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A widening wage dispute in the Netherlands could leave more than 1 million temporary workers, many of them migrants, entitled to back pay.
Dutch staffing agencies could face claims worth billions of euros, according to a report by Follow the Money.
The dispute centers on claims that temporary agency workers were underpaid for years in breach of EU law.
Many of those affected are migrant workers from Eastern Europe, and labor activists warn that large numbers of them may never claim compensation because they do not know their rights.
Stichting Eerlijk Werk, or the Fair Work Foundation, is preparing a potential mass lawsuit against the 20 largest temporary employment agencies in the Netherlands.
The group says the case could cover years of alleged underpayment across sectors that rely heavily on agency labour, including food processing, logistics, and horticulture.
“If you assume that an average of 300,000 temporary agency workers work in the Netherlands each day, the lost amounts quickly run into tens of billions,” Egbert Jan van Bel, chairman of the Fair Work Foundation, told Follow the Money.
The organization says the lawsuit is also meant to pressure staffing agencies into negotiations rather than simply push the fight through the courts.
“The claim would be more a way of getting the agencies to sit around the table with us,” van Bel said.
The issue has gained momentum after a series of court rulings in Europe and the Netherlands.
According to the report, labor activists and legal academics argue that weak collective labor agreements in the Netherlands did not comply with the EU’s 2008 directive on temporary agency work.
That legal picture shifted after the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in 2022 that temporary workers are entitled to equal treatment with permanent staff under EU law, regardless of differences in collective labour agreements.
A 2024 ruling by the Dutch Supreme Court on the full scope of remuneration for temporary workers added further weight to that principle and helped open the way for a new deal this year to improve their overall pay package.
The scale of the gap has already been documented. A 2023 working paper by the Dutch central bank found that the average pay gap between flexible and permanent employees in comparable roles stood at 13.8%, according to Follow the Money.
Still, there is a major legal obstacle. Civil claims in the Netherlands generally face a five-year limitation period, which could exclude complaints covering much of the 2011 to 2021 period.
To try to stop the clock, the Fair Work Foundation said it sent an extension letter to 20 agencies at the end of last year while gathering more claims.
The report says the people most affected may also be the least likely to come forward.
The Netherlands depends heavily on agency workers born abroad. As of 2024, more than half of the country’s 407,000 agency workers were born outside the Netherlands, with most coming from Poland, according to official data.
Polish labour activist Aleksander van der Schott, who helps migrants understand their rights through his organisation Explify, said many workers struggle even with basic legal knowledge.
“They are legally illiterate. I sometimes have to help out with very basic stuff,” he told the outlet.
Van der Schott said many workers do not know they may be entitled to higher wages.
“Most workers are not aware that they might be entitled to higher pay. The system as a whole operates in a way that workers cannot effectively verify or enforce their rights,” he said.
That concern is shared by legal experts and lawmakers. Evert Verhulp, a law professor at Amsterdam University, said many migrant workers from countries such as Latvia, Poland and Hungary may not even know what they are entitled to.
So far, the response to the possible mass claim appears to reflect that problem. Follow the Money reported that, as of late March, the Fair Work Foundation had received more than 10,000 responses, but only hundreds came from migrant workers.
“We’d really need to focus on those countries and their languages if we want to receive such applications,” van Bel said.
The case has also exposed disagreement over who should carry responsibility.
The Dutch social affairs ministry said it is not responsible for informing workers who may have been underpaid of their rights, describing it as a matter between employers and employees.
“It is not the government’s task to actively disseminate case law relating to possible individual cases,” a ministry spokesperson said.
But Social Democrat MP Mariette Patijn argues the state should still do more, especially given how hard the rules are for workers to understand.
“The rules surrounding temporary agency work are incredibly complex. As a result, people are vulnerable, certainly migrant workers,” she said.
Patijn plans to table a motion during a parliamentary debate on the draft More Security for Flexible Workers Act, urging the government to discuss with trade unions how workers can best be informed.
The staffing sector, meanwhile, is also pushing back. The ABU, the largest Dutch trade association for temporary employment agencies, told Follow the Money that the Dutch government is “primarily responsible” for how EU legislation was carried out in the country.
Some legal experts disagree. Labour law academic Niels Jansen said he understood the sector’s attempt to hold the Dutch state responsible, but argued that the position was mistaken. In his view, the Dutch government transposed the EU directive into national law correctly.
Staffing entrepreneur Frank van Gool, founder of OTTO Work Force, said the situation remained legally complex and said many in the sector had relied on existing collective labour agreements.
“When it comes to the question of who ultimately has to pay, legal experts all have different perspectives,” van Gool said. “It is a very complicated matter.”
He added that he had not fully understood the issue himself until the Dutch Supreme Court ruling in 2024.
The wage dispute is unfolding against a broader backdrop of concern over the treatment of migrant workers in the Netherlands.
A 2020 report by the Dutch social affairs ministry concluded that the way the country treats migrant workers is “undesirable” and said there was no effective system to remove abusive actors from the labour market.
The report said employment agencies often deducted excessive travel and housing costs, while workers’ fear and unfamiliarity with the rules kept many from speaking out. It also warned that when one group of workers became more aware of its rights, agencies could simply shift to other, more vulnerable groups.
Van der Schott said he knew of thousands of underpayment cases and warned that the sector “could go bankrupt” if it faced legal action on a large scale.
For now, the Fair Work Foundation is betting that legal pressure will help force a settlement and bring more workers into the process before time runs out.
“After the temporary agency workers, we move on to the next underpaid group, such as women or Dutch people of migrant heritage,” van Bel said. “We have only just begun.”
Whatever the legal outcome, the dispute has already drawn fresh attention to the gap between Dutch labour protections on paper and the realities many migrant workers face in practice.
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