Low wages, sexual abuse dogged flower industry for years

It’s a cold, wet morning as Salome Nafula leaves her two-roomed house in the sprawling Karagita estate in Naivasha for the Moi South Lake Road.

Dressed in a fading sweater and gumboots to ward off the biting cold, she jumps over a flowing sewer and walks past mountains of garbage as the first rays of sunlight hit ageing iron sheets.

The daily routine is cut short by a pack of mongrels on heat chasing each other and barking and howling.

Back bent, hands thrust deep into her sweater pockets, she arrives at the bus stop to find over 100 workers already lined up waiting for transport to her place of work.

In 30 minutes, an old, smoking bus rattles to a stop and one after the other, they hop board off to the office -- one of Naivasha’s flowers farms.

At the farm, she quickly slips into a dusty coat and heads to the grading hall where she sorts and packs tens of roses for export for hours till evening.

This has been her hustle for 17 years, rising from a casual labourer to a permanent employee, seeing the good and the ugly side of a sector that employs thousands of workers, majority of them women.

That journey has not been a bed of roses.

Nafula vividly remembers days when sexual harassment, low wages, working in greenhouses filled with noxious chemicals and getting fired on flimsy grounds was the order of the day.

“My first salary was Sh1,200 when I started working in this flower farm and I had to sleep with a supervisor to get a salary raise of Sh300,” she says with a sneer.

Although grey areas remain, Nafula, a mother of three teenagers, admits things have changed greatly and that sexual abuse, arbitrary sacking and skewed promotions are no longer entertained in nearly all the farms.

“Working conditions have improved generally. Days when workers used to walk or use public means to their workplaces are long gone. Most farms provide transport. I now earn Sh16,900. But there is room for improvement,” she says.

For years, flower farmers were accused of mistreating and underpaying their workers, forcing various consumer bodies in Europe and human rights activists to intervene.

And with change in the manner of management and delivery of services, farms like Van Den Berg (VD), Maridadi, Panda, Oserian and Plantec have been awarded as the top producers for exemplary services.

Ferdinand Juma, the Kenya Plantations and Agriculture Workers Union (KPAWU) Naivasha branch secretary, admits that consumer influence forced many farmers to change.

“For years, we would move from one farm to the other trying to resolve disputes around sexual harassment and arbitrary sackings but this is now history,” he says.

He adds currently, there are many certifications which farmers are required to adhere to before their flowers are allowed into the market.

For flowers destined for the United Kingdom it's Fair Trade, Netherlands is MPS, Germany is Fair Flowers while locally, KFC is there to certify the farms.

“We have seen an improvement in the working conditions in the farms though many of the farmers have blocked their workers from joining the union,” he says.

Juma says that cases of harassment have gone down with farms forming gender committees to address and report any case of sexual abuse.

Other areas that need to be addressed according to him are casualization of labour, payment of overtime, maternity leaves and the right to join unions.

“In all the flower farms, workers are united over the low wages against the high cost of living and this should be adjusted upwards,” he says.

But human rights activist June Njeri dismisses the certifications from different consumers in Europe as mere pieces of paper.

Njeri says that levels of compliance are still low and many workers are still suffering mainly in terms of sexual harassment.

“We have seen the implementation of various policies but these are never implemented. In most cases, they are pieces of paper in files,” she says.

Njeri says nearly every flower farm has a gender committee, but when an audit was conducted, it emerged that many members do not understand their mandate.

Labour expert Joel Omollo, however, says working conditions have improved greatly but the most contentious issue remains the salaries paid to workers against the perceived high earnings by their employers.

According to him, the farmers pay their workers between Sh7,500 and Sh20,000 depending on one’s position and years of service.

He, however, points to the archaic labour laws for the low wages, noting that there is need for Parliament to review them.

“When a flower farmer offers Sh7,000 as the monthly salary one cannot blame him as he has surpassed the government gazetted wage which is around Sh5,000,” he says.

Former Naivasha MP John Mututho was among the brains that saw the Floriculture Wages Council launched following a miscellaneous amendment in Parliament.

The government has already formed an independent body that will see workers in the floriculture sector removed from the agricultural wages order.

Mututho says that with the formation of the council, the workers minimum salary would shoot from the current Sh5,000 to Sh20,000 per month.

“The biggest challenge for workers in the agriculture sector in the country is archaic laws that need to be amended,” he says.