One in seven Dutch employment agencies exploiting migrant workers: Labor Inspectorate

About 15 percent of the almost 17,000 employment agencies in the Netherlands are deliberately violating Dutch labor law and exploiting migrant workers, according to an exploratory study by the Labor Inspectorate. That amounts to about 2,500 employment agencies paying less than minimum wage, violating the working hours law, or wrongly fining temporary workers, Rits de Boer, director of the Inspectorate, told NRC.

De Boer called the estimate on the “cautious side.” The Inspectorate is still working on a final calculation. “It could also be double,” he said.

And it is not only the migrant workers who suffer from this exploitation, but society as a whole, according to De Boer. Employers increase their profits with cheap personnel. While society pays for it with extra pressure on the scarce space, in the housing market, and in education, he said. “It can’t go on like this.”

A committee led by former SP leader Emile Roemer, which investigated the situation of migrant workers in the Netherlands, concluded two years ago that the Labor Inspectorate has hardly any insight into the temporary employment sector. As a result, employment agencies get away with “turning the migrant worker into a revenue model.” They “cheat with the payroll, make them work too many hours, deduct all kinds of amounts from the wages,” and “demand fines for strange house rules,” among other abuses.

De Boer wants the Netherlands to limit work migration. He suggested a “target” for migration - when there is a lot of asylum migration, there should be less room for other migration, like labor migration. “We are reaching our limits,” he said to NRC.

Improvements can start with deciding which companies to allow in the Netherlands, he said. “When municipalities decide on new businesses that want to establish there, they also have to look at the costs that this entails. For education, the social burden for housing. If you don’t take that into account, you’re making the wrong decision. And if you do factor it in, it will eventually come down to the fact that there can be less growth on the basis of labor migration.”

The Cabinet already plans to impose stricter rules on temporary employment agencies, though it will be years before they take effect. For example, from 2025, temporary employment agencies will be obliged to get certified. That should give the government more insight into them and better protect migrant workers, Minister Karien van Gennip of Social Affairs wrote to parliament earlier this year.

The Cabinet also wants to make opening a temporary employment agency more challenging. Entrepreneurs who do so will have to get a Certificate of Good Conduct, pay a deposit of 100,000 euros, and meet all kinds of standards, including offering certified housing.

According to De Boer, these rules “will certainly help,” but we’ll have to wait and see “whether it does enough to limit the current abuses.”