Insights from Fairwork, FNV-uitzend, FNV-Agrarisch groen, Shop – The Hague, and OKIA brought a great understanding of the precarious situation of migrant workers in the Netherlands and about their important work advocating for workers’ rights and dignity. Migrant organisations could not attend but we acknowledged their important work.

We learned more about the low wages of workers through employment agency; about poor housing and dangerous working conditions; the vulnerable position and loss of dignity of migrant workers when they are dependent on their employer for their housing, employment, and insurance; the lack of protection of workers through Dutch law and little accountability for companies violating the law; and about the importance of advocating to get these problems adressed in politics.

Putting solidarity into action

Afterwards we dived into various strategic questions of active solidarity, such as

• • How to connect with migrant workers?

• • How to make bridges between farmers and migrant farmworkers, who both earn poor pay and little respect for their hard work, against a common enemy (being retailers pressing down prices for food)?

• • How can the agroecological movement fight exploitation of migrant farmworkers? 

Inspiration was taken from examples of successful organising like the FairFoodProgram and Migrant Justice, by coalitions of migrant workers and other parts of civil society.

A new coalition

This assembly was a good first step for the Agroecology Network to take migrant farmworkers’ interest into our advocacy and organising work, internally and externally, and to start being part of the struggle of migrant workers for a fair work situation. The agroecological movement is a movement against exploitation of nature and people. Just like we are advocating against the exploitation of nature (through for example pesticides in conventional agriculture), we will advocate against the exploitation of people in our food system.

We envisioned this assembly as the starting point of a new coalition for migrant justice in the Netherlands.

Would you like to be involved in this work?
Join the Signal group of the  ‘’Migration and Wage Labour’“ Working Group of the Dutch Agroecology Network