From regulated precarity to decent work: Improving conditions for migrant workers in Dutch agriculture

Migrant workers in the highly productive Dutch agricultural sector experience unfair labour practices, including structurally poor wages and living standards, insecure contracts and hazardous working conditions. The Covid-19 pandemic has placed this precarity in the spotlight. • The current Dutch legal framework and economic model enable structurally unfair labour practices that particularly affect Central and Eastern European (CEE) migrant workers. • This policy brief proposes steps to move from precarity towards decent migrant work in Dutch agriculture. It is based on the Netherlands chapter of the comparative study “Are Agri-Food Workers Only Exploited in Southern Europe? Case Studies on Migrant Labour in Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden”.