The EconomistJuly 25th 2020 Europe 411C
lemens tönnies used to be a local hero
in eastern Westphalia. One of six chil-
dren of a butcher from the town of Rheda-
Wiedenbrück, he grew Tönnies, the family
meat-wholesaling business which he took
over after his brother Bernd’s death in 1994,
into one of the biggest meat-processing
companies in the world, with annual sales
of €7bn ($8bn). For almost two decades the
bratwurst billionaire was chairman of
Schalke 04, a beloved local football team.
He built the Tönnies arena, a 3,600-seat
stadium for a women’s football club, next
to his company’s headquarters. He donates
to the local shooting club, and owns hotels,
a gym, a real-estate agency and even a
kindergarten in Rheda.
Mr Tönnies’s image suffered last year
when he made comments belittling Afri-
cans, and was forced to step down as
Schalke’s chairman. It took a much bigger
hit last month after the plant in Rheda, the
largest of his 29 plants in Europe, triggered
Germany’s biggest single outbreak of co-
vid-19. More than 1,400 people, mainly
contract workers from south-eastern Eu-
rope, tested positive. Authorities closed
the plant, quarantined some 7,000 workers
and their families, and imposed a lock-
down for 640,000 people in the area.
As the extent of the outbreak grew clear,
Robert Tönnies, Bernd’s 42-year-old son
who owns 50% of the company, asked his
uncle and the entire top management to re-
sign. Uncle and nephew have been at
loggerheads for years over how to manage
the firm. (Robert wants his uncle to spend
less on football and more on animal and
worker welfare.) In a letter leaked to the
press, Robert lambasts the company’s use
of subcontractors, which he has wanted to
ban since 2017. More than 9,000 of Tön-
nies’s 18,700 workers are supplied by 24
subcontractors who recruit them mainly in
Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. They live in
cramped, infection-prone quarters.
“Workers are exploited,” says Sonja von
Zons, a Green Party candidate for mayor of
Rheda-Wiedenbrück. Tönnies does not
have a digital time sheet, making it hard to
track work: a typical shift is 12 hours of
blood-soaked labour at temperatures near
freezing, but contractors often pay only for
eight. Sixty-hour weeks are the norm.
Workers get the minimum wage (€9.35 an
hour), but subcontractors charge them for
knives, boots and other equipment. They
also make them pay for board (in a squalidroom shared with half a dozen others) and
transport from their home countries. Lo-
cals do not mingle with the migrants. “It is
a parallel society,” says Ms von Zons.
Mr Tönnies did not resign. Instead, he
vowed to right the ship. He promises to
scrap subcontractors and employ all work-
ers directly by the start of next year. He also
paid for food sent to quarantined workers,
and for thousands of coronavirus tests in
Rheda and surroundings. In an interview
on July 18th with Westfalenblatt, a local pa-
per, he explained that Martin Exner, a hy-
giene expert at the University of Bonn,
found that the outbreak was caused by poor
ventilation. In Mr Tönnies’ view, that
meant it was not his firm’s problem, but
one for the entire industry. On July 17th the
Rheda plant restarted slaughtering, albeit
at a reduced pace: 8,000 pigs a day, com-
pared with up to 25,000 in normal times.
Hubertus Heil, the German labour min-
ister, will not let Mr Tönnies get off the
hook easily. He demands Tönnies pay dam-
ages for having forced the region’s quaran-
tining. And he is due to present a draft law
on July 29th banning the use of subcontrac-
tors in slaughterhouses.
Tönnies reacted by creating 15 subsid-
iary companies that will employ the for-
merly subcontracted workers. Critics think
this is a ploy to prevent unionisation by di-
viding workers by job type, and perhaps by
nationality: the vast majority of them will
still be eastern Europeans. “We cannot find
Germans to work for us,” explains André
Vielstädte, a spokesman for Tönnies, add-
ing that it is not “pleasant work”. Ending
subcontracting will alleviate some hard-
ships for migrant workers, but real change
will come only if the industry leader shows
the way. So far, Mr Tönnies has improved
conditions at his plants mainly when he
had no other choice. 7BERLIN
A big European abattoir vows to
reformCovid-19 in slaughterhousesGermany’s
wurst jobs
Problems at Big PigO
n july 7tha small boat motored up to a
villa near the Black Sea resort town of
Burgas. On board (and livestreaming) was
Hristo Ivanov, a former justice minister
who leads “Yes Bulgaria”, an anti-corrup-
tion party. He wanted to show that the vil-
la’s main resident, Ahmed Dogan, founder
of a party representing the country’s ethnic
Turkish minority, was illegally treating the
beach as his own. (In Bulgaria, coastal
beaches are public property.) Mr Ivanov
alighted and planted a Bulgarian flag, to the
consternation of several muscular men in
sunglasses who, unmoved by the ex-minis-
ter’s protestations of his constitutional
rights, pushed him into the water.
A few weeks on, it is Bulgaria’s govern-
ment that risks being pushed over. Mr Do-
gan is seen as an ally of the prime minister,
Boyko Borisov, a former bodyguard who
dominates the political scene with a mix of
populism and patronage. But multiple
scandals have led to daily protests in Sofia
by thousands of demonstrators. On July
23rd Mr Borisov announced he was sacking
four of his ministers, hoping to fend off de-
mands that he resign.
The government’s troubles started in
June, when an anonymous source began
leaking recordings of someone who
sounded like Mr Borisov ridiculing euoffi-
cials and boasting of harassing a local busi-
ness. The next week, photos surfaced of a
man resembling the prime minister asleep
on a bed, with a handgun on the nightstand
and an open drawer full of €500 bills and
gold ingots. Mr Borisov said the recordings
and photos were manipulated, but ac-
knowledged it was his bedroom.
Then came Mr Ivanov’s visit to Mr Do-
gan’s beach, which led to questions about
the mysterious men who shoved him. On
July 8th Rumen Radev, Bulgaria’s presi-
dent, who was nominated by the opposi-
tion Socialists, revealed that they were offi-
cers of the state agency that protects senior
officeholders. It was providing security for
Mr Dogan and another member of his
party: Delyan Peevski, a media oligarch. It
was not clear why they deserved taxpayer-
supplied beach bouncers, and Mr Radev
called for the protection to be withdrawn.
The response was swift. On the morning
of July 9th police raided the president’s of-
fice and detained two aides on charges of
influence-peddling and disclosing state
secrets. That afternoon demonstrators
took to the streets, accusing the chief pros-SOFIA
A seaside scandal may scupper
the governmentBulgarian protestsBullies on a beach