Ruptures and acts of citizenship in the Swedish berry-picking industry

The Swedish berry industry relies today on two categories of agricultural seasonal workers: ‘third country nationals’, commonly from South-East Asia, who are granted seasonal work permits for berry picking; and another category designated as ‘free pickers’, mostly EU citizens who sell the harvested berries directly to Swedish berry buyers. With regard to both categories of berry-pickers, successive scandals have plagued the industry. Workers who arrive in Sweden hoping for lucrative employment have ended up with large debts, not able to return home, or have become trapped into ‘forced labour’. This article builds partly on results from our previous research projects on berry pickers in Sweden that centre upon recurrent crises, highlighting the social invisibility of berry-pickers that both enables and adds to their precarity and exploitability. In this paper, our research objective is to study the visibilisation of the pickers' situation of socio-economic precarity and their need for substantive rights. The empirical data comprises interviews and observations collected in 2010–2013, and additional follow-up interviews gathered in 2019–2020. The analytical approach follows theoretical notions of ruptures and acts of citizenship, leading to visibilisation and mobilisation. Key findings identify the occurrence of ruptures contributing to a visibilisation of the berry pickers' plight and to civil society calls for the improvement of their employment rights. Berry-worker protests that make their situation visibile are acts of citizenship which have led to wider mobilisations, but in recent years these have been counteracted, not least, by co-ordinated (local and national) authorities and by landowner responses to such challenges. We argue that these counter-responses can add to invisibilisation, thus becoming pre-emptive bureaucratic actions. •Improvements of berry pickers’ labour rights and living conditions depend on public visibilisation and recognition.•Public visibilisation and recognition is difficult to achieve in remote and depopulated local rural localities.•Ruptures in the citizenship script propel workers' plight for decent working conditions into the corridors of power.•The dispersal of berry pickers to sparsely populated rural areas raises concern regarding visibilisation and labour abuse.