Balkan Insight, 3 september 2025 – Romanian migrants recruited by employment agencies often end up in some of the toughest and lowest-paid jobs in the Netherlands, most notably in the meat industry.
It was a bitter November day in 2024 when Goian was dumped at the Blaak station area in Rotterdam, his face swollen from the beating. A day earlier, he recalled still working for Vleesbewerking van der Pijl B.V., a Dutch meat processing company, for which he had spent the past four years slicing veal for the European market. By that evening, he was homeless, with nowhere to go.
This is a story that is being repeated across the Netherlands, where many Romanian workers suffer from gruelling slaughterhouse shifts, unstable housing arrangements organised by recruitment agencies, and the sudden loss of both. Nearly 40,000 Romanians are employed in Dutch agriculture, logistics and meat processing, forming an essential yet invisible force in the economy. Lured by promises of better wages and job security, many soon discover that these assurances conceal a system of precarious contracts, sudden evictions and a pervasive culture of abuse.
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