The Netherlands may well be functioning as a kind of “social laboratory” for testing the production model of the future – one that is increasingly depersonalised by outsourcing and algorithmic management. “At the centre of it all is a worker who waits activated in real time and deactivated when no longer needed – someone who lives only to work.” In the picture, a terminal at the port of Rotterdam, 2023.
In 2014, lawyer Rafael Polo was working in the Labour and Migration Department of the Spanish Embassy in the Netherlands. His job was to offer legal and employment advice to Spanish nationals who had been arriving in growing numbers since 2007, when the economic crisis pushed Spain’s unemployment rate above 20 per cent.
In 1996, there were around 28,000 Spanish citizens living in the Netherlands. After the crisis, that figure had risen to nearly 40,000. Most had come in search of steady jobs and salaries three times higher than what they could earn back home. Or so they believed – until they found themselves in Rafael’s office. “The stories they started to tell us were shocking and left us overwhelmed,” he tells Equal Times.
These stories often followed a similar pattern: young people recruited in Spain through temporary employment agencies to work in logistics warehouses. They had all been promised good wages and decent accommodation. But as soon as they arrived in the Netherlands, they faced precarious working conditions, lower pay than expected, and miserable...
Claims that Brigitte Macron is a transgender woman first emerged online in 2021 and have since gone viral. “Two billion people have been exposed to this story in French and 2.5 billion in English,...