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Illegal temporary work in the meat industry: the Weissenfels swamp

2020-09-23T17:59:00.569Z


The police had been investigating for months, now they hit: With the help of a large raid in the meat industry, the backers for illegal temporary work are to be found. A city in Saxony-Anhalt forms a center.


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Raid in Weißenfels: Federal police officers search a residential building in the city of Saxony-Anhalt

Photo: Jan Woitas / DPA

The raid has been going on for more than ten hours, but the investigators were still on duty that Wednesday afternoon.

Since the early morning, more than 800 federal police officers have searched the offices of ominous personnel service providers, the private apartments of the company owners and accommodations in which apparently illegally smuggled temporary workers live.

It is a day of major fighting.

On behalf of the Naumburg public prosecutor's office, the police felt 72 residential and business premises until the early afternoon: in Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia, in Berlin and Saxony - and several times in Weißenfels, Saxony-Anhalt.

A hotspot of the German meat industry.

They confiscated notebooks, smartphones and business documents.

And met people who have to stay six people in two or three-room apartments.

In the middle of the pandemic.

The federal police prepared this raid for months - in order to penetrate deep into the "swamp", as one investigator calls the alleged smuggling network.

Since the beginning of the year, the investigators have been investigating, under the leadership of Soko, the Federal Police Inspectorate for Combating Crime in Halle against a construct made up of various temporary employment agencies.

These are said to have systematically brought people from Belarus, Ukraine, Kosovo and Georgia to Germany with the help of forged papers or as so-called "sham students" - in order to hire them out to local slaughterhouses.

The investigators put the income from the illegal business model at 1.5 million euros.

According to SPIEGEL information, the German market leader Tönnies has also deployed personnel from at least one of these temporary employment agencies in its Weißenfels plant: possibly without knowing the illegal origin of these workers.

"We work according to the motto: fairness is a win for both sides."

Advertisement from Berkana GmbH

The meat industry is writing negative headlines again: after the ever new corona infections in slaughterhouses across the country and the lockdown in the Gütersloh district after the mass outbreak at Tönnies.

The incidents revealed the precarious existence of thousands of Eastern European contractors who slaughter, dismantle and pack animals in monotonous movements - and who all too often have to live together in a confined space after their work is done.

Federal Labor Minister Hubertus Heil (SPD) wants to largely ban work and loan contracts in the meat industry from next year.

His draft law is in the Bundestag;

Meat industry lobbyists are trying to soften it up, at least when it comes to temporary work.

But the big raid on Wednesday shows how dubious the structures are when it comes to recruiting and employing low-wage workers.

Ten main suspects

"Our measures are not directed against the meat processing industry," says a spokesman for the Federal Police, "but against the people behind the scenes who brought people to Germany illegally."

The investigations began at the beginning of the year after the police had repeatedly discovered travelers with false documents during controls at border crossings and train stations - and there were increasing indications of illegal use in the meat industry.

Now there are ten main suspects, they are between 41 and 56 years old, two of them women.

At the center of the investigation are two personnel service providers: the German-Polish company IRC and, above all, Berkana GmbH based in Twist, Lower Saxony.

Their business premises were searched early in the morning.

Berkana GmbH was founded in 2017, the sole shareholder is an entrepreneur from Garbsen near Hanover.

According to the commercial register, the managing director lives in Weißenfels - where the police examined at least four dozen commercial and residential premises on Wednesday.

"We work according to the motto ´Fairness is a win for both sides´", Berkana once promised in an advertisement to customers from the meat industry.

"Compliance with the meat industry's code of conduct and the applicable laws is a matter of course for us."

"A small service provider from us at the Weißenfels location"

From Weißenfels, Berkana apparently placed temporary workers in several meat processing companies in Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony - including the local Tönnies factory, as SPIEGEL learned from investigators.

A Tönnies spokesman confirmed on request: "The company you mentioned is a small service provider of ours at the Weißenfels location."

If the authorities need information on certain business partners, they will be given "the necessary insight," said the spokesman.

Tönnies promises to employ 5,000 people directly at the company by November.

The fact that the agents had to recruit their temporary workers outside the EU is a result of the conditions in the slaughterhouses, says Szabolcs Sepsi from the Fair Mobility Advice Center of the German Trade Union Confederation.

"The fluctuation is high and the system is constantly in need of supplies. But now you can no longer even find people in Romanians who want to work under these conditions."

The service providers are accused of being smuggled in as a gang and on a commercial basis, as well as of forging documents.

The presumption of innocence applies until a final conviction.

The Berkana owner and the managing director were so far not available for SPIEGEL.

IRC Czuprynscy declared in Poland that it was impossible for the company to send people to Germany with false papers.

Lobbying for temporary work

For Labor Minister Heil, the raid is confirmation that "we are on the right track with our law".

In parts of the meat industry, "the criminal exploitation of employees is unfortunately still the order of the day".

The planned changes should therefore "not be watered down by loud roars from the lobby".

On October 5, the Bundestag hearing on the planned ban on work contracts and temporary work in the meat industry will take place.

Industry representatives recently pushed for exemptions for contract workers.

They claim that these are indispensable for the barbecue season.

Employee representatives refer to this argument as being advanced.

"It is always said that you need the temporary workers to ramp up production in the season," says Thomas Bernhard, head of the meat division in the food-pleasure-restaurants union (NGG).

"But in other sectors such as the confectionery industry you can do this without temporary workers, but with flexible working time accounts."

Heils draft must therefore be "decided without compromise".

And quickly.

Icon: The mirror

Source: spiegel

All business articles on 2020-09-23

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