Agro-industrial Labour in Kenya by Gerda Kuiper

Author:Gerda Kuiper
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030180461
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

4.3 Rhythms of Labour: Yielding to the Flowers and the Markets

The timing of the work is an important aspect of flower growing and structures the tightly controlled daily routines described above. As explained by Happ (2016, p. 53), the workers are in a race with time once a flower is ready for harvesting, as it loses much of its value once it starts to wither. But there are still other factors which shape the rhythms of labour within the farms.

First of all, the crop goes through a natural growth cycle. I here describe the cycle of the most prevalent crop at the time of my fieldwork: the rose. I witnessed during a visit to Karibu Farm that the planting of new seedlings by a greenhouse team only takes a few hours of steady labour. After the planting, there is little work to do in the greenhouse for some time and in Karibu Farm most of the employees would be temporarily put to work in other parts of the farm. It takes around two months from the planting of the seedlings to the harvesting of the first flush of flowers. After several flushes, during which plants produce several flowers at a time, the growth of the plants can be balanced and stabilized. Plants can then produce steadily for a period of three to six years. Whenever old rose bushes are no longer productive or when a specific variety is not popular anymore in the market, the bushes are uprooted and replaced by seedlings of the same or a different variety. These (licenced) varieties and their seedlings are acquired from, mostly Dutch-owned, breeders and plant propagators, some of which have a local branch in Naivasha.3

Apart from these growing cycles over longer time spans, the workload also varies on a daily basis. Supervisors have to be flexible in the planning of the work. The hours of work differ per farm and also per department, although working hours have become more standardized since an increasing number of farms participate in the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). Typically, workers in the greenhouse start work at 7 a.m. They have an (unpaid) lunch break of one or two hours. The time of finishing work differs per day. There could, for instance, be more flowers to harvest after sunny days, there could be more time needed for spraying pesticides after the outbreak of certain diseases (and so less time to do other work in the greenhouse), and a specific order could also disrupt the normal work rhythm. I once witnessed in Lucy’s greenhouse that a sudden request for yellow flowers made workers harvest those flowers all day long, leaving maintenance tasks for another day. This variability demands considerable flexibility of the employees, as they have to work longer hours on certain days than on others. Moreover, in farms that adhere to the CBA, (paid) overtime is mandatory when need be (AEA & KPAWU, 2011, sec. 5(c)). Supervisors in the greenhouses of Karibu Farm nevertheless attempted to balance the

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