COVID-19 and Eastern Europe: how the pandemic uncovered fault lines in the European Union

Photo by Christine Siracusa on Unsplash

The rise of modern slavery in Europe is another hidden cost of the COVID-19 pandemic. Maria Caluianu explains.

On 17 June, a COVID-19 outbreak linked to inadequate working conditions in a meat factory in Gütersloh, Germany was made public. Eight days later, over 2000 people were infected in the area and a lockdown had to be reimposed. The situation in the factory - whose workforce was almost entirely made up of Eastern European migrant workers - is symptomatic of a greater problem. As the virus highlights social inequalities across the world, it raises questions of how the current crisis impacts patterns of modern slavery in Europe, who is most affected, and finally, “how does asparagus taste?”

Infographic by Maria Caluianu

Modern slavery is a term defined by the UK Government as “a complex crime that covers all forms of slavery, trafficking and exploitation.”

For years, EU reports have confirmed that Europe has a major modern slavery problem. Almost half of human trafficking victims have EU citizenships and the majority of them originate from Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, among non-EU nations, Albania is one of the top countries of origin for human trafficking victims.

What has the virus done? 

COVID-19 has highlighted the exploitation of Eastern Europeans in the West. Although most Western European news agencies have reported on individual cases of human rights violations, such as that of the workers in Germany's abattoirs, the reality is that there are simply too many “individual cases” for larger patterns to be ignored.

So, let’s break down all the things that we know have happened. When the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic and countries announced lockdown, many out-of-work migrant workers returned to Eastern Europe, bringing the virus with them. Luckily, Eastern European countries responded efficiently, setting up restrictions before the UK did, despite the latter having a three week head start in cases.

Why did they respond so quickly? Simply put - they had to. Between the brain drain of trained medical professionals and the lack of appropriate medical facilities, Eastern European leaders were aware that a spike in cases like the one Western Europe was facing would be catastrophic.

Infographic by Maria Caluianu. Information from the 2015-16 EU reports on human trafficking, EU webpage, and The Telegraph.

It was at this moment that the first signs of modern slavery started rearing their ugly heads. Western European countries soon found that they needed those migrant workers back and that local recruits were not enough to fill the gap they had left behind. In fact, demand became so high in April - as asparagus harvest season rolled around - that Germany relaxed its strict lockdown rules to import 80,000 harvest workers mainly from Romania and Poland. The UK also allowed special chartered flights with hundreds of Romanians into the country for farming. Without them, Western European crops would go to waste possibly leading to food shortages. Here are the things that went wrong at this point:

• Airport crowding: Thousands of workers rushed to Romanian airports in crammed buses. The airports were a scene of chaos with no social distancing, risking the biosafety of a country that could not afford to have a virus outbreak.

• Bad contracts: Contracts provided to Eastern European workers have been inhumane. However, desperate workers, left unemployed and unsupported by their state, quickly signed them without a second’s thought. What was so wrong with these contracts?

  According to the Guardian, Romanian and Bulgarian workers in Germany were to be paid minimum wage despite being asked to work for up to 12 hours a day, seven days a week. According to an ad for a UK warehouse job, workers could expect 12-hour shifts, day and night, for £8.35-£12 per hour, depending on achieving set targets. Workers were to cover travel costs themselves, in addition to paying £85 weekly rent as well as estate agent fees. Advance rent payments were expected from them two weeks ahead of arrival. 

  Moreover, they had no guarantee of healthcare. In Germany, contracts shorter than 70 days exempt employers from paying social security contributions, such as health insurance coverage, and leave the state with no obligation to enrol workers in the social security system. During the pandemic, this exemption period has been extended to 115 days to prevent seasonal workers from moving from farm to farm and increasing infection risks. This has simultaneously allowed companies to exploit workers for longer without providing any additional welfare benefits. Once the workers are ill, they may have to return home, yet again risking the biosecurity of Eastern states and putting a burden on their healthcare systems.

• Payments may be taken back. Some German contracts have clauses which state that the first two months of work are for education - for instance, learning how to work in a slaughterhouse - and if the worker quits or is fired having worked for less than two months, they may have to repay the earnings for this time. Although this clause does not seem to be enforced by companies yet, its existence is illegal and Eastern European workers state that they are the ones doing the training and not the other way around. 

After being crammed into buses, airports and airplanes and handed with their dreadful contracts, the workers finally reach Western Europe, only to be greeted by a new set of challenges.

• Semi-protective quarantine: In Germany, workers were meant to “quasi-quarantine,” meaning that while working, Eastern Europeans would be put in different housing than German workers for 14 days following entry into the country. This housing would be filled at half-capacity, which means little, considering one house can have up to 12 occupants. This protects the German workers but provides little protection to Eastern Europeans who end up clustered together. 

• Old conditions seem to be worsening: German project, Faire Mobilität, noted many problems in the treatment of Eastern European workers prior to the pandemic including failure to pay minimum wage, illegal deduction of sums from final wages, lack of health insurance, and poor condition of accommodation. These are all expected to be worsened during the pandemic.

• Broken promises: In May, together with the German Government, the EU assured that employers are legally bound to protect workers from COVID-19, while the German Minister of Labour and Social Affairs, Hubertus Heil, stated that the position of agricultural workers in the meat-processing industry are “terrible, shameful and intolerable.” Despite this, last week, over 600 workers of mostly Romanian and Bulgarian origin tested positive for COVID-19 at a German abattoir, likely due to the cramped and unsafe working conditions.

• Censorship: Some contracts illegally specify that the contract details are confidential and that talking to a union representative would be breaking the contract.

• Victim blaming: The company running the abattoir felt it necessary to blame its workers, the majority of whom come from Romania and Bulgaria, for catching the virus while traveling home during the weekend. Considering that, at the moment, Romania and Bulgaria have much fewer cases than Germany, as well as the fact that Romanians would be asked to quarantine for 14 days if they returned to their country, the company’s excuse is unreliable.

It makes you wonder what kind of opinion you have to have of Eastern Europeans to do all this for asparagus and ham.

Besides these examples, we can also look at how Western European use of Ukrainian surrogacy has led to a backlog of babies waiting to be collected. Countries such as Germany outlaw surrogacy, so its citizens must look elsewhere to get around the law. 

Why should we care?

There are three lines of argument - moral, political, and economic - which can explain why you should care about this issue. Regardless of one’s political leanings, at least one of these arguments should strike a chord.

Morally, the statement “slavery is wrong” should not be controversial in this day and age. However, one may feel that the fault does not lie with Western European states, but rather the Eastern ones. It is true that Eastern European states were the first to fail their people by falling short of providing reasonable wages at home and allowing people to leave their countries with horrid contracts. However, the second in line to betray hard-working Eastern Europeans, willing to work unreasonable hours to send money back home and feed their families, was Western Europe and the EU. Whether they like it or not, those living in Western EU nations, regardless of their nationality, have directly profited from the exploitation and slavery of Eastern Europeans provided they have eaten fruit, vegetables, or ham during the pandemic. One can be forgiven for not noticing the disturbing patterns in the news about Eastern European exploitation in this current crisis, however the continuation of this ignorance is unacceptable.

On 11 April, the first Eastern European victim of Germany’s asparagus cravings was found dead in his accommodation. Nicolae Bahan, a 57-year-old father of two, is thought to have contracted COVID-19 in Germany. The treatment of Eastern Europeans in Western Europe, rather than begging the question of whether the West considers Easterners to be deserving of basic human rights, seems to have answered it. So really, only one question remains: “#wieschmecktderSpargel?” or “#howdoestheasparagustaste?” - two hashtags prompted by Mr. Bahan’s death, raising awareness of the overlooked suffering of Eastern Europeans during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It goes without saying that showing one’s fellow EU members that their lives and wellbeing are inconsequential will destabilise the EU and thus Europe as a whole. With the UK leaving the union, the smart thing to do would be to try stopping others from doing the same. Yet, Western countries make no such effort. In the middle of this crisis and growing signs of Eastern European suffering in the West, the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD) decided to erect a statue of Lenin - the founder of Communism, an ideology estimated by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to have killed more than 100 million worldwide and under which Eastern Europe suffered until the 1990s. After courts blocked appeals to prevent the statue’s installation, it was unveiled, the memories of Germany’s involvement in Eastern Europe’s plight is all but forgotten.

To add insult to injury, the party’s leader Gabi Fechtner-Engel stated that “the time of the removed monuments to racists, anti-Semites, fascists, anti-communists, and other relics of a bygone time is clearly a part of the past.” The grouping anti-communists, a group that encapsulates most Eastern Europeans who don’t like the thought of returning to a time when abortion was so illegal it killed women, secret police listened to your every word, and you had the chance of being tortured or “disappearing,” together with racists, fascists, and anti-Semites was not received well in Eastern Europe. 

If the above arguments are not sufficiently convincing, perhaps an economic one will be. Anyone who wants “England for the English” or “insert country for insert people,” won’t get that as long as Eastern Europeans are being exploited in their country. Have you ever asked yourself why employers prefer Eastern Europeans, who can’t understand the local language, over natives? That’s because they can be exploited. If you stop exploitation, you give your people an advantage. You don’t have to hire translators to talk to natives. Also, do not imagine that Brexit will do anything to stop human trafficking. The most common country of origin reported for potential adult victims in the UK in 2019 was Albania which is not even in the EU.

Infographic by Maria Caluianu: An Eastern European worker’s guide to the West.

What needs to be done?

It is currently unknown how many Eastern European migrants have fallen ill with COVID-19, taken it home, or died. Enquiries like the UK BAME report do not look at Eastern European minorities, which are lumped together with others ranging from Australians to the French in the category of “other whites.” 

You probably won’t see a high death rate of Eastern European workers because they are often the youngest and fittest their countries have to offer. Thus, they will not necessarily die, but rather be disabled for long periods of time if they catch the disease. A study by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that one in five of those hospitalised with serious complications were aged between 20 and 44. Approximately 15 to 20 days of mechanical ventilation is needed to assist those recovering from pneumonia. Muscle waste and PTSD are common conditions among those who recover, with recovery commonly taking months to a year. A disability can completely ruin the life of a manual labour worker. 

Thus, inquiries must be carried out not only into the deaths, but the disability resulting from COVID-19 infection among all migrant workers and victims of human trafficking. Moreover, research must be carried out into what happened to the thousands of sex trafficking victims in the EU during lockdown.

Rather than promising better working conditions which are never implemented or implementing ineffective laws, governments should regularly carry out inspections of the most at-risk businesses to protect workers in danger of catching COVID-19.

Additionally, keep an eye on what happens to the UK’s connections to Europe. If intelligence task forces - such as those between the UK and Romania- break down, many Eastern Europeans are likely to be trafficked into the UK and exploited despite Brexit.

Awareness must be raised and people must open their eyes to the suffering of Eastern European migrant workers. One can share articles on the topic or use hashtags such as “#wieschmecktderSpargel?” and “#howdoestheasparagustaste?” but ultimately, for things to change it is vital for people to not forget about the problem of Eastern European modern slavery. Eastern Europe has a tendency of idealising the West while forgetting those most disadvantaged members of their diaspora in order to avoid furthering stereotypes. This does not mean that modern slavery is not rampant, only that many are too ashamed to bring up the topic. Light must be shone on the plight of poor and downtrodden Eastern Europeans.

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