EU migrant workers and the right to health in the Netherlands during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic

Sandra Mantu, Lisa Berntsen, Tesseltje de Lange, Anita Böcker and Natalia Skowronek
Additional contact information
Sandra Mantu: Radboud University, The Netherlands
Lisa Berntsen: De Burcht (Scientific Research Institute for the Dutch Labour Movement), The Netherlands
Tesseltje de Lange: Radboud University, The Netherlands
Anita Böcker: Radboud University, The Netherlands
Natalia Skowronek: Fachstelle Limita zur Prävention vor sexueller Ausbeutung, Switzerland

Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 2025, vol. 31, issue 1, 105-119

Abstract: While the right to health is a basic human right recognised in international law, the COVID-19 pandemic painfully revealed that existing policies and regulations poorly protect many categories of migrant workers, not only during a pandemic, but beyond. This article draws on research data collected during the pandemic and examines the experiences of ‘essential’ EU migrant workers with Dutch health care and identifies structural barriers migrant workers face when attempting to realise fundamental health rights. We show how sedentarist biases in the configuration and delivery of the Dutch health-care system, but also in the legal-administrative residence system and the organisation of work, as well as a general lack of migrant awareness in central government regulation and communication prevent the full realisation of the right to health and undermine migrant workers’ rights.

Keywords: Right to health; EU migrant workers; sedentarism; legal-administrative status; employment status; barriers; language; information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10242589251318693 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:treure:v:31:y:2025:i:1:p:105-119

DOI: 10.1177/10242589251318693

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().