"If you ask me for money again, I will call the police"

There is a kind of worker in this country that most Germans never see.

He comes in before the restaurant opens and leaves after it closes. Twelve hours. Six days a week, sometimes seven. He does the dishes, the prep, the cleaning, the deliveries. He is paid in cash, if he is paid at all. Twelve hundred euros a month, maybe less.

He does not have papers. And the boss knows it. That is the whole arrangement.

I have been in kitchens in Spain and in Germany, and I have watched this from the inside for two decades. I want to write down what I know, because the people it happens to are the least likely to ever read a German government website.

Let us do the maths, because nobody does

So the man is being paid roughly a quarter of what the law says the work is worth. The other three quarters are the boss's profit. That is not a hard job. That is a business model.

And the hours themselves are illegal on their own. German working time law allows eight hours a day, ten at a stretch only if the average comes back down within six months. Twelve hours a day, every day, is not a grey area.

The sentence that ends the argument

So the month ends and the man asks for his money. Sometimes it is short. Sometimes it does not come at all. And then comes the sentence.

"You want to make trouble? Fine. I will call the police. You have no papers. See what happens to you."

And the man goes quiet. He walks away from four hundred, a thousand, three thousand euros that he earned with his hands. Then he goes back the next morning and works another twelve hours, because he has nothing else.

I have seen a grown man cry about this in a walk-in fridge so nobody would see him.

Who is actually breaking the law here

Working without a permit is a problem for the worker. Nobody should pretend otherwise. But look at what the employer has done, in a single month:

• Employed someone without a work permit — an offence under German law against illegal employment, and much more serious when the conditions are exploitative.
• Paid far below the minimum wage.
• Broken working time law every single day.
• Paid cash with no records — undeclared work, which is a matter for the customs authority, not the local policeman.
• Not paid social insurance contributions. Withholding those is a criminal offence in Germany, and it is one the state takes seriously because the money is owed to the state.
• Not paid tax on any of it.

The worker risks his residence status. The employer risks fines that can run into six figures, back-payment of years of social contributions and tax, closure of the business, and in bad cases prison.

That is why the threat is a bluff in almost every case. A boss who calls the police on his own kitchen porter is calling the police on himself. In twenty years I have never once seen a boss actually do it. I have heard the threat many, many times.

Rights that do not care about your papers

This is the part that surprises people, and it is worth reading twice.

In Germany, certain rights belong to anyone who actually did the work, no matter what their residence status is. Payment for work done. Protection under accident insurance if you are hurt on the job. Minimum holiday. Continued pay when you are sick.

There is a specific rule in German residence law for exactly this situation: if an employer used a worker without a permit, the employer still owes the wages, and the law starts from the assumption that the person worked there for at least three months. The employer has to prove otherwise. That rule exists precisely so that "you have no papers" cannot be used as an excuse not to pay.

And the labour court is not the immigration office. As one long-time advisor in Hamburg puts it: at the labour court, your status does not matter for the wage claim itself.

Where to go — free, and anonymous if you want

Faire Integration

Free advice on employment and social law for people from outside the EU. There is a centre in every German state. Advice is free, multilingual, and can be anonymous. Since January 2026 it runs on a proper legal footing, and employers hiring from abroad are now legally required to tell new staff that it exists. Search for "Faire Integration" plus your city, or go to faire-integration.de.

MigrAr, and the union advice points

MigrAr in Hamburg has been advising workers without secure residence status since 2008, first through ver.di and later through the DGB. Similar union advice points exist in Berlin, Munich and other cities. Ver.di was the first German union to let people join regardless of papers. A union behind you changes the conversation with a boss more than anything else.

Faire Mobilität

If you are an EU citizen — Romanian, Bulgarian, Polish — this is the one for you. Same idea, free, in your own language.

The Servicestelle against labour exploitation

For the worst cases: forced labour, passports taken away, debts to the employer, people who are not free to leave. That is not a bad job. That is a crime with a name, and there are people whose entire work is helping in those cases.

Start collecting proof today, even if you never use it

This is the single most useful thing in this article, and it costs nothing.

Undocumented work leaves no payslips. So you make your own record, quietly, starting tonight. Advisors have been telling workers to do this for years, and it is what turns "he says, I say" into a case.

• Write your hours down every day. Date, start, finish, break. A cheap notebook, or a note on your phone. Do it the same evening, never a week later.
• Photograph yourself at work. In the kitchen, in the uniform, by the sign. With the date on the photo.
• Keep every message. Every WhatsApp about shifts, every "come at 9 tomorrow", every voice note. Do not delete anything, ever.
• Note what you were paid and when. Even cash. Especially cash. Write the amount and the date.
• Names of colleagues who saw you working. A witness who will say "yes, he worked there every day" is worth a great deal.
• Keep it all somewhere the boss cannot reach. Your own email, a friend's flat. Not in a locker at work.

Do this even if you have no intention of ever complaining. The day you need it, you will not be able to go back and create it.

And the room with nine other men in it

The same arrangement usually extends to where he sleeps.

Seven to ten people in a seventy square metre flat. Four hundred euros each. Do that maths too: eight people at €400 is €3,200 a month for a flat that would rent normally for a fraction of that. Often the landlord is the same person as the boss, or his cousin, or a friend. The wage goes out of one pocket and comes straight back into another.

Charging a wildly inflated rent because someone has no other option is not simply sharp business in Germany — there are laws against it. And a flat like that is usually a fire risk, which is a separate matter entirely.

There is also a quieter trap in it. Without a proper tenancy and a landlord's confirmation, there is no Anmeldung. Without an Anmeldung there is no bank account, no tax number, no insurance, no legal job. The man stays stuck in the same system, and the room is part of what keeps him there.

Why I am writing this

People say the government does not know. I am not sure that is true. The customs authority runs checks on exactly this, and the advice centres above exist because the state accepts the problem is real.

What is true is that almost nobody complains. An advisor in Hamburg who has won many of these wage cases said the plain reason it never stops: too few people come forward. Most just leave. So the boss loses one worker and hires the next one off the same street, and nothing changes.

I am not going to tell any individual what to do. Your situation is yours and I do not know it.

But I will say this much. The threat is designed to make you feel like you are the criminal and he is the one with the power. In the eyes of German law it is a good deal closer to the other way around. Before you walk away from money you have already earned with twelve-hour days, spend one free hour talking to someone who does this for a living, in your own language, for nothing, without giving your name.

One phone call is not the same as making a complaint. It only means you decide what to do next knowing the truth, instead of believing whatever your boss told you in a kitchen at midnight.