Low pay, long hours, broken dreams: working at Europe’s biggest meat exporter

Temporary staff at meat plants in the Netherlands share none of the success of the booming industry as agencies withhold pay and threaten eviction

Read more: The whole system is rotten': life inside Europe's meat industry

In October last year, Lucian Rou found himself unemployed and homeless in Boxtel, a town in the southern Netherlands. I went to the railway station and slept there in the cold and the rain," he says.

A few hundred metres away, on the other side of the train tracks, was the headquarters of one of Europe's biggest meat companies, where he had worked a few days before on the production line.