Wednesday, October 1, 2025
12:00pm - 1:30pm
Janice Levin Building, Room 103
Lunch provided, RSVP to Lauraann Walkoviak, lauraann@smlr.rutgers.edu
Abstract
The paper deals with the regulatory gaps that resulted in devastating and scandalizing wages and working conditions in the German meat industry for more than two decades. These gaps, combined with insufficient labor inspections, allowed meatpackers and their sub-contractors to circumvent existing regulations and undercut German standards regarding wages and working conditions. Scandalizing campaigns run by the German Food Workers Union (NGG), the German Union Federation (DGB), and local protest movements and NGOs, taken up in extensive media coverage, have led to some improvements for the workers, but did not change the so-called „system of organized irresponsibility,“ a term used to describe the system of sub-contracting in the meat industry that allowed for rejecting any responsibility for grievances by pointing to other actors in the sub-contracting chain. However, after the major outbreaks of Covid-19 in several German meatpacking plants in summer 2020, the German government has legislated a ban on sub-contracting in the meat industry, and strengthened labor inspections. The paper addresses the question of why earlier efforts to abandon the sub-contracting system pushed forward by NGG, DGB, and NGOs have not been successful, and what the effects of the recent ban on sub-contracting will be. It develops the argument that characteristics of the production model applied in meat production, and of the overall value chain explain the resistance to change and strong regulation, and that fundamental changes of working conditions are unlikely to result from the recent ban on sub-contracting.
About Our Speaker
Ursula Mense-Petermann is Professor of Economic Sociology and the Sociology of Work at Bielefeld University. Her current research focuses on economic globalization and on transnationally mobile work, with a focus on the processes and problems of transcending (political and cultural) boundaries in the economic realm. As a member of the Institute of World Society Studies, she is also interested in world society theory and the world society-specific social structures, in particular global/transnational labor markets. Professor Mense-Petermann is the spokesperson for a research training group sponsored by Germany's National Research Foundation (DFG) and serves in both the DFG's Senate and Joint Committee.
