All the walnut importers I met with tell how they have a factory out of town and for all their hospitality, they do not offer a tour of their walnut cracking facilities although one person waited until the evening after the businesses were closed and then took me to a warehouse but then told me he forgot the key and we could not go inside. We did not even get out of the car before he drove off. Most of the nut importers want to appear as though they have a dedicated factory somewhere for their walnut business but they seem reluctant to admit to the California exporters that they are personally using this labor pool and the people's homes for the hand cracking operations here.
The reality is that millions of pounds of inshell California walnuts are brought into Gaziantep each year and the vast majority are taken to houses in the morning, cracked by hand during the day by lower income families and then the kernels are collected that evening by the labor contractor/foreman. While this forman pictured below wears a jacket from the largest nut importer in the country, they are all independant contracters and shell nuts for any of the importers that need it. Given the treatment I saw, he is quite a popular person that is well liked by the community.
Behind him, there is a "warehouse" that has product stacked to the ceiling in one corner, empty cases in another, with some room to package the kernels that are brought in each evening. They had not yet started receiving the kernels being cracked that day when I was there.
This is providing thousands of jobs needed by the families who find that the local minimum wage does not necessarily mean a liveable wage. While I only saw the ladies in the house crack nuts, I am fairly certain the children help to some degree. The left over walnut shells are kept by the families who burn them in a little custom furnace in the middle of their living room which provides heat for the house, hot water and cooking all in one little unit. I have been told some pistachios are hand cracked as well and would guess they probably have other labor intensive tasks that are done here. Below, you can see the combination stove in the house. There is another one in the adjacent room.
When I first heard that nuts were cracked in people's houses in the slums, I had an image of very unsanitary conditions. While not up to the food safety standards in America, I did find their homes to be very clean and we had to remove our shoes before we could enter their homes. From what I can gather on local wage rates and how fast they crack, it appears as though the women may be able to make almost as much as the men in the factories without leaving the home if they have enough product to keep them busy.
All in all, I saw something I had heard about and had some impressions and images of what to expect but what I found was people who were glad to have work and although poor, they took pride in their homes. and all of them seemed quite happy.
- Mike Poindexter
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