The ‘Long Spring’ of migration management: Labour supply in the pandemic-induced EU border regime

Abstract

Pandemic-induced border lockdowns in the spring of 2020 severely disrupted the migrant-labour supply in Western EU economies. This disruption of the EU border regime took place for different, even opposite reasons than the so-called ‘crisis’ of 2015, which is also known as the ‘long summer’ of migration. Indeed, where the latter originated from migrants’ massive appropriation of mobility, the disruption of 2020 resulted from state-imposed restrictions on mobility. However, by comparatively analysing two models of work organisation in the agro-industrial sector, characterised by a strong reliance on mobile labour and thus particularly affected by the border lockdowns of 2020 (harvest of crops in Italy and meat processing in the Netherlands), I argue that states’ response to the disruption of border regime in 2020 relied on a pre-existing logistical approach in migration management, adopted in the aftermath of 2015. More specifically, during the pandemic the ethical minimalism intrinsic in the logistical approach allowed a decoupling of migrant workers’ right to mobility, on one hand, and social and economic rights, on the other, thus resulting in increased discipline in the workplace, exposure to infections, exploitation, and dependency on the employer, to which migrant workers opposed more or less visible forms of resistance.

Keywords

EU agro-industrial sector logistification of migration migrant workers pandemic-induced border regime

‘German farmers lack seasonal workers: “Nobody knows who should do it”’ (Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland, 2020), ‘Fields without seasonal workers, harvest at risk’ (Corriere della Sera, 2020), ‘Italy now needs to regularize migrants’ (AGI Agenzia Italia, 2020), and ‘Corridor train from Romania brought 24-hour care workers to Vienna’(APA/Red, 2020) are just a few of the countless newspaper headlines conveying concerns about the shortages of migrant labour in the first stage of pandemic lockdowns in the EU, between March and May 2020. Indeed, the governance of the coronavirus disease (COVID)-19 pandemic brought the structural reliance of advanced economies on the cross-border mobility of low-cost labourers to the forefront. In the EU agro-industrial sector alone, the shortfall of agricultural workers in Western EU countries was estimated to be about one million, mainly corresponding to a drop in arrivals from Eastern Europe and Northern Africa (FAO, 2020).

Western EU states responded to labour shortages in this and other sectors with specific measures. Among them, the European Commission’s calls to member states to ensure free movement of critical workers (European Commission Communication, 2020), the organisation of chartered flights to Germany for 90,000 Romanian asparagus pickers (Newsroom, 2020), the establishment of ‘corridors’ to Austria for 70,000 Romanian and Hungarian 24-hour caregivers (Erizanu, 2020), and the regularisation of hundreds of thousands of irregular migrants employed in the domestic and agricultural sectors in Italy(Ministero dell’Interno, 2020) show the extent to which economic production and social reproduction in Western EU societies rely on underpaid migrant workers.

The unique and extreme character of such a disruption sheds light on usually invisibilised, naturalised, and even trivialised dynamics of labour supply in advanced economies. In this sense, it can be considered an ‘infrastructural inversion’ (Bowker and Leigh Star, 1999), namely, an explicit inversion in the tendency of infrastructure to disappear or ‘fade into the woodwork’. Such an inversion provides a privileged perspective to study the usually unnoticed inner workings of labour-supply infrastructures and debunk related ‘mythologies’ and normativities, such as the representation of immigration as ‘unwanted’ or its categorisation as a mere security problem. On the opposite, it shows the active involvement of states in supplying low-cost foreign labour rather than merely containing cross-border mobilities.

Indeed, far from being an exception, the measures taken to sustain employers’ demands during the first stage of the pandemic fit into a more general pattern of ‘normal’, and mostly ‘under the radar’, migration management through policies of labour supply. One of the most evident (and surely not new) examples in this sense is certainly the EU directive for the use of posted workers (Caro et al. 2015; Lillie, 2012), combined with the EU Eastern enlargement. According to Bommes and Sciortino (2011: 216), indeed, EU Eastern enlargement can be seen as a massive ‘regularisation programme’ on an unprecedented scale that turned ‘hundreds of thousands of irregular migrants into legal foreign residents with a single stroke of a pen’.

Other patterns through which states sustain employers’ demand for low-cost foreign labour are bilateral agreements for so-called ‘co-development’ with northern African countries that allow, for instance, French and Spanish farmers to recruit Tunisian and Moroccan seasonal workers on a temporary basis (Courtin, 2007; Daum, 2007; De Hass, 2010; Potot, 2013). Last but not least, policies formally aiming to restrict migration inflows may ultimately result in the production of an exploitable workforce from which employers can benefit (De Genova, 2013). In this regard, it is paradigmatic, for instance, the process of ‘refugeeization’ of the Italian agricultural workforce (Dines and Rigo, 2015), whereas restrictive EU policies have turned asylum into one of the few, if not the only, legal entry channels to Europe for the large majority of citizens from the global South (Karakayali and Rigo, 2010).

A vast body of migration scholarship focusses on the structural tension between advanced economies’ dependency on migrant labour, on one hand, and strong anti-immigration sentiments and policies, on the other (Boswell, 2007; Cornelius et al., 1994; Piore, 1979; Sciortino, 2004, just to mention a few). Throughout this article, I will explore how logistification provides an angle from which negotiation between these apparently incompatible stances becomes possible and the impacts that such a logistical approach to migration management has on migrant workers in their workplaces.

By specifically focussing on the EU agro-industrial sector, in this article I will comparatively focus on two different models of work organisation: meat processing in the German/Dutch so-called ‘pig belt’ and the harvest of crops in southern Italy. Both industries were defined as ‘essential’ in the first pandemic stage – namely, indispensable to ensure social reproduction. The definition of ‘essential’ (a category often reserved for workers without the right to strike) is one of the novelties introduced by the pandemic management at the discursive level, to justify exploitative practices, hierarchisation processes within the labour force, and a deepening of power relations between the state and employers, on one hand, and the workers, on the other (an approach that I describe elsewhere in terms of biolegitimacy; see Vergnano, 2023. See also Costantini, 2022). While the definition of ‘essential’ implicitly conveys the idea that workers in these sectors are essential ‘for others’, not in themselves (and are therefore allowed to circulate in a context where all other mobilities are considered risky), the overwhelming majority of them are migrant and racially subaltern workers. Regardless of their status (EU citizens, foreign workers with a temporary permit, illegalised migrants, or beneficiaries of international protection), they often converge in the same sites of production, such as farms, processing plants, logistics centres (Peano, 2021), which makes the comparison between apparently disparate sites (such as tomato fields in the South of Italy and meat-processing plants in Northern Europe) relevant and appropriate.

Collected data are based on the existing literature, policy and legal texts, worker unions’ and civil society organisations’ reports and, as in the Dutch case, informal conversations with three migrant workers in a Dutch meat-processing plant. One of them is a former asylum seeker from Ghana, whom I met in my previous research on asylum seekers’ intra-EU movements and with whom I kept in touch throughout 2020 and 2021. Since we were both living in Amsterdam at that time, we had several opportunities to meet in person besides maintaining contacts through phone calls, WhatsApp messages, and social media. He introduced me to two other migrant workers (from Ghana and Latvia, respectively) employed in the same plant. He also agreed to give me the access to the temporary-work-agency app, which provided daily or weekly notifications about his work schedule and kept track of work hours and payslips. In this article, not only the names of research participants (the workers of the meat-processing plant), but also the names of the companies and subcontractors are fictive to protect the workers engaged in this ethnographic study from employers’ retaliations.

The logistical approach in migration studies

Defining the reorganisation of migrant labour supply in times of pandemic as a ‘logistical’ response to disruptions in the supply chain implies a more general reference to the lively critical debates surrounding ‘logistics’ in recent years (Cowen, 2014; Easterling, 2014; Grappi, 2016; Kanngieser, 2013; Neilson, 2012; Rossiter, 2016), resulting from contemporary transformations in geo-economics and the global economy brought about by the ‘logistics revolution’ (Cowen, 2014). The specificity of this term consists in creating ‘added value’ by integrating the two processes of production and circulation of goods (previously framed separately) into a single business.

Critical debates surrounding the logistic revolution took place in migration studies as well (Anderlini, 2022; Krifors, 2021; Peano, 2019; Scheel, 2021; Vianelli, 2022). Moritz Altenried et al. (2018), in particular, propose adopting a logistical approach to describe the project of reorganising the European border and migration regime in response to the ‘long summer of migration’ of 2015 (a turning point in the so-called EU ‘refugee crisis’), namely, through the differentiation, filtering and hierarchisation of asylum seekers according a logistical rationale reflected in the use of terms such as a ‘corridors’, ‘platforms’, ‘hubs’, and ‘hotspots’ in EU and national policy texts. Adopting a logistical approach in migration management entails, according to the aforementioned proponents of this approach, the extraction of value from migrants and asylum seekers’ mobilities through processes enabling a quick differentiation between migrants filling labour markets’ needs and those to be deported. In general, the logistification of migration responds to the long-standing idea of an ‘orderly and managed’ migration, or a ‘just-in-time’ and ‘to-the-point’ migration, in a time where labour markets’ needs are increasingly imponderable and must respond to the imperative of ‘flexibility’: migration can no longer be managed according to the post-WWII Fordist rationality of the ‘guest-workers’ regime based on relatively stable predictions of standardised industrial production (Altenried et al., 2018; Mezzadra, 2016).

‘Green lanes’ and ‘transit corridors’ also form part of the terminology used by the European Commission in its guidelines and recommendations to ensure the availability of workers (together with goods and essential services) in the spring of 2020, during the first intra-EU border lockdown as a response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Since both the summer of 2015 and the spring of 2020 can be described as moments of striking disruptions of the EU border regime, even if for quite opposite reasons (migrants’ ‘turbulence’ and ‘excess’ in one case and state-imposed restrictions on mobility in the other), the logistical lens adopted to analyse the former might prove equally or even more useful to understanding the latter as I will argue in this article.

A few premises should be specified to understand some important features of the idea of logistification of migration. Indeed, logistifying migration is above all a governmental fantasy that produces real effects but also collides with the unstable, multi-layered assemblages underlying migration policies, whose coordination evades a centralised and unitary logic (Bertossi, 2011; Bertossi and Duyvendak, 2012; Finotelli and Michalowski, 2012; Hess, 2012; Joppke, 2007; Tsianos and Karakayali, 2010). This is precisely one of the main characteristics of migration regimes since international migration is part and parcel of broad processes and structures that go far beyond the scope of states’ sovereignty and capacities of control (Cvajner et al., 2018; Echeverría, 2020). By adding an additional layer to the assemblage of different interests, desires and logics shaping migration regimes, states’ attempts to manage migration orderly, according to a logistical rationale, may result in some cases in mere ‘quick fixes’ producing limited or contradictory effects, thus making logistification less efficient than planned.

Furthermore, the logistification of migration not only collides with states’ unstable migration regimes but should be also understood in a dialectical relationship with the autonomy of migration – and indeed the proponents of the idea of logistification of migration are also strongly engaged with the autonomy-of-migration approach (Bojadžijev and Serhat 2015; Moulier Boutang, 2007; De Genova, 2017; Mezzadra, 2011). Migrants’ autonomous mobilities, in fact, are framed by the necessity to sell their labour on the world market ‘at the best price’, in spite of increasingly restrictive border regimes, thus creating tensions and conflicts in labour markets and continuously challenging their reduction to a mere commodity (Altenried et al., 2018; Heller et al., 2019). The composition of the working class in the Western EU should be understood also as a result of practices of autonomous appropriation of mobility by citizens of the global South, and in this sense the distinction between asylum seeking and economic migration should be analytically deconstructed. Within the dualised EU labour market, Eastern EU posted workers, temporary non-EU workers, and asylum seekers often converge at the same sites of production, such as farms, processing plants, and logistics centres (Peano, 2021).

In addition, one of the main features of the process of logistification that is especially interesting for the purposes of this analysis is its ‘ethical minimalism’ (Grappi, 2020), which allows to normalise the treatment of migration and asylum ‘as technical issues rather than social and political challenges, [. . .] [thus] limiting the reach of global justice as a political concept’ (Grappi, 2020: 1). Violence, which is intrinsic in the logistical management of migration, is often the result of such ethical minimalism. Indeed, as Cowen (2014: 15) remarks, logistic networks and spaces are per se highly vulnerable and require high levels of ‘organized violence’ to be preserved. During the pandemic, mobility rights were clearly decoupled from social, political and labour rights – not to mention the right to health (Della Rosa, 2021) since EU responses had been ‘strong enough’ to ensure free movement of essential labour, and ‘minimal’ in the field of migrant workers’ protection (Mantu, 2022: 25).

In the next sections, I will examine how, in the name of ‘operational efficiency’, states’ ‘quick fixes’ to pandemic-related disruptions in well-established models of work organisation based on migrant labour allowed a further disciplinarisation, commodification and exploitation of migrant labour in their workplaces, while migrant workers in some cases were able to turn the limits, contradictions and interstices of the logistification approach to their advantage.

The German-Dutch ‘Pig Belt’ in pandemic times

‘It is very important that you install the JOBS app on your phone and check the updates of your work schedule. Before coming to work always check the app’. With these words, an approximately 40-year-old Romanian coach, Gabriel, announced to an audience of newly recruited workers the flexible and digitalised relationship between employers and employees under the provision of the 0-hour contracts that the temporary employment agency, JOBS Logistics (subcontractor of Wurst Inc.), was offering them. ‘You are welcome on board. We are actually honoured and proud of being one of the few companies in the Netherlands currently hiring, in spite of the Corona crisis’.

At Wurst Inc., Gabriel’s audience was composed of Polish, Romanian, Latvian, Spanish, Eritrean, Ghanaian and Congolese workers. None of them were Dutch. They were expected to perform all the activities in direct contact with the meat itself in the departments of production, packing and the dreaded ‘tumblers’, whose temperature was between 0°C and 4°C. In the lockdown period just before Christmas, with a high demand for meat from the supermarkets and new limitations affecting German competitors, Wurst Inc. was actually increasing its temporary staff by recruiting workers through JOBS Logistics and other agencies.

Wurst Inc.’s badge of honour (namely, the fact of being one of the few companies recruiting workers in a moment of economic contraction) was correlated to a set of different circumstances, the most remarkable advantage being the sudden loss of the Netherlands’ closest competitor in meat processing: Germany.¹ Indeed, severe COVID-19 outbreaks in German slaughterhouses and the spread of the African Swine Fever (ASF) to wild boars in Germany disrupted production in the German sector (Hogan and Hunt, 2020).² The German government responded to severe pandemic outbreaks among workers of the meat sector with a legislative ban on the use of subcontracted work in the German meat industry.³

While the model of work organisation in the Dutch meat sector is also based on posted and subcontracted work, and pandemic outbreaks also occurred in Dutch meat plants, the Dutch government, unlike the German one, did not intervene to limit sub-standard labour conditions. On the contrary, the Netherlands was among the EU countries that took most advantage of the circumstances affecting the until-then booming German meat processing sector (Byrne, 2021).

In the spring of 2020, disruptions of the labour supply across internal EU borders were addressed by the European Commission through guidelines and recommendations, including the ‘Guidelines Concerning the Exercise of the Free Movement of Workers during the COVID-19 Outbreak’ and the communication from the Commission ‘On the Implementation of the Green Lanes under the Guidelines for Border Management Measures to Protect Health and Ensure the Availability of Goods and Essential Services’. This way, the usual flow of posted workers could be supplied to Dutch meat processing plants as in pre-pandemic times.

The EU Commission’s recommendations are characterised by a language in which terms such as ‘green lane border crossings’, ‘dedicated lane’, ‘special stickers’, ‘transit corridors’ explicitly referring to the management of posted workers and seasonal migrant workers, are frequently used. The rationale behind such guidelines is to avoid, among other things, disruptions to the labour supply in those economic activities, deemed essential, that are based on posted and seasonal work, such as crop harvesting and meat processing. In the middle of drastic mobility restrictions, which had never occurred in the history of humanity on such a scale in such a short period of time, special lanes were dedicated to ensuring the smooth circulation of critical workers, among which migrants and racially subjugated workers are overrepresented.

In the Dutch/German ‘pig belt’ between Lower Saxony and the northern Netherlands, the procedure of subcontracting concerns more than just labour. Usually, the subcontract includes the whole ‘package’ of raw material, time, and labour necessary to process a certain amount of meat in a certain amount of time. Once these parameters are set (amount of meat and duration of time), the agency for temporary work is responsible for workers’ recruitment and remuneration. The agency can also become a service provider for workers themselves as regarding housing, transportation, and the provision of tools and safety gear (applying fees for their services: in the case of JOBS Logistics, an exorbitant fee of 500 euros per month applied to workers accommodated in shared rooms in housing facilities – a price much higher than the average cost of rent in the housing market). This mechanism not only makes workers 100% dependent on the agency for all their needs, but also allows the main company to avoid accountability for possible illegalities – a dynamic that could be defined as an ‘externalization of illegalities’. According to this system, slaughtering, production, and packaging are almost exclusively performed by migrant workers, the majority of whom were recruited by subcontractors from EU countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, or the Baltic states. In the Netherlands, during the public-health emergency, not only did these problematic mechanisms remain in place, but also local, racially subjugated Dutch workers moved to this sector too, having lost their jobs in other sectors.

Beyond the exceptional guidelines established by the EU Commission, the supply of workers to the Dutch meat processing plants could rely on pre-existing, well-oiled, ‘turbocapitalistic’, and digitalised model of work organisation, fostered by extremely liberal national regulations. Indeed, in the Netherlands, legal and financial barriers to set up agencies for temporary work are very low⁴ and the possibility even exists to ‘turbo-liquidate’ a company overnight (i.e. dissolve it quickly and cheaply).⁵ Furthermore, the Dutch Collective Labour Agreement for Temporary Agency Workers allows for the termination of an employment contract with immediate effect, on the user company’s request, in case workers fall ill (art. 15b). The flexibility in labour supply, according to retailers’ demand, is facilitated by a regulative framework allowing atypical working conditions, such as on-call work and 0-hour contracts. The provision of just-in-time and to-the-point labour, in turn, can be easily administered through the mediation of digital apps, such as the JOBS Logistics app, that notify the worker of their schedule for the following day or week. Indeed, the number of working hours from week to week usually varies, resulting in huge wage oscillations (a weekly wage may vary from 150 to 600 euros); thus making ends meet is especially difficult for workers. The digitalised recruitment system was already perfectly functional at the time of the pandemic outbreak: having the WhatsApp number of a temporary work agency was enough. Pictures of the necessary documents (ID cards or residence permits) were digitally submitted by candidates who were then immediately called to start the new employment.

However, while ‘green lanes’ and ‘transit corridors’ for posted workers were implemented at the EU level, meat workers in the Netherlands as elsewhere were affected by the emergence of new ‘frontiers’, namely, new frontlines of exposure to the risk of infection. COVID-19 outbreaks, indeed, frequently occurred in slaughterhouses and meat processing plants. In the Netherlands, some plants had to close for several days or weeks (Clevers and Van Mersbergen, 2020; EFFAT, 2020). As previously mentioned, rather than taking this opportunity to improve the notoriously sub-standard living and work conditions of migrant workers employed in meat processing plants, the Dutch government took a laissez-faire stance (Palumbo and Corrado, 2020a) by placing the responsibility to avoid further disruptions on employers (Megens and Van der Heeden, 2020).

‘I am very happy I found this work’, Ibrahim declared in a conversation after his first day at the Wurst Inc. plant. ‘We are living in crazy times. The streets of Amsterdam are empty, no tourists, hotels and restaurants closed, I was very afraid I was not going to find work’. Ibrahim was a Ghanaian man of 28 years, who arrived in Europe by boat in 2016 and managed to join his Ghanaian contacts in Amsterdam in 2020, shortly after the beginning of the pandemic in the EU.

You see? This is the company app. Every day I have to check their updates so that I know whether I will work tomorrow or not. My shift starts every day at 4:00 p.m., but actually I have to be there at 3:00 p.m. because our breaks are not paid.

It was indeed at his own expenses, through the deduction of 1 hour per day from his weekly wage, that Ibrahim discovered that the formally declared work shift did not correspond with the actual shift, which was 1 hour longer. Actually, workers were requested to be in the workplace even sooner to undergo the daily COVID-19 test. While monitoring workers’ health conditions was mandatory for the company throughout the health emergency, it represented further unpaid time for workers who were requested to be in the workplace 1 hour before the informal beginning of their work shift – namely, 2 hours before the beginning of the formally declared shift: in other words, just in time and to the point – from the employers’ perspective. In this sense, employers were preventing further pandemic outbreaks among their workers through time dispossession, while the digitalised relationship between subcontractors and workers made the employer further unaccountable for workers’ disenfranchisement. These forms of unpaid labour added up to other more or less evident frauds, like the aforementioned fees for housing.

Beyond the obligatory test at the entrance, the biggest change introduced by employers in the aftermath of the pandemic was the increased control of workers’ behaviour and mobility across different spaces and times. New supervisors were hired and explicitly instructed not only to ensure workers’ social distancing during working hours, breaks in the workplace and leisure time in housing facilities, but also prohibiting conversations among them. This way, a further layer of oppression was added onto pre-existing factors preventing workers from establishing solidaristic relationships (such as linguistic barriers, high turnover, and lack of prior experience in collective action).

It is worth noting that the systematic monitoring of workers’ health conditions does not automatically result in more safety for workers. This aspect became very clear the day that Kofi, one of Ibrahim’s colleagues, returned home with a strong cold. Catching a cold is especially common among meat workers since meat is processed at very low temperatures. However, the requirement to use masks turned a simple cold into a problem. ‘I cannot go to work like this’, Kofi explained. ‘I cannot even blow my nose. With a runny nose and the mask, I cannot even breath’. However, a 1-day sickness leave would have been impossible: with the new rules, a negative COVID-19 test was required before being reincorporated at work after a leave, thus meaning at least 2 days without any income (temporary agency workers are not entitled to any benefits in the first 2 days of sickness and can even be fired, according to the Dutch Collective Agreement for Temporary Agencies). In the end, by turning the anonymous, digitalised work relationship to workers’ advantage, Kofi left his card to Ibrahim, who checked-out in Kofi’s place at the end of the shift. This way, Kofi was able to ‘escape’ the workplace beforehand without losing his earnings. In general, even in the midst of the pandemic, temporary meat workers preferred to hide their disease rather than running the risk of being fired.

The regularisation of seasonal workers in Italy

In Italy, the progressive reduction of labour quotas since 2011 has been accompanied by an increasing number of (mostly Western African) migrant workers in the Italian agricultural sector. These migrant workers’ documents have usually been issued for humanitarian reasons rather than for work reasons (Dines, 2018; Palumbo and Corrado, 2020b; Peano, 2020b). Therefore, a process of ‘refugeeization’ of the agricultural workforce has been taking place (Dines and Rigo, 2015), and the ‘humanitarian reason’ (Fassin, 2012) has increasingly permeated discourse, representation and policies targeting agricultural workers (Dines, 2018). In general, in Italian farms, asylum seekers work as braccianti (seasonal workers) together with Eastern-EU workers and other migrants in irregular situations (e.g. rejected asylum seekers) (Gambino, 2017). Informal settlements of braccianti are often in close proximity of asylum reception centres. These informal settlements, as well as reception centres themselves, have turned into centres for the recruitment of an underpaid and often informal workforce (Peano, 2020a) through an exploitative system of recruitment known as ‘caporalato’ (gang mastering).

Unlike the legal, subcontracted, digitalised recruitment system in the Dutch meat sector, informal gang mastering in Italian settlements of braccianti – a system that worked perfectly working in ordinary times – showed its limits during the health emergency. When the pandemic emergency was declared in Italy in March 2020, many non-EU migrants typically employed as braccianti were physically present in Italy. In this sense, they were not actually ‘missing’: they were just irregular, either because they didn’t have an official status or because they didn’t have a regular job contract – or both. Most workers were simply not entitled to reach farms through police checkpoints deployed everywhere to enforce restrictions on internal mobility for the simple reason they didn’t have the necessary documents to prove they were essential workers. In this sense, the infrastructural inversion triggered by the pandemic made two characteristics of the Italian agro-industrial sector apparent: the increasing reliance on non-EU asylum seekers and the extensive use of undeclared labour.

The two main Italian farmers’ associations, Coldiretti and Confagricoltura, estimated the shortage of labour at 370,000 and 200,000 workers respectively. The logistical fantasies of the Italian government’s approach to addressing such a shortage took two specific forms. The first was the regularisation of undocumented migrants as an ad hoc governmental response to farmers’ alarm about labour shortages (and more general risks concerning the functionality of the food chain). Indeed, in spite of the formally declared rationale underlying the regularisation of undocumented migrants, namely, to ensure ‘public health’ in a moment of health emergency, the regularisation exclusively targeted two specific categories of migrant workers: those employed in the domestic sector (either as caregivers or cleaning ladies) and those employed in the agro-industrial sector. The logistical approach is particularly visible in this strategic choice: migrants working in other sectors, also characterised by an over-representation of foreign workers but not deemed essential (such as construction and catering, to name a few), were not included in the regularisation. As a result, most undocumented migrants remained excluded from access to healthcare. Migrants’ health rights (and thus public health in general) were subsumed to the economic imperatives of labour market needs – even in the context of a health emergency.

The second logistical aspect in the intervention of the Italian government was the possibility of ‘change of lane’ between asylum and labour provided by the same measure of regularisation: while asylum and economic migration are usually categorised as very different forms of migration (with most citizens of the global South only entitled to the former), the exceptional regularisation included the possibility to apply for a work permit on the condition of withdrawing an asylum application. In other words, while a residence permit for humanitarian reasons is usually not interchangeable or ‘interoperable’ with a permit for work, the sudden visibility of the Italian economy’s structural need for migrant workers led to the approval of a provision that makes this changeability possible – of course, only with the condition of filling specific labour market needs, namely, exclusively in the domestic and the agro-industrial sector.

After years marked by intense anti-immigrant rhetoric, epitomised in the Minister of Interior Matteo Salvini’s popular slogan ‘porti chiusi’ (‘closed harbours’, as a reaction against asylum seekers’ landings on Italian shores), such a sudden shift in migration politics put a strain on Italian ruling coalition, comprised of Salvini’s former allies, the 5-Star movement. In this sense, the tension between the structural need for migrant labour, that had suddenly become visible, and strong anti-immigration sentiments, constructed along the years through an intense and strategic propaganda, was reflected in a strained negotiation between the ruling parties (Perrotta, 2022). It is precisely the rationale of the operational efficiency that provided legitimacy to this temporary, but radical, change in Italian migration politics after decades characterised by increasing securitisation and criminalisation. As the Minister of Agriculture put it, ‘we need immigrants in agriculture, or the functioning of the food chain will be at risk’ (Il Fatto Quotidiano, 2020).

Predictably, the negotiated, emergency-driven, and ad hoc character of the regularisation decree was disappointing for the main parties involved: employers and workers. According to employers, the time required to first pass the measure and then have workers undergo the processes of regularisation, did not generate the necessary workforce in time for the harvests (Cappellini, 2020), thus showing once more that logistification is above all a governmental fantasy. On the other side, the self-organised workers’ group ‘Lega dei Braccianti’ (‘League of Farm Workers’), mostly composed of African farm workers, organised a strike on May 21 as a response to the regularisation promoted by the government. Reasons for the strike were the limited scope of the regularisation itself (exclusively restricted to migrants working in the agricultural and domestic sectors), the narrow criteria for eligibility and the subordination of the demand for regularisation to the employer’s will (Cangemi, 2020).

However, what is interesting for the purposes of this analysis is precisely the discursive shift through which the main proponents of the regularisation legitimised the measure in the eyes of constituencies. The decree was indeed justified through a logistical discourse and rationale (as the Minister of Agriculture put it, ‘otherwise the functioning of the food chain will be at risk’), together with other rhetorical tropes and arguments drawn from the traditional repertoire of humanitarian reason (Perrotta, 2022).

Interestingly, the treatment of migrant workers’ legal status as a technical issue to be solved to guarantee the food supply chain has specific consequences in terms of the increased exploitability of migrant workers themselves. An important element of ‘ethical minimalism’ contained in the decree is that the legislator did not provide any possibility for the worker whose regularisation has been requested by the employer, during the time the application is processed, to terminate the employment and start a new one with a different employer (not to mention in another sector). This, in connection with limited capacities by local immigration offices to handle the applications received, with an estimated processing time of 5 years in Rome and a disconcerting 30-year timeframe in Milan (Ero Straniero, 2021), may result in a bond sine die between the employer and the employee, entailing the increasing exploitability of the worker or even new forms of legal ‘semi-enslavement’ (Schiavone, 2021).

Conclusion

Border lockdowns in the spring of 2020 provided an exceptional scenario for understanding what happens in so-called ‘advanced economies’ when nationalistic claims for border closures become a reality. Such a unique circumstance was revelatory about the ordinary dynamics of the migrant labour supply and represented a test for unquestioned assumptions about the ‘undesirability’ of certain types of migration inflows, namely, the cross-border mobility of workers from Eastern Europe and so-called ‘economic migrants’ from the global South, or ‘bogus asylum seekers’. Indeed, in Western European countries, the actual result of border closures was the disruption of well-established models of work organisation accompanied by a strong, urgent and very concerned demand by employers to move quickly back to ‘normal’.

Throughout this article, I have analysed two case studies of work organisation within the EU agro-industrial sector deemed ‘essential’ during the pandemic with the aim to understand how governments negotiated the tension between shortages of migrant labour, on one hand, and long-standing trends of anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, on the other. I argue that the pandemic governance exacerbated a pre-existing trend in migration management, namely, a governmental fantasy of logistical management of migration – a trend already grasped in migration scholarship, in particular through the concept of ‘logistification of migration’ proposed by Altenried et al. (2018b).

This article compares on two different cases that may appear quite different at a first sight: the legalised, well-oiled, and digitalised model of recruiting through subcontracting in the Dutch meat sector and the informal recruitment of migrant workers, among which asylum seekers play a fundamental role, in the Italian agricultural sector. The difference between the two models, however, is not as sharp as some might assume. As this article exposes, different illegalities are carried out by both Italian and Dutch employers and subcontractors, and exploitative practices, including in severe forms, are common in both the Italian and Dutch agro-industrial models of work organisation. Indeed, sub-standard and exploitative practices drive the whole European agri-food system across the North/South divide (Palumbo and Corrado, 2020). Furthermore, besides their apparent differences, both the Dutch and the Italian models are fed through a supply of racially-subaltern and/or migrant workers who are often the same individuals moving from one exploited job to another according to market demands (Peano, 2021). Finally, in spite of the differences between the two models, it is possible to observe how governments at the EU and national levels sought to quickly fix disruptions caused by mobility restrictions by adopting or refining a logistical approach to provide the required amount of labour ‘just-in-time’ and ‘to-the-point’.

Dutch employers of the meat sector could rely on the EU Commission guidelines concerning the exercise of the free movement of workers during the COVID-19 outbreak, on one hand, and on the already-in-place system of labour supply through subcontractors, on the other. In Italy, instead, exceptional measures to regularise undocumented workers in the agro-industrial sector were adopted. While the Dutch government adopted a laissez-faire stance, the Italian government had to intervene ad hoc to address the structural informality in Italian agricultural labour. In both cases, interestingly, responsibilities for workers’ safety (applying for their residence permits and ensuring the enactment of health prevention measures in the workplace) were essentially relegated to employers. The relationship between employers and workers has therefore been rearticulated to the benefit of the former with an intensification of the exploitation of the latter.

Indeed, far from being a privilege, the recognition of essential workers’ (among which migrant, undocumented, and racially subjugated workers are overrepresented) mobility rights in a context where all forms of unnecessary mobility were forbidden turned into a new layers of oppression, and new ‘frontiers’ and frontlines of exposure to the infection risk emerged. The subordination of migrant workers’ social, political and labour rights in the name of operational efficiency actually increased during the pandemic.

The decoupling of mobility rights, on one hand, and social, political and labour rights – not to mention the right to health – on the other, was possible precisely because the mobility of foreign labourers was logistically managed as a mere technical issue requiring a ‘quick fix’ to the disruptions resulting from mobility restrictions. To guarantee the functioning of global supply chains, migrant workers’ rights have been increasingly violated by employers (except for the right to move to the workplace), dependency on the employers increased up to the level of new forms of semi-slavery, and further discipline was imposed in workplaces.

The logistification of labour supply is not exempt from frictions, tensions, micro-resistances, and struggles, though. In different forms, from organising strikes to taking advantage of the interstices in digital systems, migrant workers tend to resist their reduction to mere commodities as the examples of the strike of Italian seasonal workers and the tactical exchange of digital identities as an act of radical care in the Dutch meat processing plant demonstrate.

The model of society underpinning nationalist and exclusivist ideologies has been clearly questioned by the labour shortages that took place as a result of mobility restrictions, not only as a consequence of the health emergency.⁶ The logistical response alone, due to its intrinsic vulnerability, may prove insufficient to guarantee social reproduction without broader public policies that ostensibly have nothing to do with the labour market (e.g. migration, welfare, health and social policies). Where the mobility of essential cross-border workers was quickly re-established, such as in the Netherlands, other problems soon emerged, such as pandemic outbreaks in workplaces. Addressing migrant labour as an issue of global justice requires, of course, a broader shift in hegemonic discourses and practices about migration, namely, an acknowledgement of the active subjectivity of border crossers and the political dimension of their movements, while abandoning the long-held characterisation of (migrant) labour as a disposable commodity.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This article presents part of LABOR-PAS research findings (Labour relations and border regimes in a pandemic scenario. A comparative study of migrant labour in the EU agro-industrial sector), funded by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO), grant 12A9822N (Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship).

ORCID iD

Cecilia Vergnano

Notes

Author biography

Cecilia Vergnano is a social anthropologist whose research trajectory is placed at the intersection between the realms of labour and mobility. After in-depth research on the everyday life of intra-EU borders, and their function of containment of mobilities labelled as ‘undesired’ during the post-2014 crisis of the EU border regime, her research now focusses on models of work organisation strongly relying on ‘much desired’ migrant underpaid labour – in particular, in the EU agro-industrial sector – and their embeddedness in regimes of mobility and migration. Before being granted an FWO senior postdoctoral fellowship at KU Leuven, she was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow at the University of Amsterdam.

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