DAILY TRIFECTA: It's A Dirty Job, But Only Migrants Are Willing To Do It
Americans aren't unique in their hypocrisy or their scumbaggery
TITLE: Into the Meat Grinder: On the migrant workers who feed Germany
https://thebaffler.com/latest/into-the-meat-grinder-bonhomme
EXCERPT: There is no disputing how significant a role food plays in our lives, but the enterprise of food production relies on labor that most people living in western European cities rarely see. “The powerless must do their dirty work,” James Baldwin once stressed, while “the powerful have it done for them.” Baldwin had the United States in mind, but his sentiment holds for the agricultural industry in Germany today.
Historically and presently, agrarian workers play a vital role in German society, and yet their labor is consistently undervalued. Some three hundred thousand workers in the industry are migrants; a majority of them come from the former Eastern Bloc, while some, like Olufemi, originate from sub-Saharan Africa. Whether it is in the slaughterhouse or the meat-processing plant, these jobs are occupied in large part by migrants partially because most Germans do not want to do them. Their immigration status, as well as the way they are racialized within Germany, has allowed poor working conditions to flourish. In recent years, organizations such as Faire Mobilität (Fair Mobility), have pointed to the discrimination against migrant workers from central and eastern Europe, who earn an average of 13 percent less than Germans for doing the same tasks.
While Olufemi’s experience at his plant has been good so far, for some migrant workers in Germany’s slaughterhouses, the conditions have been horrific. In recent years, Yulia Lokshina, a Moscow-born filmmaker, has drawn international interest to the plight of migrant workers in the German meat industry. Reading about a multitude of accidents at some of these factories led her to direct her 2020 documentary Rules on the Assembly Line, at High Speed, a portrait of Bulgarian and Romanian workers living in western Germany. The film is acute in its purpose: to expose the exploitative nature of the meat industry. Some of the laborers Lokshina documents work shifts that lasted for seventeen hours a day; others are harassed by their managers to perform at a greater speed. As Lokshina explained to me, we all profit from the wealth that companies make from migrant labor, parts of which are reinvested into their respective towns. The men depicted in her film make a flood of searing admissions: despite working for five to ten years in Germany, most of them have not registered with the government or received benefits.
During the first wave of the Covid-19 outbreak, the reputation of German meat factories was further diminished by scandal. In May 2020, most people in the country were advised to remain socially distant from people outside their household. But meat-packing plants in North Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein, where workers presumably had not been sent home to isolate, were flooded with outbreaks. Coronavirus quickly appeared in various slaughterhouses in western German cities. When Tönnies, the largest meat-processing plant in Germany, had more than a thousand infected workers, the factory temporarily closed. Up to 80 percent of the workers at the plant were employed through subcontractors, making any accountability for their health and treatment onerous.
Throughout Germany, authorities cited the unhygienic standards of communal dorms for temporary migrant labor as a contributing factor to the spread of Covid-19. In most cases, the accommodations were not provided by the factories themselves but by a third-party company that coordinated migrant work contracts, another way that the industry abdicated responsibility for its workers. It was also reported that the air-cooling systems commonly used at abattoirs could have contributed to the spread of Covid-19.
Social workers and local politicians blamed the outbreak on anti-unionism, which they believe fueled workers’ exploitation. Without a union, migrant laborers had few mechanisms to file formal complaints toward an employer. For some, their nationality also compounded their exploitation: given the free movement of citizens between European Union countries, there was a loophole whereby Romanian and Bulgarian workers could work in Germany without first registering with the state. In practice, this meant that companies could avoid providing them with health care, based on the assumption that they were seasonal workers and had health insurance through their home countries. By the time the outbreak occurred, then, some workers were uninsured.
Like Germany, U.S. meat plants were also a hotbed of coronavirus outbreaks, with 59,000 meat-processing workers testing positive during the first year of the pandemic, and 269 dying Covid-19 related deaths. In the United States, the industry also disproportionately depends on immigrant—mostly Latino—and African American labor. While most of the vulnerable migrant workers in Germany’s meat industry are European, they often come from lower-income countries within the EU such as Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland. Ultimately, they are still otherized within the German context, and the prejudice that these workers experience is manifest in their wages, housing, and health outcomes. According to Lokshina, there is a hierarchy of sorts, and workers from Hungary tend to be on the upper echelon; the Roma Civil Monitor has noted that Sinti and Roma workers are on the lower rung. Overall, the effect is that many eastern Europeans working in the German meat industry are essentially racialized.
TITLE: Israel Is Desperate to Replace Palestinian Farmhands
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/25/israel-agriculture-india-palestinians-foreign-workers-rights/
EXCERPT: Farming is fundamental to Israel’s national identity, yet the country’s agricultural sector has been reliant on non-Israeli labor for decades. In 1967, after Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza, the government decided to integrate the territories’ residents into the Israeli economy. Since then, “Palestinians have been integral to the Israeli labor force,” said Adriana Kemp, a sociologist at Tel Aviv University who studies Israeli labor. “You could not talk about whole sectors like agriculture or construction without talking about this large number of Palestinians.”
By the 1990s—following spates of violence from Palestinian militants—Israel began “talking about the possibility of opening the gate for overseas labor migrants,” Kemp said. “That’s when they started actually bringing [in workers] from different countries.” But even so, Palestinians stayed in large numbers; in 2021, tens of thousands of Palestinian laborers made up a quarter of Israel’s total agricultural workforce.
Then came Oct. 7. Claiming that agricultural workers from Gaza had provided intelligence to Hamas fighters, the Israeli government barred some 20,000 Palestinian agricultural laborers from reentering the country. (Israel’s internal security service has since partially disputed this finding.) Around the same time, some 7,800 Thai workers, previously the largest population of overseas workers in Israel due to a 2012 Israeli-Thai bilateral agreement, fled after at least 39 of them were killed in the Hamas attack.
Almost overnight, the agricultural sector lost over a third of its entire foreign workforce. In the early weeks of the war, even though Israeli volunteers stepped in to help struggling farmers, farms hemorrhaged profits. By November, to replenish the labor force, the Israeli government announced that it would allow up to 5,000 overseas workers into the country via a new immigration scheme.
When Orit Ronen heard about the scheme, her immediate thought was that it would lead to “one big balagan”—Hebrew for a “chaotic mess.” Ronen, who works at Kav LaOved, a Tel Aviv-based labor rights nonprofit, was acutely aware of how vulnerable the new arrivals would be, given existing exploitation. Ronen also knew that many farms lacked sufficient infrastructure to house workers, since the farms’ previous Palestinian laborers had simply commuted in from the West Bank or Gaza.
Ronen was right to worry. Since early December, when thousands of new laborers began arriving in Israel, Kav LaOved has received more than 300 requests for information and assistance from workers reporting a litany of abuse. The conditions Odedara and others have experienced are blatantly illegal under Israeli labor law. But ever since the Oct. 7 attack, labor law enforcement has been “less than before,” Ronen said. “And even before, it was low.”
The Population and Immigration Authority (PIBA), the Israeli government agency tasked with labor law enforcement, did not respond to requests for interview. “We have the call center for foreign workers, where they can explain exactly the problem, and they will be checked,” PIBA spokesperson Sabine Haddad wrote in an email.
Migrant workers also often hesitate to contact PIBA’s call center for fear of retaliation; employers “are telling [workers] that we will send you back to India if you will not work as we say,” Bharat said. Employers “can’t do that. I know that, but [the workers] don’t. They are new.” (Israeli law allows workers to stay in the country for 90 days to find a new employer if they have been fired.)
The threat of deportation is especially potent because most workers are effectively stranded in Israel for the duration of their five-year contracts, thanks to the outsized fees they paid before departing for Israel. In Odedara’s case, an agent in India asked him for $6,300 in an under-the-table payment, which he paid for with his family’s savings.
These fees are not a new phenomenon, but labor advocacy organizations scored a major victory in 2012, when Israel and Thailand established a bilateral agreement that eliminated predatory fees for Thai migrant workers. The post-Oct. 7 immigration scheme, which has no such provision, threatens to undo this progress. “The [workers] that come, especially from India, paid thousands of dollars” to brokers, Ronen said. “For them, that’s a very big deal, and that makes them very vulnerable.”
TITLE: Gov't to build more dorms for migrant farm workers
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/tech/2024/05/129_373920.html
EXCERPT: New dormitories are part of the government's plan to improve the workers' living conditions here which have drawn fierce criticism for their horrendous conditions. In December 2020, a Cambodian female migrant worker in Pocheon, a city in the north of Gyeonggi Province, was found dead inside a greenhouse that had been repurposed as living quarters for a number of migrant workers. The structure wasn't insufficient to protect her from the frigid winter conditions.
Under the government plan, a revised enforcement decree under the country's Farmland Act takes effect in July, in which residential structures for farmers and others in agricultural industry can be used for housing local or foreign workers at local farms. To make the plan feasible, the decree has raised the land area ceiling allowed for such structures from 660 square meters to 1,000 square meters.
These measures are to support the government's plan to invite 61,631 migrant workers this year, the biggest scale ever. It is a jump from last year of more than 10,000 and 4.9 times the figure from 2021. Among this year's figure is 45,631 seasonal workers, up from 35,604 last year.
While the ministry anticipates more foreign workers will arrive in the country than ever this year, allocating them to workplaces with particular needs remains a challenge for the authority, especially during the months when seasonal workers crowd the country. Over 70 percent of the entire migrant workers here are concentrated during peak periods each year.
To facilitate the allocation better, the ministry said it will increase employer-worker matching agencies from 170 to 189 this year. A number of such employment agencies run by the country's National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (NACF) will also be increased from 19 to 70 this year and the service will be expanded to 130 cities and counties by 2027.
"Keeping our farmers with enough hands on deck, especially during the harvesting seasons, is the key objective," Kwon said. "We'll monitor employment status in real-time and respond to varying situations as promptly as possible."
Migrant workers advocacy groups, while welcoming the government's move to build new dormitories, expressed concerns whether the new housing quarters will restrain foreigners by enforcing excessive rules to control their behaviors such as curfew or other strict time scheduling.
An activist from Migrants' Trade Union said that several member of NACF in Hamyang, South Gyeongsang Province, who managed a dormitory for dozens of migrant workers forced foreign nationals to come back to the dormitory and sleep at certain hours. The management ran a point-base system and deducted a point from any person who failed to comply with their rules. The final penalty was eviction from the dormitory.
"The farm workers must have been worried their employees might flee their workplaces and wanted to control them," the activist said. "But still, that is a violation of personal freedom. With the government officials limited in number, the dormitories will have to be operated by private groups. I'm worried that such inhumane management might occur in some of these new dormitories."