by Ingerlise Andersen
After the coronavirus crisis, some things could get better. The optimists among us hope that a certain realisation will have been reached in many areas: we don't have to spend this weekend in Paris and the next in Lisbon to have a good time, meetings can often be held without physical presence, you can also get around by bike, and it can even be fun to spend time with your children.
We've been forced to see life a little differently, to shift our perspective slightly, and that's not so unhealthy. But sometimes we're also forced to look in almost forgotten corners - and that's where we discover things we'd rather not see, things we've stored away in the hope that they'll be forgotten.
That's what happened to me when I learnt about the first outbreaks of disease among workers in the slaughterhouses in Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia. Somehow I knew that Eastern European "labourers" (a nice word, you can almost forget that women and men are hiding behind it) were responsible for slaughtering the animals and preparing them so that we could eat them in the kitchen. But how these "labourers" live, where they live, how they spend their free time, I didn't think much about that. I was more upset about the conditions in Qatar. The stadiums for the 2022 World Cup are being built by construction workers from India, Nepal and Sri Lanka; they toil in life-threatening, slave-like conditions so that the football world can enjoy fun, profit and prestige.
Of course, migrant workers are also employed in Europe, in Germany; if you walk past construction sites with open ears, for example, you will hear that it is not only organic Germans who are on the move. And there have also been cases where these people have been cheated out of their earned wages. But it was probably not so blatant that the temporary workers had to put their lives at risk?
And then more than 150 slaughterhouse employees in Coesfeld in North Rhine-Westphalia and almost 110 in Bad Bramstedt in Schleswig-Holstein were tested corona-positive. They had not brought the virus with them from their home countries, mostly Bulgaria or Romania. They had become infected in the cramped collective accommodation, where they share too few square metres and too few sanitary facilities with too many colleagues. How much attention was paid to informing the workers about epidemic hygiene and mask-wearing remains to be seen.
What is certain, however, is that the meat factories could not function as they do today without migrant labour - which could well mean that we consumers would have to pay more for the schnitzel and that the meat industry operators would earn less. This becomes all the clearer the more slaughterhouses are affected. Hundreds of infected migrant workers have also been reported from Baden Württemberg and Lower Saxony.
In the internet comments on the reports about the sick slaughterhouse workers, there was concern that the virus could spread via the meat, and many were annoyed that the easing of restrictions in the affected districts would have to be postponed. No one questioned how the "labour force" was doing.
I also don't know what the health of the Romanian asparagus pickers is like, who saved the season for the noble vegetable in a marvellous airlift operation. They are allowed to continue cutting in quarantine as long as they keep to themselves. I hope they are safe and sound - because I love eating asparagus.
And perhaps in future we will have fewer problems recruiting domestic labour for unpopular and poorly paid jobs in agriculture and care. After all, the economy is forecast to go down the drain and unemployment is rising. At the same time, socially disadvantaged children are missing so much schooling that we have to fear for their school qualifications - they then need the jobs.
Ingerlise Andersen worked as an editor at Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg until recently.
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