Meat Plants and Strawberry Fields Forever? Precarious Migrant Labour in the German Agri-Food Sector before and after COVID-19

Abstract

Despite a series of regulative steps and the introduction of a minimum wage in 2015, meat production as well as agricultural and horticultural farming remain vulnerable to undeclared work and exploitative employment structures. The COVID-19 pandemic was a disruptive event for these industries: mass infections in meat factories and housing facilities for seasonal migrants, but also a looming shortage of harvest workers evoked rapid regulative responses, albeit with a different focus. In the agricultural fruit and vegetable sector, security of supply, labour shortage and farm survival centred stage, prompting adaptive measures to comfort farmers, retailers and consumers. In the meat industry, reforms were much more profound and marked a fundamental policy change towards improved working conditions. This article sheds light on the frameworks for recruiting, employing and (potentially) exploiting migrant workers in these two segments of the German agri-food sector. We critically contextualise the legal, political and institutional changes ever since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and find that the reforms each have a quite different potential to sustainably improve the precarious working conditions of migrant workers in agriculture and meat production, respectively.