European Journal of Migration and Law最新文献

Migrant labour constitutes an important feature of the Swedish agri-food sector – often employed with sub-standard working and employment conditions. Combining legal analysis and data from semi-structured interviews this article analyses the socio-legal factors and structure of the labour market and its interplay with the national migration regime that make possible the resort to exploitative practices in the employment of migrant labour in the Swedish agri-food sector. Theoretically speaking the article approaches migrant labour using Mariana Valverde’s concept of the ‘chronotopes of law’ capturing the simultaneous and dynamic relationship between space and time in defining legal meaning. In short, the study of legal processes as the result of a space-time interaction.

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.

The Covid-19 pandemic crisis has shown that migrant workers are essential for the agri-food system, especially in Spain and Italy. The development of fruit and vegetable production in both countries has importantly relied on migrant labour due to integration in verticalized value chains and competition in neoliberal globalization. Migration and asylum policies as well as mobility policies and recruitment mechanisms have made labour differentiated, precarious, cheap, flexible and constantly renewed to match the specific demand in the sector. In both countries, the national governments have promoted different interventions to address labour exploitation, migrant workers’ vulnerabilities, and also labour shortage risks, following internal socio-political confrontation and pressures from different actors. Having pointed out the interplay of dynamics and mechanisms causing labour exploitation in the agri-food system, this contribution will analyse the political interventions in the two countries showing how they shape specific migration and labour regimes.

The Covid-19 pandemic has placed the contradictions that characterize the conditions of migrant workers in Dutch horticulture in the spotlight. Central and Eastern European (CEE) workers’ low labour and living standards contrast with the sector’s high productivity. This article disentangles these contradictions by analysing their legal, economic, and social causes through the lens of the power resources approach. Countering discourses that depict rights abuses as exceptional and relate them to rogue employers, the article shows that migrant precarity has been legalised in the context of the highly flexibilised Dutch labour market. Workers’ location at the bottom of an agri-food chain dominated by retailers and their dependency on employers weakens their economic position. Trade unions’ lack of effective outreach to CEE migrants has not helped to counter this disempowerment. Engaging with these sources of migrant farmworkers’ disempowerment also helps us to identify entry points for change sketched in the article’s conclusion.

Although political attention has been devoted to the exploitation of migrant farmworkers in Southern Europe, migrant workers also experience exploitive practices in the agri-food systems of Northern EU countries. Building on critical studies on vulnerability and exploitation and on migration and labour regimes, and drawing on the papers in this Special Issue of EJML, this article critically compares labour migration policies and models for labour market regulations in Northern and Southern European countries (specifically Italy, Spain, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands), underlining how policies and legislation on migration and labour mobility have contributed to creating specific situational vulnerabilities – especially with respect to the interplay of legal status, nationality and gender – which are exploited within agri-food systems. While there have been relevant national initiatives aimed at addressing the rights of migrant farmworkers during the pandemic, in most of the examined European countries these have mainly consisted of short-term and reparative measures which fail to address the root causes of vulnerabilities to exploitation.