Seasonal Labour Migration to Germany: the structural role of seasonal work in the German agricultural sector

Across advanced economies in Europe, the agricultural sector relies heavily on seasonal migrant workers. Despite being declared ‘essential’ by many governments during the coronavirus pandemic, these workers are widely documented to face extremely poor working and living conditions, along with low wages. While existing literature has primarily focused on countries in southern Europe, this paper examines Germany’s agricultural sector as facing similar challenges in securing migrant workers’ rights. Around 300,000 migrant workers come to Germany each year for the harvest season, with most now arriving from Romania and Poland. We find that the employment of this workforce is driven by structural changes in Germany’s agricultural sector, the Europeanisation of migration policy, the deregulation of the German labour market, the proliferation of new employment categories, and the dominance of sectoral business interests in policymaking. The German case illustrates both the difficulty of regulating precarious, low-wage work in a sector traditionally weak in labour organising, and how the Europe-wide nature of the issue means that, without coordinated action by the labour movement across the EU, the ‘race to the bottom’ in this sector will continue.