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With a focus on the position of EU mobile workers in the Dutch meat industry, this article discusses the multi-level State efforts to enhance protection of workers who experienced limited protection of existing State and private enforcement institutions. The COVID-19 pandemic, with virus outbreaks at Dutch meat plants, fuelled public and political will to structurally improve these workers' precarious work and living conditions. Yet, the process of policy change is slow. The authors show it is the gradual transformation in the institutional environment that the State needs to counter to become more protective for EU mobile workers.

Using the gradual institutional change approach and the concept of State ignorance, the authors examine State responses drawing on interviews with expert stakeholders in the public and private domain, public administration records and newspaper articles.

Through knowledge creation, boosted social dialogue mechanisms, enhanced enforcement capacity and new housing legislation, the Dutch State focuses on countering gradual institutional change through which existing institutions lost their effectiveness as protectors of EU mobile workers. The organization of work is, nevertheless, not (yet) fundamentally addressed with tighter public legislation.

The findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the role of the State as multifaceted actor in institutional change processes towards increased protection for EU mobile workers.

The narratives that would give meaning to at least four generations of scholars and practitioners are amplified in the discourse growing out of the elements of technical rationality, pragmatism, evolution, and the rush of different ideas and new institutions that punctuate the Progressive period. The narratives explored below persist in public administration from the beginning of the twentieth century: preparation for the rise of national institutions, the citizen-state relationship, reconciling democracy and administration, and science and scientific management. Throughout the paper, the author's interest in the reconciliation of freedom and order is explored in the relationship between self and community, citizen and nation, and politics and administration.