The cost of saving Europe’s asparagus harvest

Photo: open source (Pixabay)

Steep price

Recent scandals involving COVID-19 outbreaks in slaughterhouses, agricultural facilities, greenhouses, logistic warehouses and other locations related to the food industry on both sides of the German-Dutch border have exposed the lower safety standards that the Dutch and German governments require for the most vulnerable foreign workers. Although food-supply experts predicted a shortage of essential workers in the sector during April and May due to the plunge in demand caused by slow economic activity, the worst-case scenario did not materialise. While some of these foreign workers have stayed home, the vast majority of them answered the call by the Dutch and German governments to save the asparagus season. However, their exposure to COVID-19 due to overcrowded living facilities and exploitative labour regulations means that the price these workers have paid is steep.

Political scientists like Pieter Van Houtem would have depicted Kleve – and the surrounding villages near the border – as a community within a borderless Europe. Although open borders have allowed the formation of an immensely profitable market, its existence has come at the cost of the most vulnerable cross-border workers. Their economic need and lack of legal protection has turned such workers into alluring prey for businesses unconcerned about confining them to exploitative and overcrowded living conditions as long as these practices guarantee them a profitability otherwise threatened by the lockdowns.

Such practices take place across the German-Dutch border. Often, workers are crammed into houses on the German side from which they are routinely transported to the fields and factories on the Dutch side. Given the non-existent political will to protect these workers – as well as their lack of local political representation in either Germany or the Netherlands – the policies that allow their exploitation have remained unchanged over the last number of years. Although the appalling circumstances these workers face have been an open secret for years, interest in the social inequities that they experience has only recently surfaced because of the pandemic. This newfound attention on their plight might finally prompt local politicians to change policy at the regional level. A ticking bomb for public health, the most recent outbreaks in Velp and Kleve have shown that these workers’ precarious living conditions were highlighted only once they were recognised as a potential contagious threat for Dutch and German communities.

The many temporary workers from Bulgaria, Romania and Poland living in the German-Dutch border region have sparked a rise in COVID-19 infections among Kleve’s seasonal work force. Since no other community in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia has seen more confirmed COVID-19 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in one week, this region has acquired a reputation for being a “corona hotspot”, as the socially conservative local newspaper Rheinische Post reported on June 6th. Given that all 42 newly registered infections have been detected among seasonal workers – thus shooting the average infection rate up to 13.5 within ten days, surpassing the 10-day guideline that Germany has set as the maximum per 100,000 inhabitants – their housing facilities have become the target of widespread inspections, with a total of 45 houses screened in the process.

All workers had been housed on the German side of the border while working at a meat processing plant in the Dutch town of Helmond – a common practice intended to evade stricter housing regulations on the Dutch side. Since recent infection outbreaks in slaughterhouses have caused a nation-wide outcry in Germany, local officials such as Kleve’s administrator, Wolfgang Spreen, have found themselves forced to make a commitment to increase testing capabilities. However, without public pressure on the regional government to crack down on the municipality’s neglect, no significant change has really taken place.

Hitting a nerve

An article by Julia Lörcks in the local German newspaper Rheinische Post discusses a joint policy proposal to set up a working group intended to improve living conditions among temporary workers. Proposed by the FDP (Free Democratic Party), the SPD (Social Democratic Party) and the Green Party, this measure was rejected by the CDU (Christian Democrat Union). A prominent member of the local branch of the CDU, Andy Mulder, was quoted stating that “a politically-motivated working group would not contribute to solving the issue but instead only absorb necessary manpower/energy.” His statement represented a direct rebuke to demands by the provincial government of North-Rhine Westphalia to provide seasonal workers with dignified employment and housing conditions. Even though city officials have been turning a blind eye to this practice for almost two years now, criticism has finally hit a nerve due to the pandemic.

Looking from the other side, however, one cannot help but wonder if this could not be seen as a German problem imported from the Netherlands? The Dutch policy regarding the seasonal workers has not been more successful in addressing the issues they face. In the Dutch city of Velp, close to Arnhem and the German border, the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation (NOS) reported that over 28 temporary workers had been identified as “probably” infected by coronavirus – it was categorised “probably” due to the poor testing efforts of the Dutch government and the country’s inability to account for new cases. After putting the entire living complex under quarantine, it became clear that the majority of these workers were employed by the meat industry and also came from Central and Eastern Europe. Similar scandals erupted in Germany, these workers were mostly Romanians who had to endure overcrowded housing and working facilities which, in turn, contributed to the spread of the virus.

The role of temporary employment agencies is of central importance to this discussion. Many of them have confined workers to poor housing conditions, such as the case involving 50 migrants in Rijen. The Dutch federate trade union (Federatie Nederlandse Vakbeweging, FNV) emphasised that 50 workers had to share one kitchen and three showers at La Cigogne, a hotel where they were all housed. A sign of the precarious situation in which Polish and Romanian workers find themselves is the threat of eviction they now face as a result of the lockdown. Temporary employment agencies offer accommodation to workers as part of their “services” unless their contracts are terminated, which for many workers would mean homelessness.

Workers who earn up to seven euros an hour in a horticulture facility often work shifts that regular Dutch or German workers would hardly tolerate. They start at 5am and often work until late into the night – including holidays. Even though some employers literally stack up workers in their improvised housing facilities to maximise their profits, the rents for these unenviable housing conditions can go up to 400 euros per month. Although labour unions such as FNV have criticised these practices, any change to this lucrative “business model” is unlikely. On both sides of the German-Dutch border, it is common practice for temporary workers who work on farms to also receive housing, making them effectively a type of “modern-day serf”, according to a MP for the Dutch far-left Socialist Party (SP), Jasper Van Dijk. Many are unaware of their employment rights, face challenges due to language barriers, or are afraid that losing their jobs will also imply getting their housing, transportation and community taken away.

The hierarchy of “Europeanness”

While Black Lives Matter protests across the US and inside the EU cast light upon the prevalence of institutional and systemic racism in our societies, they also provide insight into the complex relations among class, race, ethnicity and religion necessary to explain these events in our own backyards. Especially in the context of the EU, hierarchies between politically and economically privileged majorities and racialised minorities, both among and within member states, are often concealed behind the façade of institutional equality – even though they should be odious to the liberal democratic principles that the EU is supposed to uphold. The result is a system of racialised exploitation that has received little attention; while “Europe without borders” is belied by recurrent discord between Northern and Southern European politics, a neglected, yet equally racialised, fault line runs along Eastern and Western Europe.

The empirical reality is that within “Fortress Europe” a closing of external borders for immigrants from outside the EU and a focus on the attraction of specific workers in order to bypass labour shortages in certain segments of the economy have led to keeping disposable bodies at bay. This mechanism of exclusion is being constantly reaffirmed by the dramatic aesthetics of black and brown bodies continuously washing up along the shores of southern Europe. Therefore, it is important to keep in mind that hierarchies of “Europeanness” also involve a much less discussed split between Western and Eastern Europe.

EU member states from Central and Eastern Europe represent a particularly interesting case given that they have experienced a different historical trajectory than Western EU member states and are still considered – and, arguably, still imagine themselves – as recent additions to the “Global North”. As a result of joining the EU, Eastern EU members have thus been granted an unusual upgrade in the hierarchy of geographical imaginations that influence international politics. Having been part of what used to be the “second world”, much of Central and Eastern Europe has faced their own struggles regarding their position on the geopolitical board; notions between centre and periphery have established a hierarchy between what might be considered quintessentially European countries and those that simply qualify as European enough.

Therefore, the COVID-related scandals surrounding slaughterhouses and overcrowded living facilities have brought an unspoken societal consensus to the forefront – namely, which lives we deem most valuable and worthy of protection. In this hierarchy of “Europeanness”, determining which bodies are most deserving of security, many temporary workers seem to fall in-between the grid: white enough to pass superficially, their accent quickly gives them away as migrants; European, but somehow not the right kind of European, thus justifying their treatment as second-class citizens; tolerated but hidden away in enclaves of their own, accused of not integrating while simultaneously exploited, they lead their existences in the shadows of their host societies.

Products without any value

In our “Europe without borders” that stipulates all European citizens of having the same inalienable rights, the reality is very far from the ideal. It remains difficult to imagine that a similar treatment of Norwegian or Swedish nationals would be met with the same public indifference.

The second-class treatment that many Central and Eastern Europeans are subjected to in Germany and the Netherlands can be interpreted as the manifestation of this geopolitical hierarchy. Within scholarly debates, social scientists refer to the power relationship as the
Self/Other” Theory. The “Self” refers to, in this case, the white, native majority of the German-Dutch borderland, while the “Other” represents the Central and Eastern European migrants. The body of the temporary workers as the “Other” serves as a constant reminder to the host countries’ societies that they are the outsider and exist to construct an otherwise heterogeneous mass of people as one. While the body of the “Other” is created through the boundaries of social interaction, they are actively being created in the process.

The reason they are so crucial to the majority society is highlighted by sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman, who states in his book Wasted Lives: “Defined primarily through the combined discourses of character, personal responsibility, and cultural homogeneity, entire populations expelled from the benefits of the marketplace are reified as products without any value and are disposed of. Like leftovers in the most radical and effective way: we make them invisible by not looking and unthinkable by not thinking.”

The fact that these temporary workers’ living conditions and treatment have become a priority only due to the alleged health threat they pose because of COVID-19 supports Bauman’s analysis. Moreover, in the current market economy, he adds that: “With the social state in retreat, and thanks to the rapacious dynamics of a market fundamentalism unchecked by government regulations, the public and private policies of investing in the public good are dismissed as bad business, just as the notion of protecting people from the dire misfortunes of poverty, sickness, or the random blows of fate is viewed as an act of bad faith. Weakness is now a sin, punishable by social exclusion.”

No end in sight

This social exclusion that many of those temporary workers face is especially true for those migrant groups who historically have always been at risk – economically and politically. Removed from the prospect of decent jobs, productive education, satisfactory health care and access to other services, as well essential necessities such as safe shelter, many join the ever-growing ranks of a socio-economical precariat, only less visible. In the case of those temporary workers, Bauman’s statement that dominant “power is measured by the speed with which responsibilities can be escaped” perfectly encapsulates the unfolding situation in the border region.

With no end in sight for scandals involving temporary workers’ living conditions and intensified by the stipulated health threat they pose due to COVID-19, one can conclude that within the EU we need to address our own internal blind spots: namely, the fact that some European workers’ lives matter more than others, and that this reality is carefully disguised by transnational exploitation practices of an already vulnerable group – Central and Eastern European workers. Cloaked by the institutional veil of equal worker protection rights within the EU, it will be one of the bigger challenges of today’s European society to unmask the practices of business owners and politicians profiting from this ongoing injustice and to demand the abolishment of a second class in our own societies.

Alexandra Wishart is a journalist and researcher of social movements specialising on Ukraine and the post-Soviet space. She is currently a PhD student at the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa.

coronavirus, COVID-19, migrant workers