Workers fall victim to jobs scam in Sochi

Workers fall victim to jobs scam in Sochi

Thousands of workers from Southeast Europe headed to Sochi for what sounded like a dream job in constructing venues for the Olympic Games. In some cases, when they arrived, they found out differently.

Thousands of illegal workers from Serbia and BiH were hired for construction jobs for the Olympics. [AFP]

Milan Vukelja left to work on an Olympic construction site in Sochi, Russia, this summer with dreams of a regular salary and steady employment. But his dream became a nightmare two months later when he and 20 men from Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Serbia were deported for being illegally employed.

"We had a promise from the manager of Serbian employment company Hey You that we were not going as illegal workers, that we would have good conditions, food and documents. Nothing of that was fulfilled. The entire group of workers was arrested and deported from Russia," Vukelja, from a village near Prijedor in BiH, told SETimes.

The group was promised about 4,000 euros for two months of work, but so far they have only received a small part of that.

Elena Krsmanovic from Serbian NGO Astra said the organisation has had about 20 calls from workers who were victims in Sochi. They said there are about 500 Serbian workers in Russia.

"We have had some cases in which the victims were returning to Sochi, because they managed to get some money from employers. They consciously became victims again just to gain the chance to feed their families," Krsmanovic told SETimes.

Around 5,000 Serbian workers have gone to Russia over the past four years. Most of them were in Sochi, working in bad conditions, Sasa Simic, president of Serbia's independent construction workers...