Posting of workers in the single market: attempts to prevent social dumping and regime competition in the EU

Abstract

The so-called 'Posting of Workers Directive' was an integral part of the European Commission (EC) Action programme linked to the Community Charter of Fundamental Rights of Workers and was meant to establish a legal frame for labour conditions of workers posted for a temporary period to another Member State. Its content is about equal treatment, a guarantee of minimum protection, fair competition and respect for the regulatory frame in the host country. In the cases included in this article, increased divergence can be observed with respect to the role of the state versus the social partners with regards to regulation and control. The over-riding challenge nowadays is to develop effective mechanisms of enforcement compatible with the constraints of European Union principles and regulations. In the EC documents, any reference to the Community Charter of Basic Rights of Workers has disappeared and the weight of power has shifted in favour of the free market hardliners, who seem to regard the Directive as an oddity in breach with the logic of the four freedoms.

Social dumping cases in the Swedish Labour Court in the wake of Laval, 2004–2010

“…Regarding the first research question, among the six Labour Court cases analysed in this article, two concern the need to consult Swedish trade unions' rights when a company uses a subcontractor, one concerns the applicability of Swedish versus foreign collective bargaining agreements on work sites in Sweden, one concerns the definition of an employee (and, by extension, the issue of 'bogus self-employment'), one concerns how to determine wages for temporary staffing agency workers and one concerns workers' rights to join a trade union. Four of the cases studied were taken from the construction sector, known to be the sector with largest concentration of EU migrant workers (Cremers et al, 2007) and the other two from the manufacturing sector. The analysis shows how the rules of the labour market are constantly being renegotiated by social actors -especially employers and unions -from the pre-existing power relations and rules and institutions.…”

“…In an earlier section, I showed that the definition of 'employee' and the issue referred to as 'bogus self-employment' has become an acute issue in European industrial relations and especially in the construction sector (Cremers et al, 2007;Houwerzijl and Peters, 2008). Above I also discussed a case in the transport sector with a Polish truck driver who was bogus self-employed and was compensated -but before the case reached the Labour Court.…”

From labour migration to labour mobility? The return of the multinational worker in Europe

“…From the social dumping perspective, there are three main consequences of the EU-wide free movement of capital and labour: the lowering of wages and employment standards in West Europe, the weakening of trade unions, and the strengthening of employers' power. First, wages and employment standards decrease because East European workers are willing to work for lower salaries than domestic workers, causing job displacement and an increase in unemployment among the local workforce as employers prefer to hire migrant and/or posted workers (Cremers et al, 2007;Lillie, 2012). Second, trade unions in Western Europe are often opposed to the free movement of labour because labour migration is seen as putting pressure on existing collective agreements, resulting in a proliferation of temporary and flexible jobs that are difficult to unionise (Krings, 2009;Wagner and Hassel, 2015).…”

The European Social Union and EU Legislative Politics

“…The politics of regulating workers posted in another Member State dates back to the 1980s when the relation between public procurement regulation and the internal market was first debated. 32 The trade unions in the construction sector demanded a social clause in the public procurement regulations. The unions wanted the clause to be in line with the ILO Convention 94, meaning that posting firms would comply with the working conditions and collective agreements of hosting countries.…”