Postcard From the Algarve - November 05
While there’s a number of Portuguese working in Highland Perthshire, there’s few, if any, Scots working in Sao Bras. Although here there are ten months of sunshine, unspoiled beaches 5 miles away, and The Famous Grouse at £7 a bottle, the minimum wage is just £255 a month. This explains why there are Portuguese working there where they should, legally, be paid just over twice that.
The majority of guest workers in the Algarve are from the Ukraine where the minimum wage is an unbelievable £16 per month. Ukrainians work mostly in the building trade earning around €6 (just over £4) per hour, which is below the local minimum wage but well above what they can earn at home. (Many of the building workers are Ukrainian professionals such as engineers, teachers, and lecturers) |
|
|
There is no animosity towards guest workers here, although the Portuguese unemployment rate is reckoned to be around 6 per cent. The only slight ill feeling is towards Chinese shop owners. There are now four Chinese stores in Sao Bras all selling everything from clothes to electrical goods at less than half the price of their competitors; needless to say, the ill feeling is manifested by those competitors and not by the customers. The staff, of course, also work for well below the minimum wage, about £2.50 per hour. That’s the rate paid to a woman I know of, working in the kitchens of one of the fancier restaurants on the coast.
The only trouble I’ve heard of faced by the Portuguese in England happened last year in Lincolnshire when a Portuguese-owned pub was attacked during the European Cup Competition. There is a considerable number of Portuguese working around Lincolnshire harvesting vegetables - work which the locals appear unwilling to do. The pub has several times been raided by police acting on gossip which claimed that English were barred from drinking there, and a house in nearby Boston, home to 10 Portuguese workers, was firebombed. It seems that some parts of England still have the mentality of the labourer in the 1880’s punch cartoon saying to a friend: “Hey Sid. That bloke’s a stranger. ’eave ’alf a brick at ’im.”
|
