The cabinet is investigating the option of launching criminal prosecutions against employers who abuse low-skilled foreign workers or traffick them into the country to do menial jobs.

Social affairs minister Eddy Van Hijum told the Telegraaf in an interview that the cabinet wants to speed up on tackling abuses in the seasonal and temporary work sector where tens of thousands of people, mainly from eastern Europe, work.

“There are unfortunately too many examples of bad working conditions,
exploitation and poor housing,” he said. “We want to tackle this as quickly as we can.”

Van Hijum said he hoped MPs would back new legislation which will make it possible to prosecute companies and staffing agencies under criminal law. “Their way of making money from cheap labour… has been able to continue for too long,” he said. “It has to stop.”

At the same time, he said, the number of immigrants coming to the Netherlands has to be reduced drastically. “Labour migration is out of hand,” he told the paper. “We have to be more critical about who we allow in to work.”

Economists have said repeatedly that much of the Dutch economy is too dependent on cheap workers.

The social affairs ministry’s chief inspector Rits de Boer, for example, has called for a rethink on Dutch economic strategy, telling the NRC in an interview that employers are able to increase their profits using cheap labour, but the social cost – the pressure on scarce space, housing and schools – is being picked up by society.

Distribution centres, slaughterhouses and greenhouses are all reliant on low paid personnel and staffing agencies are actively recruiting workers in central and eastern Europe, he said. ‘They come because the staffing agencies facilitate it,’ he said.

Earlier this week figures from government job centre UWV showed labour migrants hired through recruitment agencies were almost six times more likely to be sacked on the spot than their native Dutch colleagues.