On a moonless night in the Kenyan lakeside town of Naivasha, Anne sits inside a makeshift, two-room house, exhausted after a gruelling shift picking and sorting roses.
Anne has spent over 15 years working in Kenya’s burgeoning flower industry, one of the largest employers in the country. Each sunrise Anne queues with hundreds of other workers to catch one of the company buses that takes them to the farms, as the gentle fog lingers over the hills before being evaporated by the blazing mid-morning sun.The working day at her flower farm is meant to be eight hours, but she explains that she often feels obliged to work an extra three hours, for which she does not receive overtime pay.
Anne worries about other ways in which her work on the flower farm may harm her health - for example, the unfamiliar chemicals she was asked to use to spray the roses.Margaret, another flower picker on a nearby farm, says workers are routinely forced to spray chemicals on flowers without being given protective gear.
We put the allegations of sexual harassment, unpaid overtime, harsh working conditions, and lack of protective gear on some flower farms in Naivasha to both the Kenya Flower Council and the Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service , the government agency responsible for monitoring the industry, but neither got back to us.Kenya’s flower business also has a significant cost for the environment at large.
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