Effective enforcement of the EU framework on the posting of workers: Empirical evidence

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of effective enforcement of EU labour law by looking at the case study of the enforcement of the EU framework on the posting of workers. While recent years have seen a revival of Social Europe in the form of the European Pillar of Social Rights, scholars have also expressed concern over the effectiveness in practice of transnational labour law, and EU labour law in particular. Rasnača (2022) argues that ineffective enforcement creates a ‘justice gap’ between formal rights on paper and access to these rights in practice. One example of an area of EU labour law plagued by enforcement issues is the posting of workers. It is a peculiar type of intra-EU labour mobility, where posted workers, despite often being EU citizens, cannot benefit from the protection afforded by the EU's fundamental principle of the free movement of workers. As the original Directive 96/71/EC on the posting of workers proved manifestly inadequate to safeguard the rights of posted workers, the EU enacted Directive 2014/67 to improve the framework's enforcement. This article offers an evaluation of the Enforcement Directive based on data collected from 29 qualitative interviews. The effectiveness of the Enforcement Directive will be assessed based on the theoretical framework of precarious work. It will be argued that while the Enforcement Directive has contributed to narrowing the justice gap, posted workers continue to be exposed to precarity.