Labour and Migration in the German Meat Sector On Cheap Labour, Subproletarianization and the Struggle over Mobility
The MA program Labor and Social Transformations / Muncă și Transformări Sociale invites students, academics, researchers and the wider public to this semester’s first public research seminar in the sociology of labor.
Labour and Migration in the German Meat Sector
On Cheap Labour, Subproletarianization and the Struggle over Mobility
John Lütten
Friday, October 9th, 2026
18:00 – 19:30
Room 7, Str. Dostoievski 34
The talk will outline key aspects of labour in the German meat industry and present findings from an ongoing research project on the class analysis of migrant labour-power. Migrant labour has been a crucial factor for the German meat sector for more than 20 years. Today’s production in the economically strongest part of the German food sector depends heavily on both cheap and mobile labour from Eastern Europe, especially from Romania, making its availability a key factor for the sector and its competitiveness.
For a long time, this was realised through a system of subcontracting and a labour regime which helped to enable the exploitation of a migrant industrial subproletariat with restricted power resources. In 2021, subcontracting was banned under the ‘Occupational Health and Safety Control Act’. While this has partly improved the position of workers, the sector’s historically grown dependence on the availability of cheap labour-power remains unchanged. Against this background, Romania’s socio-economic development and changing patterns of labour migration could pose challenges for the German meat industry. Which developments are taking place – and how can they be used for workers’ class struggles?
Dr. John Lütten is a labour sociologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg, Germany. PhD on workers’ consciousness in Social Sciences (University of Göttingen), MA in Sociology (Friedrich Schiller University Jena), BA in Sociology and Philosophy (University of Leipzig). Current areas of interest: labour and industrial sociology, labour and migration, workers’ consciousness, marxist class analysis.
