemic showed that essential jobs, which are largely what sustain everyone's lives, are the most invisible, the most precarious, and also the most feminized.

This is how Marta Malo, one of the coordinators of La Laboratoria : “These struggles make visible the feminization and racialization of poverty. As Pastora Filigrana , there is a segmentation of humanity, a hierarchy that places some people below others. And while this has historical roots, it is constantly reinscribed through very specific mechanisms of racialization and feminization. For example, the border regime is a mechanism of racialization that generates poverty, just as the socialization of women into caregiving tasks is a mechanism that impoverishes them. These struggles challenge those mechanisms.”

Malo refers to the Day Laborers of Huelva in Struggle, but also to organizational processes such as those of sex workers, riders and domestic and care workers.

All of these can be understood under the notion of syndicalist feminism, a term that allows us to “place the struggle for the material conditions of existence at the center of feminism.” These feminisms “need tools that are part of the heritage of the trade union struggle, such as the strike, the picket line, the strike fund, or the union school,” Malo adds.

But at the same time, they require new tools because they go beyond the traditional framework of trade unionism, which gave prominence to the figure of the white, male, wage-earning factory worker. “The valorization of capital doesn't take place solely in the factory, but in many other places; and this has always been the case, but what's more, today wage labor has lost its centrality,” Malo explains.

“The world doesn’t move without us”

The collective Territorio Doméstico (Domestic Territory ), made up of women, many of them migrants, domestic workers, and care workers, has coined the concept of biosyndicalism . “A form of struggle for the right of all people to have lives worth living and, above all, the joy of living them,” they write in the booklet Biosyndicalism from Domestic Territories: Our Demands and Our Way of Doing.

“The struggles of Territorio Doméstico, Jornaleras de Huelva Lucha, or the organized sex workers are a beacon, an inspiration; they give strength to the rest of us, and they also clearly reveal that capitalism is colonial and patriarchal, that this framework is inseparable,” Marta Malo explains.

That's why, when the women of Territorio Doméstico say "without us the world doesn't move," they are emphasizing that racialized and migrant women occupy the most oppressed and vulnerable place in the hierarchies imposed by the dominant order. They are the ones who sustain not only life, but also the valorization of capital.

Angela Davis said that “when Black women move, the whole structure of society moves with them.” When hotel cleaners, care workers, or day laborers mobilize, the foundations of the economic and social structure tremble. Therefore, a feminism that aims to be emancipatory and transformative must place these struggles at its center.

In other words, improving living conditions requires more than simply demanding better working conditions. It requires placing care work, debt dynamics, and the struggle for land and decent housing at the forefront.

This is what the women leading food sovereignty movements throughout Latin America have understood so well. Like the Union of Land Workers (UTT) in Argentina, which defends the agroecological model against agribusiness as a way to improve the conditions of those who work in the countryside, but from a much broader perspective.

“Agroecology must go hand in hand with a recovery of women’s role as caretakers of the land, the planet, and the family, while men learn to share caregiving responsibilities. We must understand that the violence we inflict on the land with the agro-industrial model is the same violence that women experience in their own bodies,” explains Rosalía Pellegrini, Gender Secretary of the UTT.

The debt to women

In Argentina, too, the massive and radical Ni Una Menos movement has placed the discussion about debt at the center.

Her feminist reading of debt links labor exploitation with financial devices that, through indebtedness, extract value differentially from feminized, racialized, and working-class bodies, at a time when going into debt is becoming mandatory in many contexts, not to access consumer goods, but simply to survive, and when the poorest people pay the highest interest rates.

Furthermore, debt often makes it difficult for many women to leave homes where they are abused.

Verónica Gago and Luci Cavallero, from Ni Una Menos, have just published together with Silvia Federici the book Who Owes Whom?, which compiles different experiences of financial disobedience, including that of the Platform Affected by Mortgages (PAH).

“The obligation of debt, the mandate that leaves us no option but to go into debt to live, demonstrates that debt functions as a productive tool. It puts us to work. It forces us to work more. It leads us to have to sell our time and effort for the future,” the authors emphasize. Improving wages is of little use if forms of extractivism, such as those related to debt and the inaccessibility of housing, are not combated.

Financial disobedience, the challenge to immigration law, and the centrality of care work and the sustenance of life converge, within feminist struggles, on the same idea: you cannot change the situation of women without changing the world.

From there, an emerging trade unionism is being forged, which is radicalized from the principles of the feminist movement and which, situated in the territories, unfolds new ways of seeing the world and intervening in it.

*This article was originally published in Pikara . To learn more about our partnership with this publication, click here .