Around 50 women from eastern Europe were employed as fruit pickers in Alsace in eastern France under conditions that approached "slavery", the CGT trade union said on Friday.

The women were paid 0.25 euros ($0.350) a kilo for picking strawberries, well below the legal rate and housed in "unfit" conditions in temporary barracks, Jacky Wagner, a local CGT official told Reuters.

A local police official said an investigation had been opened into the case but would focus on what the women were paid and how they were employed rather than the conditions in which they were housed. The CGT said one group of Romanian women had been replaced by another group made up of Poles, Ukrainians and Romanians after a disagreement with their employer, a German national.

Reuters