Placement and hiring of migrant workers

On 12 April 2022, ABN AMRO published the report 'Recruitment and hiring of labour migrants'. The report examined, among other things, the working conditions of migrant labourers in the food sector. It also describes various incidents and best practices that can help entrepreneurs to improve the working conditions of foreign employees in their own organisation.

Not just a matter of extra hands

The Dutch food industry employs approximately 146,000 people. A large proportion of these employees work in production halls, operating filling machines, cutting fish or packing food boxes. An estimated 60,000 of these employees are migrant workers. The majority of them work for shorter or longer periods on a temporary basis. In recent years, several incidents have come to light that mainly concerned Eastern European temporary workers who were poorly accommodated, who were pressured to come to work despite being ill, or where temporary employment agencies wrongfully withheld wages. Foreign workers are mostly active in subsectors of the food sector where many manual activities take place that are difficult or expensive to automate. Examples of these activities are cutting meat, fish and vegetables.

Margins under pressure

Companies in the food sector are finding it increasingly difficult to find and retain labour. The food sector competes with other sectors such as warehouse work for webshops. Working in a warm warehouse is more attractive than doing repetitive work in a production hall for meat processing at 5 degrees Celsius. The report examined, among other things, the working conditions of migrant labourers in the food sector. It also describes various incidents and best practices that can help entrepreneurs to improve the working conditions of foreign employees in their own organisation.

Paying more for food in the supermarket is only a partial solution to pay workers more and to improve things like housing. The Dutch supermarket trolley is one of the cheaper ones in Europe. Cheap does not by definition mean less sustainable, but it does limit the opportunities for parties to invest in becoming more sustainable.

Strategic staff planning

Due to the shrinking population and rising wages in Eastern Europe, the supply of Eastern European workers will decrease in the coming years. This also leads to increased competition between various EU countries and sectors to find these workers and bind them to the company for the long term. This requires user companies to adopt a more strategic approach aimed at retaining and developing all employees within the company. But also an approach that is aimed at reducing the dependence on the flexible shell, whether or not consisting of Eastern European workers. In the medium term, it is expected that more Asian labour migrants will come to the Netherlands. 

Robotisation

Increasingly, companies are also opting to further automate and robotise their production process. The low hanging fruit for automation in the industry is in sight. However, more complex operations such as filleting fish still often require human hands.
An ideal balance between robotisation and human effort requires a thorough long-term automation plan and substantial investments. These investments are difficult to realise when margins are low, sales fluctuate sharply and cash flows are low. For companies, it is therefore more important to work together in a closed chain with fixed customers. This is the basis for making good long-term agreements. The ABN AMRO report concludes with a list of organisations that are involved in setting standards for the hiring of foreign personnel.

View the report 'Recruitment and hiring of migrant workers’ (Dutch only)
abnamro.nl