If people don’t want to do your job, is there something wrong with the people or with the work?

The persistent abuses surrounding labor migration have not gone unnoticed, but they still lead far too little to fundamental debate.

Inspector General Rits de Boer of the Dutch Labor Inspectorate rings the bell in his annual report. This time he did not want to limit himself to the annual summary of abuses found in the workplace, but to dig a layer deeper. After all: enforcement is really enforced, abuses lead to social commotion and fines, sometimes to company closures. But then, a little further on, inspectors find dozens of labor migrants who work and live under extremely precarious and often substandard conditions. And that for years now.

In De Boer’s words: ‘Our work will increasingly have to be to investigate the economic motives for abuses. To check whether enforcement is in proportion to the strength of those motives.’

In other words: at the bottom of the labor market, the business model of many employers is so geared towards the cheapest possible labor that the inspectorate can no longer hold back. This is how things continue to go wrong on a large scale for many people who are lured here with golden mountains, but are then handed over to the gods.

The demand for labor is so great here and elsewhere the supply is so overwhelming that employers will continue to look beyond the border as long as the brakes are not put on something. And now that the control rests entirely with employers who benefit themselves – and pass the additional costs on to society – that brake will not come soon.

That is why the Labor Inspectorate is strongly targeting political The Hague. There should be much more thought about the phenomenon of labor migration: isn’t it too easy to find new people all the time as the solution to the acute shortages, especially now that we succeed so poorly in making such poor use of the labor potential present here?

If new people have to be recruited all the time for work ‘that the Dutch don’t want to do’, is there something wrong with the Dutch or with the working conditions? And how does unrestricted labor migration actually fit in with the stalled housing market and the scarcity of space?

These are all questions that are asked at the Binnenhof and that here and there also lead to good initiatives (raising the minimum wage, the new legislation against the exploitation of flexworkers), but hardly to a fundamental debate. De Boer gives an excellent pass for this.