Strategic contextualisation: free movement, labour migration policies and the governance of foreign workers in Europe

an article by Regine Paul (Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences, Universität Bremen, Germany) published in Policy Studies Volume 34 Issue 2 (2013)

Abstract

Heightened levels of internal labour mobility since the European Union (EU)’s Eastern enlargements in 2004 and 2007 have shifted the context for member state policies geared towards the admission of non-EU workers.

This article contends that the strategic use of the internal mobility régime by member states, as a justification for selective recruitment of labour from outside the EU, deserves more analytical attention.

This contribution examines how labour migration policies (LMP) in the United Kingdom, France and Germany make use of the EU free-movement framework in current legislation, and how associated policy rationales are justified.

In an interpretive policy analysis of legislative documents and decision-makers’ meaning-making, as related in semi-structured interviews, the article identifies the logics, tools and rationales which link LMP to EU free movement. These links are shown to be highly selective and they serve common as well as nationally distinct governance goals.

Across all three cases LMPs ascribe various degrees of relevance to EU internal labour supply, depending on the different skill levels of migrants targeted in respective policies. This shared pattern of economic coordination of LMP by skill level – in which the EU common labour market plays the role of delimiting additional migration in the skilled and especially low-skilled segments – is conflated with national migration control agendas.

Member states draw on EU free movement to justify migration restrictions targeted at specific sending countries. As a result, the governance of the foreign workforce produces skills- and origin-based privileges rather than granting rights to mobile migrant workers in Europe.

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Free provision of services and cross-border labour recruitment

an article by Jan Cremers (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands) published in Policy Studies Volume 34 Issue 2 (March 2013)

Abstract

This article identifies how the use of the European Union (EU) mobility rules, as formulated by the EU’s Posting Directive, has been linked to the temporary provision of services in practice.

It demonstrates how this linkage, legitimised by European Court rulings, undermines the Directive’s original intent to provide rights-based regulation of labour mobility in the Union. In the assessment of posting practices, striking findings of two studies co-conducted by the author in 2003 and 2010 are discussed.

In the first section, the origins of the Directive are described, followed by sections that contextualise the posting rules in the framework of the fundamental economic freedoms of EU Treaties, and discuss the problems related to implementation and enforcement.

Based on the Directive’s definition of posting, three issues of governance and practice are raised:

1. regulation of the employment relationship,
2. application of labour conditions and
3. respect for collective agreements.

A final section offers policy recommendations in order to deal with the ways in which posting governance and practices currently impede any vision of rights-based mobility in the EU. It is argued that current minimalist interpretation of the posting rules can neither guarantee equal treatment nor protect the rights of temporary migrant workers.

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