When Agung arrived at Heathrow Airport in July, he thought it was the beginning of a better financial future for his family.
He was expecting to have six months of lucrative farming work in Britain to help support his mother and siblings back home in Java. He did not realize that the harvest was already well under way or that the pay would be a fraction of what he hoped.
Agung paid more than 4,650 to a broker in Java in April and took a loan with 3% monthly interest to fund it. His visa came through in June, but he did not travel for another month.
His first job was at Castleton farm in Aberdeenshire, which supplies berries to supermarkets including M&S, Waitrose, Tesco and Lidl. He had not realised it was so far from London and was shocked when he had to pay 95 to get there, adding to his growing debt.
When he started picking berries, he found the targets impossible to meet. He said they would start work at around 5 am and if he hadn't picked enough by 9 am, he was sent back to the caravan for the day. He usually took home a little more than 200 a week.
Instead of the riches he hoped for, Agung skipped meals to try to make headway repaying debt. He said that almost all of the money I earned was transferred to Indonesia. I sometimes didn't have enough food for me because all I can think is that I have to pay my debt. By September, Agung had been dismissed because he had three warnings resulting in days off for being too slow. He made about 1,500 in two months.
What I got was not enough to help them, he said.
He paid for his own transport to Kent and started picking apples on another farm. But at the beginning of November that work stopped because there was no more fruit to be picked. He moved to London with a friend and managed to rent a room, wondering whether to take his chances on the black market or fly home early in the year. He said he still owes more than 1,700 back home and is charged 3% interest a month.
He said that some of the treatment is quite unfair. There is no more work but we are still in debt. Ross Mitchell, the farm's managing director of Castleton Fruit, said the farm had a disciplinary procedure like all employers do to deal with performance related issues that were audited annually and heavily regulated.
He said that worker wellbeing was of the utmost importance and that more than 70% of the nearly 1,000 people it employs each year returned. He said that the 106 Indonesians who came to the farm this year worked an average of 41.81 hours, with an average weekly gross pay of 450.68 before costs such as accommodation were charged, and 70 were still at Castelton.
Mitchell said that the farm was concerned about payment demanded by third-party agents and that they relied on approved agents to have carried out due diligence to ensure that the workers are not paying excessive fees. Mitchell said that they first became aware of the charges made to workers when they arrived at the farm and immediately reported it to the authorities, the authorities and customers. He said that he had hoped that the relevant bodies would have dealt with this issue. Mochtar from Lombok, who worked together with Agung, is still in debt over what he paid to come to Britain. He managed to pick up more fruit at Castleton, but he still made around 300 a week.
He said he only managed to send about 100 home to his wife a month, once he had made payments against debts and factored in his own cost of living. He said I will be so happy to see my family again, but on the other side I am ashamed. The names have been changed to protect identities.