"For a few hours or more, in the field, in the orchard or on the farm ... No need for a bac + 5, your two arms are enough!" This is, in essence, the dynamic hook of the platform "Arms for your plate" launched on March 17 to try to resolve the shortage of labor in agriculture, which compromises some spring crops, but also soon summer.
For more than a month, therefore, this new site has linked farmers who had trouble launching certain campaigns - strawberries, asparagus - due to the absence of foreign seasonal workers due to Covid-19, with employees from tourism, waiters in the restaurant industry, intermittent workers, many of whom are partially unemployed, and eager to work a few hours or even a few days to make ends meet. "A certain number of them, notably in the hotel and tourism industries, were already seasonal workers," underlines Jérôme Volle, the Monsieur Emploi of the FNSEA, who specifies that "contact is made within 30 km" .
A large number of volunteers but also failures
The first results show a real enthusiasm on the voluntary side: 274,000 workers answered the call as well as 13,000 employers - some offering several offers. In total, at the beginning of May, “we had 7,000 vacancies, with connections, which we can estimate that they resulted in hirings since there are twenty times more volunteers than offers of job! "Says Jean-Baptiste Vervy, the manager of WiziFarm, who also underlines" the speed of the connection. "And still these statistics do not count all the connections in progress", abounds Jérôme Volle. "To see all these volunteers ready to come and work in our sector, it is heart-warming", rejoices for his part Baptiste Gatouillat, the vice-president of Young Farmers.
However, not all connections are a great success. What Christiane Lambert, the president of the FNSEA, recognized in her press point on Friday, April 24: “Some had minimized the arduousness, the repetitive side of work in the fields. Picking asparagus is eight hours a day with a bent back, not everyone can resist it. "Some volunteers mainly wanted to get out of their homes, they were in an entertainment plan, in these cases, they did not do the trick or gave up," adds Jérôme Volle.
"And then, this work requires a certain technicality, not to damage the strawberries during the picking, not everyone has this helping hand", underlines Baptiste Gatouillat. How many signed contracts have fallen into the water? Some suggest the figure of 15%. "We do not have statistics on this subject, but that could be consistent with what we hear said," recognizes Jean-Baptiste Vervy.
Difficulties of implementation on the ground
The small number of employers registered on the site also questions, when compared to the 450,000 duly listed farmers. Deciphering of our experts: first, these local bosses are used to going through more traditional sites or organizations (such as Pôle emploi or ANEFA), and have not yet had the reflex to go to this new platform form. And then, such a ramdam was made by the public authorities around the lack of manpower in agriculture that some volunteers sometimes contacted directly by telephone the farmers of their region.
Finally, a final element of explanation plays in the sense of a wait-and-see attitude: employers who do not yet know if their employees will leave or stay after May 11 limit their job offers. Jean-Baptiste Vervy, on the other hand, is already thinking about how to improve the operation of the site: “Some good candidates could get some kind of recommendation. And training videos could for example show concretely what the asparagus harvesting consists of. Baptiste Gatouillat is convinced of this: “The Covid-19 crisis has exposed our sector to employees who will stay and work there in the long term. "
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/DIAGMBIFCBFTJADD5SB7GXXY2A.jpg)
