Peeling, sorting and processing
Agency workers for flower bulbs
Peeling, sorting, counting and packing. A trade with a season of a few months in which everything has to happen — and with a collective agreement of its own that does not resemble horticulture's.
01Flower bulbs
What makes this work different
Flower bulbs do not have a level crew; they have a wave. Between taking the crop in and the moment the planting stock leaves, you need more people in a few months than in the whole rest of the year. An agency that then delivers five people a week leaves you sitting with a full shed.
We supply for the whole period, with a crew that stays together. That is not only more pleasant for you: a peeling line whose crew changes every day never reaches its speed.
Where we supply
We supply traders and processors within driving distance of The Hague and bring the crew to the shed ourselves.
- The Hague
- Westland
- Lansingerland
- Zuidplas
- Bulb region
- Barendrecht
02Flower bulbs
The work
What we supply people for. If your work is not listed, it is usually a variant of one of these — call and tell us.
Peeling
By hand and on the peeling line. In this work the gap between a practised peeler and someone who has never done it is not ten per cent but much more; we say in advance who is which.
Sorting by size and quality
Sorting by grade and taking out the diseased and damaged bulbs. Work where one careless hand can infect a whole batch.
Counting and packing
Counting for export orders, filling nets and boxes, labelling. Here accuracy comes before speed, because a wrong count comes back as a claim.
Processing shed and internal transport
Filling, tipping and moving crates and keeping the drying walls going. Forklift only with a valid certificate, checked by us.
Preparing planting stock
Getting batches ready for planting: cleaning, weighing, labelling and placing them correctly. A mistake in a batch's paperwork costs a season.
03Flower bulbs
Hours, peaks and conditions
- Season
- Lifting and taking in during summer, peeling and processing from late summer into winter. The weight of the work falls in autumn.
- Working week
- Six days at the peak, often with longer days. We agree that per week and record it, so the timesheet adds up afterwards.
- Conditions
- Dust in the peeling shed and cold stores in storage. A dust mask and instruction are part of the job; we arrange the instruction.
- Scaling up
- Expanding a crew is possible, but not overnight. Tell us a week ahead and they are there.
04Flower bulbs
What we arrange before the first shift
Not because it looks good on a website, but because the fine lands on your desk.
- Identity checked against the original document, with a copy on file.
- Residence or work document checked, including its expiry date — and an alert in the system before that date passes.
- A dust mask and an explanation of how to use it before the first shift in the peeling shed.
- Hours recorded per day, including when the work is on piece rate. That makes it demonstrable that the minimum wage per hour is met — which is your risk, not only ours.
- Forklift certificate checked by number and expiry date.
05Flower bulbs
Pay and collective agreement
Our agency worker is paid according to your terms, not ours. The collective agreement for agency workers requires that they receive terms equivalent to someone on your own payroll: pay, allowances, expenses and leave. For that we need your pay structure — scales, allowance percentages and expense rules — and we enter it into our system once. After that the system calculates every week with those percentages, not with an estimate.
Which collective agreement applies to you
In flower bulbs it depends on what your company does: a trading and processing business usually falls under the Groothandel in Bloembollen agreement, growing under Open Teelten. Those two differ in their allowances and in the threshold above which overtime begins, and that is real money every week. We look up which one applies to you instead of assuming it is one or the other — because a wrong assumption here means an assessment after the fact.
Other sectors
We do not work one corner of the market. Many of our people work in more than one of these sectors.
Need a crew for the bulb season?
Tell us which weeks and how many people. The earlier we know, the better the crew that turns up.