Endre Sik, sociologist, doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and professor emeritus of social sciences at Eötvös Loránd University started off our discussion on the future of foreign guest workers in Hungary’s coming battery plants with an old Jewish joke suggesting that we are navigating obscure, data-poor waters, and even experts can only guess how things will turn out — Kohn goes to see a rabbi to tell him that his geese are dying. Upon hearing that Kohn feeds his geese corn, the rabbi rebukes him and suggests semolina instead. This scene repeats itself for a few more weeks with different types of grain, before all of Kohn’s geese die. Hearing the bad news, the rabbi responds, „What a pity… I would have had so many more good ideas to try out.”
In the first part of our analysis, looking at the environmental impacts of Hungarian battery plants, we noted how data scarcity, obfuscation tactics and the retention of information prevent us from gaining a full understanding of reality. This is all the more true when we consider societal repercussions and the issue of guest workers, where we have even less information and therefore need to rely again on drawing analogies, especially from the automotive industry, to understand what is happening now and what is likely to happen in the future.
According to the experts we interviewed, in the vast majority of cases, Hungarian industrial policy has not exactly been gentle with society, meaning that it has not really tried to build trust and reach compromises: the state makes decisions – mostly without consulting the people concerned – and then there’s no other option but to live with the resulting situation. This was true under state socialism (e.g. the case of the village of Iharkút, where the development of the bauxite mine not only erased the settlement, but even the cemetery had to be moved), but also after the 1989 change of regime.
„The reason we’re reacting at all, or even more strongly, to the battery factories is because it affects the majority of society and the middle class,” said sociologist Tibor T. Meszmann, a researcher at the Central European Labour Studies Institute (CELSI) in Bratislava. Due to poorly defined and officially approved setback distances from populated areas, the problem has become literally tangible, visible and audible when considering the air and noise pollution in addition to the hazardous waste.
With the increasing environmental burden, the number of people affected will only increase, and likely so too will the tension. So far, the government has successfully dealt with this by channeling public discontent towards other groups. „The potential public tension over the expected large numbers of guest workers will be directed not at the prime minister, but at the mayor and the municipal representatives. They are the ones present, the ones who are visible,” added Márton Czirfusz, geographer and co-founder of the Periféria Policy and Research Center.
It’s obvious that neither the government nor the investing companies would like to see a conflict arise between the arriving guest workers and the Hungarian public. But the question is to what extent these processes can be controlled at a time of social crisis.
Hungary’s manipulated fears: could the many years of targeting migrants come back to haunt us?
The term ‘moral panic button‘ was coined by Endre Sik, who together with his co-authors continued to refine the concept and provide analytical evidence for the existence of the phenomenon. According to the official definition, the moral panic button is „a form of governmental technology typical of autocratic/populist governments, one of the aims of which is to increase/keep the voter base together by keeping public discourse constantly charged with a sense of threat and with the presence of the enemies and issues contributing to it. This has the effect of increasing the polarization of society and makes communication between social groups impossible, which in turn adds to the vulnerability of the ‘audience’, both literally and figuratively.” Simply put, it is the government that is constantly pressing the moral panic button, and regularly seeks to alarm its own voters with some imaginary or real enemy, thus preventing calm social dialogue and fomenting conflicts between different social groups.
Everyone in Hungary is familiar with the referendums, national consultations and poster campaigns linked to the wave of refugees and migration due to the civil war in Syria. The „state of emergency due to mass migration” has been in force continuously since March 2016, and has now been extended to March 2025. „The government is able to manipulate negative emotions very effectively. While education, i.e. the shift from seeing certain social groups or ethnicities as homogeneous masses is slow, the panic button and its associated apparatus can trigger a reaction of the masses in a matter of days,” said Zoltán Fleck, a sociologist and professor of law at the ELTE Faculty of Law and Political Sciences.
We wondered whether the government’s anti-immigrant narrative is at odds with the planned bringing in of guest workers for the battery plants, and whether this could lead to conflicts beyond the government’s control. In short, could the fact that the government has essentially been holding down the moral panic button since 2015 have harmful consequences?
According to the experts we interviewed, there’s no need to fear too much, because even if there are conflicts (and there likely will be, if only based on numbers), they are likely to remain local. Secondly, even those who react to the panic button are not entirely driven by impulse: they’re not going to go about their everyday lives in fear simply because the government and its media have urged them to do so, but they’ll be capable of handling their own daily interactions independent of broader public messages.
„Something would have to be blown up to national proportions to be able to last. There may be local issues, but they are not expected to accumulate, so it doesn’t lend itself to moral panic,” Endre Sik added. The possibility of future conflicts may also be reduced by the fact that there do not seem to be many points of friction with the majority society at the moment. „The Hungarian public is aware that the arriving factory guest workers, most of whom are expected to be Asian, will be here temporarily. They are not going to open grocery stores in the town, they are not going to create competition, and they are not going to ask for aid from the government. People are also altruistic and compassionate. It is not impossible to imagine that they will see the guest workers who toil in dangerous factories in our place as victims,” said Zoltán Fleck.
Why there could still be conflicts
Trust in institutional systems has long been low in Hungary. What is perhaps even more concerning is that, according to 2022 data, less than a third of the population, only 27.2 percent, agreed with the statement that the majority of people are trustworthy. In 1984, the figure was 31.9 percent. Data from 2017, i.e. relatively recent but still published after the wave of migration following the Syrian civil war, showed that 28.84 percent of the Hungarian population would not want a person of a different ethnicity as a neighbor. From a regional perspective, we can see a trend among Eastern European countries (Slovakia has an even lower overall trust index), but also differences (Poles are much less sensitive to a neighbor of a different ethnicity – 7.8 percent). According to the 2022 edition of the Atlas of European Values, these figures remain broadly unchanged for Hungary, with Czechia being the only one in the region that has a higher level of negative attitudes towards migrant neighbors. And in a society that is fundamentally mistrustful, suspicious and less open, it is difficult to control people’s emotions and attitudes at a time when we have been living with various crises for years.
„There are so many sources of anxiety in the world today that it is without parallel in history. There aren’t any patterns, and in many ways we find ourselves in a new situation. The greater the setback, uncertainty, or economic downturn in a country, the greater the likelihood that a minor incident could lead to major tension and conflict. The autocratic nature of our politics, the potentially poor investment in the battery plants, the lack of local integration of the industry, the visible damage to the environment, the uncertainty of no one knowing what will happen to the waste, all these factors might compound later on,” added Zoltán Fleck.
In his view, and drawing on historical evidence, in such periods marked by multiple crises, Hungary’s current regime and similar, perhaps even more autocratic regimes have tended to ossify and attempt to fabricate new enemies to channel the tension directed at them. This enemy-fabrication is likely to intensify. „We are moving from a consolidated autocracy to a de-consolidated one, where it is no longer certain that the state can control the channels of hostility. Social processes might be even more unpredictable anyway, but such a situation could exacerbate this, and it is not at all certain that the battery-plant guest workers will be spared from them.”
At present, none of the Hungarian political forces envisage the need to ever integrate guest workers into Hungarian society (few of them are likely to arrive with such intentions), and the current legislation even rules out the possibility of this. The current objective seems to be a quiet and invisible coexistence, which can already be seen with the complete separation of their housing from the local population. „People in Hungary don’t want workers’ housing in residential areas, which creates a vicious circle, because exclusion is already built into the very accommodations of the guest workers. This is not a peculiarity of the battery industry: Romanian apple pickers and agricultural day laborers are out in the fields for months at a time and hardly ever mix with the locals,” added Márton Czirfusz. This type of segregation is also supported by the municipal leaders and is by no means limited to workers of different ethnicities. According to Tibor T. Meszmann, there have been examples where settlements in Western Hungary did not receive (rather, actively resisted) the mass arrival of workers from Eastern Hungary with great enthusiasm. But even those who have moved to the greater Budapest area are no strangers to the term ‘gyüttment’ (a pejorative Hungarian term for a newcomer to an area), tying back to the fundamental problem of a lack of trust in one another.
The question of integration (whether it is necessary at all) goes far beyond ideological frameworks. If we do not have first-hand experience with another, we do not communicate nor share common spaces, it can reinforce our prejudiced attitudes, and the few points of encounter could be more a source of friction than of a peaceful coexistence. According to Meszmann, if points of interaction with the majority society are minimized, it may be at the very place where tempers can get out of hand, i.e. bars, that these people will meet, and all it takes is for one of them to have a bad day or drink too much for trouble to arise.
Time will soon tell what tensions may exist between mainstream society and the guest workers at the battery plants. What we are unlikely to learn about are the conflicts between the workers and what goes on at the factories. The guest workers are not a homogeneous mass, and the unstimulating and extremely restricted life in the workers’ accommodation or on the factory premises can lead to conflicts among themselves, crime or even suicide.
The exhibition „Home is where work is” by photographer and media artist Anna Fabricius, open until the end of October at the Kassák Museum, seeks to answer the question „What are the prospects for finding happiness in Hungary for guest workers, most of them Asian, who work mainly in agriculture?” (i.e. not in battery plants). The exhibition illustrates that for many, their day off is more of a punishment than anything else. Each day spent away from their family, home, and familiar cultural environment, in an infinitely restricted (physically and linguistically) environment and deprived of their main reason for being here, i.e. earning money, only reminds the guest workers of what they are missing from their life in Hungary. For example, their child, whose better future they came here to provide for. One such example in the exhibition is a father who has only ever seen his child via video call because he has been working here since the child’s birth.
When we tried to ask Anna Fabricius how she sees the current and future life prospects of the battery plant guest workers, she deflected our question by saying that the size, scale and number of people alone make comparison impossible. The companies she had visited and that approved of the art work (a dairy farm and a mushroom producer) are dwarfed by the battery plants and do not employ thousands or, as will soon be the case, tens of thousands of guest workers, so she felt that their approach towards workers is more responsible.
To better understand the conflicts that might arise in these factories, it is worth looking towards analogies in the automotive industry, where there may already be examples of conflicts between Hungarian workers and guest workers. This could even be instigated by the employer, playing the different groups off against one another, thus further weakening the possibility of collective bargaining and any trade union resistance, something which is not strong in this country in the first place. The Continental factory in Makó is a case in point.
To distinguish between groups of workers, Tibor T. Meszmann used the terms „go-getters” (mainly young people) and „old guard”, both of which have different interests and may therefore turn against each other. „Young people want to work a lot in a short period of time to earn a lot of money. The older workers think in terms of collective bargaining: they don’t want to give in to, say, 12-hour shifts, but rather want to collectively demand for more people to be hired and for the base wage to be higher. The same scenario can be applied to the guest workers in the battery plants. The Hungarian workers at least had a common language and culture. The guest workers won’t even have the language for a faster exchange of information. The guest workers will be susceptible to self-exploitation because they are interested in working long hours, earning a lot of money and going home sooner. And companies often deliberately take advantage of this.”
The leader of the right-wing Mi Hazánk (Our Homeland) party, László Toroczkai has been a persistent critic of the government for its guest worker policy, both on social media and in Parliament. He documented his spirited night pursuit of Indian guest workers in Bakony (accompanied with dramatic background music), and simultaneously went after government pundit Zsolt Bayer. His party’s contribution to public discourse includes the spreading of the term ”guest-worker crimes„.
Although the majority of guest workers risk more by committing crimes – mainly due to the strict rules governing their stay – the law of large numbers alone makes it inconceivable that none of them will commit a crime in Hungary in the coming years. The question is how politicians, whether local or national, will deal with it, and how the media will present it to the general public.
„A real danger, which could fuel hate crime, is if the term guest-worker crime becomes a sort of self-fulfilling catchphrase. A political party such as, say, Mi Hazánk is unlikely to make a specific call for violence. But a problem could arise if organizations that sympathize with such movements and ideas decide to take up the cause. Imagine a far-right organization showing up in a town in order to settle the situation according to its own means,” said Veronika Szontagh, criminologist and research assistant at the Institute of Legal Studies of the HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences.
She agreed with the other experts that the first conflicts and offenses are more likely to first take place in the factories themselves, which remain largely out of the public eye. Lack of language skills, the strong ties to their workplace and the fear of losing their jobs make it less likely that guest workers will be able to take advantage of the legal protection they would otherwise be entitled to.
Migrant, guest worker, alien – on the track of dehumanization
Refugee, migrant, economic migrant, third-country national, guest worker and finally: alien. There is a multiplicity of terms that circulate in public discourse and legislation that mean very different things, even if the boundaries between them may be blurred in people’s minds.
Different categories of workers have long been present in labor law and regulations, but word juggling can also serve political purposes. Besides being used to influence people’s emotions and attitudes (the moral panic button), it is also an excellent way of segmenting a group (e.g. non-Hungarian workers) into several categories.
The influx of refugees into Europe following the Syrian civil war and the domestic policy responses and communications that followed not only blurred the boundaries between the terms ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ [Hungarian ‘migráns’], but also gave the latter a strong negative connotation that has persisted ever since. Prior to that time, the term was almost unknown to the vast majority of the Hungarian public, and certainly few would have used it as often as they have since. According to Endre Sik, the closed nature of the socialist era meant a kind of „age of innocence” for Hungarian society, as we were not exposed to the migratory flows in the world. Nevertheless, foreign workers have been present in Hungary since the 1990s, mainly in seasonal sectors with poorer working conditions (agriculture and construction), Tibor T. Meszmann added.
According to Meszmann, the real change came in the mid-2010s, when the Confederation of Hungarian Employers and Industrialists (MGYOSZ) openly admitted that there was a labor shortage in Hungary. At the same time, in the fall of 2016, as a political response to the refugee crisis, the parliament banned the settlement of aliens in the country in the seventh amendment to the Constitution. „No alien population shall be settled in Hungary. Any foreign citizen, excluding persons having the right of free movement and residence, shall be allowed to live in the territory of Hungary on the basis of his or her application individually evaluated by the Hungarian authorities.”
As time went on, legal terminology began to multiply. In the summer of 2023, the government adopted a separate law regulating the employment of guest workers, which it withdrew with the same impetus in the fall, before the law could even come into force. Act XC of 2023 mentions third-country nationals, not failing to explain in the preamble – in an increasingly complex and convoluted manner – that the situation with guest workers actually needs to be regulated due to increasing migration. Meanwhile, it was Viktor Orbán who said last year that the country would need 300,000 new guest workers to implement the reindustrialisation policy, assuming that this would be enough, and that the Hungarian society could provide 150,000 additional new workers to go with it.
Constitutional lawyer and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of the University of Szeged, Judit Tóth, says that in many respects we are going back in time, and the multiple amendments of the laws reflect this. „It has become an immigration policing issue: we are not bringing in people, we are bringing in workers. After the regime change, the civil administration took over the management of this, where the law dominated. Now we are returning to the pre-1989 era, with police officers and law enforcement officials again deciding these cases, working in a chain of command and following orders, and ultimately it is the acting commander who decides, not the law.” One would think that this would only affect the battery-plant laborers and other guest workers, but if an EU national wants to bring their third-country national spouse, say a Filipino, to Hungary, it has also become an immigration issue.
Current legislation prohibits family reunification and, as we have previously mentioned, the question of whether there is a need to integrate these people has not even been raised (by either side). According to the experts we interviewed, even if any integration takes place, it will be spontaneous and on a very small scale, based on the current logic of the system. We do not know whether legislators considered what had happened in Germany: the influx of Yugoslav and Turkish workers – who were also temporary at first, only to be needed on a permanent basis by the German economy – and were later joined by their families. The question is whether the current provision for two plus one annual work and residence visas is really sustainable in the future.
Worldwide competition for workers from the Global South
There is a lot of competition for labor within the country, in Europe and around the world. According to a recent forecast by the National Confederation of Employers and Industrialists (MGYOSZ), by 2030 there will be a shortage of 300,000 people in the Hungarian labor market. However, many dispute that these figures would be the same under different circumstances. „For a given job, in a given geographical location, at a given wage, there is a labor shortage, despite there being people anyway. If there were better working conditions, better wages and less exploitative work (8-hour shifts instead of 12, and no more night shifts), there might even be more Hungarian workers,” Márton Czirfusz said, referring to the labor shortages caused by the re-industrialization strategy and battery plants.
All the experts we interviewed agreed that the huge investments in battery plants and other projects will be a major challenge for the domestic small and medium-sized enterprises sector (SME), but the services sector could also feel the impact of the labor siphoning. For example, if people from a small town prefer to go to work in a battery plant in a nearby city (e.g. Debrecen), some services (e.g. convenience stores) may cease to exist, as the workforce will leave. This trend is happening independently of battery plants, but the scale may change. County seats draw people away from small towns, while the capital attracts residents from all over the country, as Budapest competes with regional capitals. And the European Union and the UK have an even greater gravitational pull on Hungarian workers. According to the Hungarian Central Statistical Office, there has not been a year since 2011 when fewer than 10,000 Hungarians have left the country, a figure that has risen to over 35,000 by 2023. This is more than the total population of Szekszárd.
Under democratic capitalism, the stability of a given political establishment is best ensured by economic prosperity, which, according to the logic of the system, requires constant economic growth. „We would have to achieve growth with a declining population, which is a contradiction, especially if we want to pursue an industrial policy focused on extensive growth and low added value,” Czirfusz added. The demographic problem of Hungary’s population and workforce shrinking by tens of thousands every year, coupled with the pressure to boost GDP, he said, and the industrial policy focused on battery plants has led the country to the point where it too is competing for workers in the Global South.
The thinking behind Hungary’s current employment policy regarding this can be roughly summarized as follows: the countries of the Global South are able to and wish to provide an almost unlimited supply of labor in the long term, and Hungary will be a desirable destination for them for a long time to come, whether for work in battery plants or other industries. According to Ágnes Hárs, economist and senior researcher at the Kopint-Tárki Institute, it is a very dangerous notion to view these people as single-use hypodermic needles, who the government believes will be needed in the hundreds of thousands, and besides being dehumanizing, such a system is not economically sustainable. Nor will the Hungarian economy be stimulated by the many guest workers who are expected to arrive in large numbers, given that they are likely to minimize their spending and consumption here, as they come here primarily to take their earnings back home. Meanwhile, their stay and the factory construction costs associated with the project are subsidized by the government.
As developing countries continue to develop, their growing populations are accompanied by a rapid increase in the number of people making the transition from poverty to the middle class. They certainly won’t want to work in battery plants, be it in Hungary or elsewhere. According to an analysis by People Research on India’s Consumer Economy (PRICE), the Indian middle class is growing even in absolute terms, accounting for 31 percent of the country’s population of more than 1.4 billion in 2023, and could rise to 38 percent by 2031. According to Kantar, more than 250 million Indians have moved from poverty into the new middle class in just the last few years. By comparison, the current population of the European Union is just under 450 million. Analyses citing data from the Pew Research Center and the World Bank show that in China, the number of people in the middle income bracket rose from 3.1 percent in the early 2000s to 50 percent by the end of the 2010s.
What is certain, however, is that in the coming years there will surely still be many poor people in these large and growing Asian countries for whom a job in a Hungarian battery plant would represent a real springboard. Our experts therefore expect that the first three-year (two plus one) shifts of battery-plant guest workers will be filled, which of course may be influenced by the state of the world economy, demand and the technological development of the industry, in terms of how much human labor will be needed. The question is what comes after that.
„Will it be in the battery plant’s interest to replace the skilled, established guest workers, who even learned some Hungarian every two-three years, and hire a new, unskilled, and therefore inferior workforce?” posed sociologist Tibor T. Meszmann. As a parallel, he cited the example of Ukrainian guest workers, who were dismissed by Hungarian companies in large numbers during the COVID pandemic, but who then couldn’t be brought back after the end of the pandemic. This resulted in the companies having to hire new workers who – from an employer’s point of view – were less skilled.
If the value chain of the battery industry is to play the role in the Hungarian economy that the government expects and wants it to play (which has already been shown to have some quantitative discrepancies), it will also mean that these companies will have even greater weight and influence on economic policy and, through them, legislation. Not forgetting that guest workers are not only working in battery plants and will continue to come to work in greater numbers, we arrive at the conclusion that the current two plus one year rule could easily change in the future. This is especially true as other EU countries will be competing for them.
„A guest worker is probably better off working in a battery plant in Hungary than in the construction industry in the UAE. But if, for example, a Vietnamese worker has to choose between a German and a Hungarian battery plant, it’s far from certain that they’ll choose us. We will be priced out of the deal, because not only can we not offer wages comparable to those of the Germans, but on the basis of current trends we will also be at a competitive disadvantage in the area of occupational health and safety,” added Márton Czirfusz. „If competition for better, experienced guest workers from good regions increases, Hungarian employers will have to turn to weaker regions, which will also mean a weakening labor supply,” said Ágnes Hárs.
The dramatic and rapid replacement of the workforce is not the future, but the present: anyone who has ordered food delivery in Budapest in recent years might have noticed that lots of guest workers have taken the place of Hungarians as couriers. Of course, this is a completely different sector, so we cannot draw any clear conclusions regarding the guest workers in battery plants.
We don’t know exactly how many guest workers are currently working in Hungarian battery factories, and according to constitutional lawyer Judit Tóth, this is no coincidence. There are so many laws and agencies dealing with non-Hungarian workers that the system is opaque to the average person. „The lack of transparency makes it possible to adjust the tone of the communications, be it reassuring or upsetting, passed on to the public about guest workers, depending on the economic period and social climate.”
According to data from the Ministry of National Economy (NGM), as of December 31st, 2023, there were 87,661 work permits issued to foreigners (i.e. aliens), of which 61,932 were subject to the quota that sets the maximum number of permits valid at any one time, and 68 percent of these workers were from an Asian country. The guest worker quota, i.e. the maximum number of work permits that can be issued, is also managed by the NGM, which has not reached the legal maximum for many years, but this may change in 2024, when the 65,000 permits are expected to be exhausted. Guest workers from Serbia and Ukraine accounted for a further 44,608. According to Judit Tóth, the data of the Ministry of National Economy is confusing because the number of valid documents at a given time and the number of permits issued in a given year do not correspond, as a permit issued in the previous year may still be valid and a permit issued during the given year may no longer be valid (for example, if the worker has gone home or been fired). „It depends on who is compiling the statistics. Act XC of 2023 provides for ten different categories of work permits and twenty-four types of residence permits. Only years from now will we have a real insight into the number of guest workers that are here.”
The largest growth was in the manufacturing category, where the impact of temporary employment agencies has been substantial. Based on data published by the National Employment Service (NFSZ) of the Ministry of National Economy, Ágnes Hárs has made her own calculation of the regional distribution of foreign labor in Hungary, which reveals a significant heterogeneity. The role of the Central Hungary region is dominant (where most work permits were issued), although it shows a decreasing trend over time, followed by Central Transdanubia.
As much as we would have liked to show the number and regional distribution of foreign workers and guest workers graphically, this is currently not feasible. The various sources and permits (and extensions) of different durations cannot be reconciled. Nor do we know whether temporary agency personnel actually appear in the statistics. Only the employing companies and the government have real information on this. What is certain, however, is that all the data reported above relate to so-called third-country nationals – i.e. those outside the scope of the freedom to work.
Temporary work agencies were already operating in Hungary before the appearance of battery plants, but according to Tibor T. Meszmann, the two-plus-one-year employment framework is a Hungarian peculiarity and differs from other countries in the region. „In Slovakia, the contract is for two years, after which you can gradually join the company in stages. From then on, a guest worker can even obtain a permanent residence permit. And after five years of employment, their labor market position becomes equal to that of a Slovakian, and they acquire the right of permanent residence. In Slovenia, it is not even possible for a third-country national contracted by a temporary work agency to be employed.” He explained that the Hungarian government’s Strategic Partners can import labor from third countries directly (i.e. without the involvement of a temporary agency). 96th on this list is CATL, which is in the process of building a battery plant in Debrecen, with whom Péter Szijjártó signed an agreement in April this year.
Companies that are not allowed to import guest workers directly can only obtain foreign workers through qualified temporary employment agencies, and the workers remain employed by these agencies. As of the end of November 2023, 28 companies were doing this, and the qualified temporary employment agencies are supervised and licensed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. However, the temporary agency workers are not limited to guest workers at the battery plants but can be anyone, including Hungarian workers, working for an indefinite period of time. According to Tibor T. Meszmann, however, if Hungarian workers are also to be employed on a long-term basis by temporary agencies, this will lead to the degradation and departure of the workforce, as it will mean a much more vulnerable situation than for someone employed directly by the company in a more stable manner. According to Endre Sik, there is an additional risk that if rent-seeking in the temporary work sector also increases, this will also result in a distortion of the system. For example, these temporary work agencies are also responsible for building and providing workers’ accommodations, which has stirred up public life in Hajdúszoboszló. They are also the ones – not the battery plants – who bear the risks associated with the employees and consequently the guest workers – or even the temporary Hungarian workers – can be laid off easily.
Judit Tóth explains that the way this system is now devised reflects early crude capitalist thinking and entails a number of potential conflicts. „Imagine that the company doctor makes the determination that a worker is unfit for work and prescribes several weeks or even a month of sick leave. Or someone who wants to stand up for their rights and defies orders. The agency can then fire anyone at any time, which effectively rules out any worker protection or union action.”
It is cheaper to establish a modern form of slavery than to empower and activate marginalized social groups
The Hungarian Catholic Encyclopaedia and the Helsinki Committee’s Dictionary of Human Rights define slavery in consistent terms: an individual deprived of their personal rights, owned by their master (which can be a person or an organization), and considered by Roman law as material property without human significance – an inhumane condition of servitude with the potential for total exploitation.
In his 2022 book, What We Owe the Future, Scottish philosopher William MacAskill explored the truly long-term (one-million-year outlook) prosperity and development potential of humanity, with a special section dedicated to the history of slavery. He argues that various forms of slavery have been present and have characterized our societies almost continuously throughout history, and that the anomaly is that it has now almost entirely disappeared from the world. The Hungarian Constitution also prohibits slavery, inhumane treatment and torture. According to MacAskill, the processes that led to the eventual abolition of the institution of slavery were far from self-evident. The change did not even come from an economic perspective, but from the convergence of seemingly isolated groups (from the Quaker movements in North America to the British legislature) and accidental factors that over time led to a global shift in values.
During our interviews, several of the experts referred to the way in which Hungary treats and plans to treat guest workers from the battery plants and elsewhere as modern slavery. But is this term suitable if they are willing to engage in self-exploitation, to work long shifts in dangerous factories, to live in a segregated workers’ hostel, and to do so for years? A recurring argument is that we are in fact helping them, because they are happy to work long hours and earn more than they would in their own country. How happy and satisfied these people actually are is a question for future sociological research, but in the meantime we recommend viewing Anna Fabricius’ exhibition which explores the individual happiness and potential for well-being of guest workers employed in a much more humane, supportive and scale-wise safer environment than the battery plants.
According to the Hungarian Central Statistical Office, the income distribution in Hungary is becoming increasingly unequal, with more than 1.2 million people living below the poverty line in 2022, and according to Eurostat data for 2023, almost half of this group could not afford to eat a meal containing meat, fish or a vegetarian equivalent every day. The question then arises as to whether reindustrialisation policies and battery plants can help, and whether the government has any intention to do so. “Hungary’s employment policy always seeks to – attempts to – solve the next most pressing issue – it does not think in the long term. We are witnessing a series of bad and ill-conceived decisions, constant fire-fighting and scrambling, without long-term strategic thinking,” Márton Czirfusz said. He sees no effort being made to bring about change in this area, which is why importing large numbers of foreign workers is becoming increasingly relevant. „This is easier for the state to do than to help those who have been unemployed for a long time or those who have multiple disadvantages. A lot has to be done for them, but this is something that has been lacking from the Hungarian labor system for 30 years now. None of the previous governments wanted to address their activation in any meaningful way.” Veronika Szontagh takes a similar view, arguing that it is cheaper and more convenient for the state to keep marginalized people in public works, since guest workers can be employed flexibly, while the Labour Code would guarantee more rights for Hungarian workers.
At the beginning of our report, we indicated that, as with battery plants in general, we are in data-poor territory when it comes to guest workers. For example, we know nothing about the long-term goals and ambitions of the investing companies. In our article on the environmental implications, we already quoted Zoltan Fleck, who said that a distinction needs to be made between South Korean companies, which are essentially profit-oriented and operate according to capitalist logic, and the Chinese, who have a completely different perspective and, by coming to Hungary, primarily seek to establish a foothold in the European Union. At the Fehértói Halászcsárda in Szeged, the staff have already started learning Mandarin so that they will be able to welcome future BYD employees without any problems, although they are not yet putting Sichuan carp filets on the menu.
If we look at the Inglehart-Welzel cultural world map of the World Values Survey over time, we can see that Hungary has made a small circle on the axis of traditionalism-secularism values and survival-self-expression values, without any major changes. The latest version of the map, from 2023, shows that China is the closest to us in terms of values, along with Mongolia and Latvia. At the same time, no one would seriously believe that if you put a Chinese and a Hungarian next to each other, you could draw an equal sign between them, as we are worlds apart linguistically and culturally. At the same time, according to Mandiner’s publicist, the time has come for us to abandon the Latin alphabet „with its poor phonetic system, making it unsuitable for describing the Hungarian language”, and learn Chinese characters and adapt them to our own rules, even if it takes 800 years.
With the battery industry and the planned mass influx of guest workers, Hungary has tapped into global processes that are not without their domestic peculiarities. Besides the many question marks and uncertainties based on the trends and tendencies known so far, there are, however, several conflicts and tensions encoded in this system, which may be exacerbated spontaneously, as a result of unpredictable social processes, or driven by deliberate political gain.
And they do not suggest that we are building a predictable and sustainable system for the long term, either in terms of human welfare or the economy. The domestic environmental impact of the battery industry has already begun to show, the social impact is still unfolding. We may still have a chance to partially resolve the sea of contradictions presented here before we start to learn about the additional societal costs of the industry on a larger scale.
We would like to thank the experts who contributed their knowledge and insight to make this analysis possible: Márton Czirfusz, Zoltán Fleck, Ágnes Hárs, Tibor T. Meszmann, Endre Sik, Veronika Szontagh and Judit Tóth.
This article was produced with the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation Climate Disinformation Fellowship.