Greenhouses, nurseries and flowers
Agency workers for glasshouse horticulture
Cucumber, tomato, pepper, chrysanthemum. Work that carries on when it is thirty-five degrees in the greenhouse — and stops when the crew does not turn up.
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What makes this work different
In a greenhouse the crop sets the pace, not the schedule. A week of sun and the harvest runs ahead; a week of cloud and you have half days. On top of that, this work has to be learned: someone who has never twined damages the head, and someone who picks too low leaves turnover hanging.
That is why we would rather send the same people back than new ones every time. Someone who knows your row produces considerably more in the second week than in the first. We record for every worker where they have worked and what they did there, so you can simply ask for that crew again next season.
Where we supply
We are based in The Hague, in the middle of Dutch glasshouse horticulture, and supply across Westland and Lansingerland and the area between. We arrange transport to the greenhouse ourselves.
- Naaldwijk
- Honselersdijk
- Poeldijk
- De Lier
- Bleiswijk
- Pijnacker
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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.
Harvesting and picking
Cucumber, tomato, pepper and aubergine. Per row, per section or on piece rate. We agree the standard beforehand, so there is no argument about output afterwards.
Crop work
Twining, de-leafing, side-shooting, turning and topping. Work where one wrong move only shows three weeks later — and therefore work for people who have done it before.
Bunching and sleeving flowers
Chrysanthemum, rose, gerbera. Bunching by weight or by count, sleeving and onto the trolley. We supply extra around Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and the weeks before All Saints.
Potting, cuttings and sorting
Pot plants and young plant material: potting, spacing and sorting by length and quality. Usually indoors on the processing line, at a fixed daily pace.
Working on the pipe rail
Harvesting and crop work at height from the pipe rail trolley. Only with instruction beforehand, and never by someone who started today.
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Hours, peaks and conditions
- Start time
- Usually six or seven o'clock, earlier in summer because it gets too hot in the greenhouse later in the day.
- Season
- The weight of the year falls between March and October. Chrysanthemum and pot plants run all year.
- Saturday
- An ordinary working day in high season. We arrange that with the crew in one go, not with fifteen separate phone calls.
- Conditions
- Warm, humid, standing and bending work. We tell the worker honestly beforehand what is coming; that saves a drop-out on day two.
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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.
- Safety instruction in their own language: the pipe rail trolley, heat, crop protection products and the rule that you do not enter a treated section.
- Spraying only by someone holding a valid crop protection licence. If nobody holds one, we do not take the job.
- Hours recorded per day and visible to you, so the timesheet and the invoice say the same thing.
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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
Glasshouse horticulture has its own agreement, the cao Glastuinbouw. It sets its own allowances for night, evening and Sunday work and its own threshold above which overtime starts — and those differ from what most people from other sectors are used to. We have recorded those percentages article by article and check them against your payroll administration before a payslip goes out. If you work under a different agreement, Open Teelten for instance, we set that one up alongside it.
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 in the greenhouse?
Tell us how many people, which crop and which weeks. You get an answer within one working day — and if we cannot deliver, we say that too.