The Broken Promise of Full Health Insurance for Seasonal Workers in Germany

Around 30 percent of the 940,000 people employed in agriculture are so-called seasonal workers, many of whom come from Central and Eastern Europe. According to the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, the vast majority come from Poland and Romania. There has also been a recruitment agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany and Georgia since 2021, and one with the Republic of Moldova since 2022, although only a few hundred people come from these countries at the moment. Either way: Harvesters from abroad play a key role in harvesting, sorting and packaging crops in Germany.

They are not well paid or accommodated. Another problem is the lack of health insurance coverage. Here, however, the traffic light made an explicit promise in its coalition agreement in autumn 2021: “For seasonal workers, we provide full health insurance cover from day one.” The 2023 harvest has long since begun and thus the second season under the traffic light government, in who did not fulfill this promise. When asked by nd, the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture said: “The consultations within the Federal Government on the implementation of the project from the coalition agreement are still ongoing.” The Federal Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Labor are also involved, both SPD-led. As early as February 2022, spokesmen for both houses claimed that they were “currently in consultation” about the implementation of full health insurance coverage for seasonal workers. So nothing has happened in more than a year.

The basic problem: Many seasonal workers are employed as mini-jobbers as part of short-term employment. Employers in agriculture are thus making massive use of a model that was only intended as an exception for schoolchildren or students. Short-term employment is limited to a maximum of 70 days. Limited again, to be more precise, because during the pandemic, this time frame was even increased to 115 days in 2020 and 102 days for 2021 under the leadership of the then Minister of Agriculture Julia Klöckner (CDU). Employers pay no social security contributions for short-term employees; the workers are only insured against accidents and have no health or other social insurance. In the past, this has repeatedly led to sick harvest workers having to pay for treatment costs themselves. In 2020, for example, the trade union “Initiative Faire Landarbeit” documented the case of a worker without insurance who was treated in hospital on suspicion of a heart attack and whose costs were to be deducted from his wages.

In order to at least avoid such cases of uninsured workers, the grand coalition decided in spring 2021 to introduce an obligation to report health insurance status. At the time, the SPD-led Ministry of Labor had pushed through this in exchange for approval to extend the period of short-term employment again in the 2021 harvest season. However, the obligation to report only came into force on January 1, 2022.

Obligation to register means: When registering a part-time seasonal worker, employers must tell the mini-job center whether they also have health insurance. The procedure is automated, so it is not checked whether the information is correct; the program only recognizes whether the status »insured« has been specified or not. Customs and pension insurance are responsible for checking. A spokeswoman for the Federal Ministry of Labor told »nd.Der Tag« that »the federal government has not yet received any data on possible violations of the existing reporting obligation«.

One reason for this – in addition to a lack of control – is that the reporting obligation is easy to fulfill, even without full health insurance cover. It is enough if the seasonal worker has health insurance either in their country of origin or through a private group insurance. Such “harvest helper insurance” has been around for a long time. They cost little, the provider Klemmer, for example, advertises 0.43 cents per day per employee for companies that have employed up to 30 seasonal workers.

However, the scope of services cannot be compared at all with that of statutory health insurance in Germany. Visible policies from several providers prove this; These include a number of exceptions to insurance cover. Excluded are, for example, the treatment of chronic illnesses and their consequences, the treatment of “diseases, complaints, accidents, pregnancies, etc. that occurred before the insurance began”, the treatment of illnesses or accidents in connection with the consumption of alcohol, the treatment of the consequences of HIV /AIDS as well as all kinds of check-ups.

The »Initiative Faire Landarbeit« points out another problem in its annual report for 2022: In the case of private group health insurance, the policyholder is the employer; after taking out such insurance, he receives the relevant evidence, not the worker. “We faced many instances in 2022 where management failed to provide workers with health insurance credentials,” the report said. Managers of larger companies had »openly reported in discussions that if an employee reports symptoms of illness, they decide whether the person works anyway or not and in which case a doctor’s visit takes place.«

For the »Initiative Faire Landarbeit«, the implementation of the coalition promise is therefore one of the central demands for the industry. However, she also sees this only as a first step towards overcoming the model of short-term employment. Because actually, according to the initiative, harvest workers should »basically be employed subject to social security contributions«.