On August 11, as temperatures soared above 40 degree Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), Gheorghe Vranciu was on a ten-hour shift picking fruit near Lleida, Catalonia. By 2 p.m., the sixty-one-year-old Romanian had become overwhelmed by the heat — and asked to go home.
“[His supervisor’s] response was that he was just drunk, even though my father didn’t drink alcohol,” his son Ovidio told local media. “She then told him to go to the end of the row of fruit trees that they were harvesting and sit there in the shade. No one called an ambulance, no one took him home, and no one even notified us.”
Three hours later, he died of heatstroke still lying under the same tree, with the emergency services yet to arrive.
Vranciu wasn’t the only seasonal farmworker to lose his life amid Spain’s extreme heat this summer. During record temperatures in June, an undocumented Pakistani worker also succumbed to heatstroke after being dropped outside the entrance of a medical center in Fraga, Aragón, by colleagues who then fled the scene.
“After he collapsed, the company where he had been picking fruit refused to call an ambulance or to take him to the hospital as he was employed illegally without a work permit,” explains Rachid El Jazouli, who is regional agricultural officer for trade union Comisiones Obreras. “They just left him lying there on the ground as if he were an animal and so other Pakistani workers, who were also undocumented, took the risk of bringing him to the hospital themselves.”
According to the Andalusian Workers’ Union (SAT), a farm laborer from Senegal, who worked in the vast industrial greenhouses in the southern region of Almería, also died of heatstroke on the job on August 27. A forty-year-old Moroccan was…
Auteur: Eoghan Gilmartin
