POTENTIAL LIMITATIONS OF BANNING TEMPORARY EMPLOYMENT IN THE GERMAN MEAT INDUSTRY

Sammanfattning: The German meat industry is a popular labour market destination for unskilled Eastern and Middle European workers. The precarious employment and housing conditions, exacerbated by a staggering number of COVID-19 infections, received immense media attention in 2020. Given the urgency of this issue, the German government introduced new measures targeting the sector with special attention paid to subcontractor companies. Utilising Beck’s risk society thesis with a focus on his individualization thesis and adopting a critical theory perspective, this paper explores how certain risk positions structure and get structured by social relations of production. For this purpose, I took a sample of ten semi-structured interviews with Hungarian regular and temporary workers, and a subcontractor company representative operating in the German meat industry. Using Katz’s critical analytical framework I outline the categories of individual survival tactics in response to the experienced insecurities and inherited conflictual relations. What becomes apparent in this study is that Hungarian workers face quasi-uniform commonplace issues regardless of their employment type. Precarious conditions often do not stem exclusively from the nature of subcontractors but also from the exploitative firm practices of the meat companies themselves and their hostile atmosphere, which fuel inherited conflicts and interior fragmentation among workers.