The aim of the Interreg VI-funded project ‘TRAM – Transnational Labour Migration in the Euregio’ (TRAM for short). The project was launched at the end of 2023 under the leadership of Prof. Dr Ingrid Jungwirth, in cooperation with Radboud University, the Municipality of Apeldoorn and the Euregio Rhine-Waal.
The Covid-19 pandemic, if nothing else, has highlighted the precarious and often exploitative conditions under which highly mobile EU citizens – commonly referred to as agency workers – work and live. Transnational migrant workers make up a significant proportion of the workforce in the meat industry and agriculture in the Rhine-Waal Euregio (Euregio for short). They come predominantly from Eastern European countries such as Romania, Bulgaria and Poland, and work on both the German and Dutch sides of the Euregio. This is where the TRAM project comes in; it aims to develop models for decent work and decent living conditions for transnational migrant workers through cross-border cooperation between 13 welfare, civil society and local authority organisations in the Euregio.
To shed more light on these circumstances, a pilot study was carried out at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences as early as 2022. The ‘Labour Migration Across Borders’ project has already produced initial findings. These are now to be built upon: over the next three years, as part of TRAM, regular ‘field labs’ will be held to establish and expand cross-border exchange in the three thematic areas of ‘Social Counselling’, ‘Work and Business’ and ‘Housing and Community Life’, as well as thematic project activities to deepen knowledge in these three areas. A prerequisite for this is the investigation into the working and living conditions of transnational migrant workers in the meat and agricultural sectors, which is being carried out comprehensively for the first time on the German side of the Euregio at the HSRW as part of the TRAM project.
TRAM is funded by the Germany–Netherlands Interreg programme: the funding bodies are the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Industry, Climate Protection and Energy of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Province of Gelderland – co-financed by the European Union. The project will run from 2023 to 2026; the project budget amounts to approximately 780,000 euros. TRAM is being carried out in cooperation with Radboud University, the Euregio Rhine-Waal, the Municipality of Apeldoorn and a further nine associated project partners on both sides of the border.
Prof. Dr Ingrid Jungwirth has been Professor of Social Sciences, specialising in diversity and inclusion, at the Faculty of Society and Economics since 2012. Her research areas include mobility and migration, gender and diversity studies, work and gender, and social theories.
Further information about the project
