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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.

This paper engages with the translation of technological upgrading into migrant workers’ opportunities for employment and decent work in agriculture, a sector commonly disregarded in the debate about the future of work in an era of automation. Zooming in on migrant workers in Dutch horticulture, it explores how technological innovation in horticulture is connected to the scope and conditions of employment and proposes a heuristic to conceptualise the observed dynamics. Our analysis that reads interview data with actors in the Dutch agri-food sector through the lens of the global value chain (GVC) literature contrasts with the pessimistic prediction of widespread technological unemployment. We find product upgrading, e.g., into high value-added products, and process upgrading, e.g., through climate control in greenhouses, to offer potential for more and secure employment. However, workers’ higher work intensity and the dismantling of entitlements to rest and reproduction in an attempt to ‘make people work like machines’ represent the underbelly of these dynamics

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare and exacerbates the existing insecurities of sex workers, a highly stigmatised, often criminalised and economically precarious group of workers. In the Netherlands, sex workers continue to experience different forms of violence despite the occupation’s legalisation, making it a ‘profession in limbo’. This paper therefore seeks to formulate answers to the questions: What are sex workers’ everyday experiences of (in)security? And: How has the COVID-19 pandemic influenced these? Given sex workers’ historical exclusion from policy formulation, we engage with these questions through collaborative research based on semi-structured interviews with sex workers in The Hague. Our analysis reveals a stark mismatch between the insecurities that sex workers’ experience and the concerns enshrined in the regulatory environment. While the municipality’s regulation of the sex industry focuses on sexually transmitted infections (STIs), occupational safety and health issues that sex workers experience also include psychological problems, insufficient hygiene in the workplace and the risk of violent clients. Besides, income insecurity is a key concern for sex workers. The decline in legal workspaces during the past two decades has not translated into higher service rates. Net earnings are further reduced when window operators pass on the risks of illness or damage to sex workers. Furthermore, operators act as powerful gatekeepers of access to remunerative employment. Here, sex workers identify gender-based discrimination with resulting more severe employment and income insecurities for transwomen and male sex workers. This legal liminality is enabled not only by the opaque legal status of sex work in the Netherlands, but also by the gendering of official regulation. Our study mirrors research from the Netherlands and beyond that documents sex workers’ widespread exclusion from COVID-19 support packages. Over and beyond this, we find that immigration status intersects with and mediates these exclusionary processes. We conclude that, firstly, to effectively address the insecurities that sex workers experience and fear, regulation needs to shift from its current criminal law and public health focus to a labour approach. Secondly, over and above such decriminalization, policies and civil society actors alike need to address the gender and sexual hierarchies that underpin sex worker stigma as well as migrants’ discrimination which have come out as powerful mediators of sex workers’ insecurities.

In recent years, several studies have reported on the exploitation endured by migrant workers in Southern European Union member states—especially in sectors such as agriculture and food production. However, there has been much less focus on the North. New research now shows that agri-food workers in Northern Europe also face poor and even abusive conditions. In this light, Are Agri-Food Workers Only Exploited in Southern Europe? focuses on production in Germany, Netherlands, and Sweden. These three EU member states have stronger social protections than Italy, Spain or Greece—yet the dynamics driving wage compression and the violation of workers’ rights are like those in Southern Europe. This publication provides recommendations on how the EU and national governments can act to make Europe’s agri-food system more sustainable, benefiting farmers, consumers, workers, and the environment.

In this paper, we analyse the gender inclusiveness of Pakistan’s economic growth performance as measured by the rate at which employment changes when GDP increases by one percentage point. Our results show not only differences in such employment elasticities across sectors but also across genders. Rooted in women’s status as secondary workers within Pakistan’s labour force, their employment is commonly more responsive to the business cycle. Surprising results include that gender wage equality is positively associated with employment elasticities. Furthermore, we question the optimistic narrative that education improves women’s ability to take up employment in periods of positive GDP growth.

The Netherlands have ratified a number of international treaties guaranteeing the basic right of all persons to health. Despite this relatively favourable legal situation, undocumented migrant women and men in Dutch cities have been shown to suffer ill-health disproportionately. On the basis of a participatory study conducted with undocumented people themselves, in this policy brief, we highlight steps towards realising health rights of undocumented migrants that can feasibly be implemented in Dutch large cities.

SOS Rosarno, an association of farmworkers, farmers and activists in Calabria, Italy, represents an innovative response from below to the extreme exploitation and precarity of migrant farmworkers in the Mediterranean region, as well as to the retailer-driven crisis of small-scale farming.

In the context of neo-liberal governance of markets that has often taken place at workers’ expense, in many cases workers have nevertheless struggled successfully to (re-)establish their rights and improve their working conditions. The Forum on “Worker-driven Innovation in the Globalized Economy – Learning from Encounters” that took place at the International Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS) from 13-15 June 2016 offered an open space to share, discuss and learn from a diverse and exciting range of such initiatives.

This entry examines women’s laboring practices and the status attached to women’s work in twenty-first- century Pakistan. It considers unpaid reproductive and informal work in addition to formal employment. We show that material realities of women’s laboring practices are highly diverse and shaped by power hierarchies related to ideologies of patriarchy, socio-economic class, generation, and religious affiliation. Patriarchal power relations find a strong expression in the spatial segregation of women’s and male’s spheres of circulation (purdah) and the constructions of women as “carers.” They legitimate reproductive work as women’s main responsibility. As a result, they limit girls’ and women’s ability to access education, build social networks, and ultimately participate in the paid labor market outside their homes. Due to the precarious employment conditions of the majority of employed women, it is unlikely that labor force participation by itself contributes to women’s empowerment; rather, women’s labor force participation reproduces existing marginalizations. Nevertheless, participating women themselves can experience significant improvements in their personal situations as a result of gainful employment, which provides them with income, recognition, social networks, and intellectual fulfillment.

Workers on tea estates at the beginning of the tea value chain have historically been and continue to represent some the most marginalised agricultural workers. The tea sector in India is the country’s largest formal sector in terms of employment. Yet, wages of tea workers are the lowest among the formal labour force and their living conditions are appalling (Bhowmik 2015: 29). In this paper, I discuss whether fair trade certification, i.e. the certification of products whose production adheres to a set of social, environmental and governance standards as fair trade-compliant, can contribute to a transformation of the tea chain, able to support moves towards more decent work. This discussion is based on a review of existing studies of the impact of fair trade on tea cultivation in India. With Biekart et al. (2016), I refer to such progressive societal change driven by civic actors as forms of ‘civic innovation’. Given tea workers’ marginalisation, the analysis of fair trade tea cultivation offers a litmus test of the potential of fair trade certification to promote inclusive development in line with the 8th Sustainable Development Goal to “[p]romote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all” (UN 2015).

This article reviews the recent literature on existing mechanisms that allow for the portability of social security entitlements for migrant workers and finds that North–North migrants have the best access to portability. There is limited coordination between origin and destination countries regarding the portability of social entitlements of South–North migrants. These migrants are dealing with discourses and policies that treat them as second class citizens, even as they are providing much-needed labour to their host countries. South–South migrants are seeing new regional mechanisms addressing portability. However, many of the impacts of these mechanisms are not yet known. Other knowledge gaps on portability relate to internal and South–South migration, the role of gender and other social identities, migrants’ occupations as well as their legal immigration status.