A Thai organisation have made the above film about how Thai workers are lured to Sweden to pick blueberries during the summer. The workers are basically promised the world, but end up entrenched in the middle of nowhere (e.g. the deep northern part of Sweden), having to pay extreme monies for rudimentary things like transports and living arrangements which, in the end, ends up placing a lot of them in debt rather than making them money. There are, according to Dagens Nyheter, appx. 150 court-cases going where Thai workers have sued their previous employer in this mess. Another scary thing ((Courtesy of Thai Labor Campaign and Stockholm News.))

The number of foreign berry pickers in Sweden is expected to be a third compared with last year. This despite prognoses that 2010 will be a very good berry year.

The reason is according to the Swedish Trade Union Confederation a new minimum wage.

Here's to the high cost of low living and maybe it'll even hand a little perspective to all the Swedes who zone in on foods labelled "Made in Sweden" at the supermarket.