"Between the cracks: third-country posted workers,"

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Posting falls under the EU freedom to provide services. Employers in one member state can post employees to another member state for up to 18 months.

This circumvents national sovereignty over determining access to the labour market. Countries such as Poland and Slovenia—focus of our research—have opened their labour markets to neighbouring countries to compensate for domestic emigration following EU accession. This however allows of immediate onward posting of these third-country nationals, often under exploitative conditions...

Mobile workers, particularly third-country nationals, are at a structural disadvantage in vindicating their rights. Apart from language barriers, complex rules on posting, health and safety and labour rights are difficult to understand. Third-country nationals are heavily dependent on their employer if their residence permit is linked to their employment and their low level of trade-union organisation facilitates exploitation. They are thus very unlikely actively to assert their rights...

Member-state authorities can demand compliance with EU rules but this is where the challenges to transnational administrative co-operation come in. The rules are complex and fuzzy.

Companies cannot make posting alone their business but need to be economically active in the sending country—to what extent, however, is vague. Workers cannot be explicitly recruited for posting, but their previous employment duration in the posting country lacks specification: 30 days is merely recommended. Nor can countries of employment add requirements—the Court of Justice prohibited Germany from requiring that third-country nationals had worked for one year before being posted...

The posting of third-country nationals enables new business models that remain attractive, even in the face of converging economic development among member states. Cross-border co-operation is complex and monitoring regulation requires a lot of administrative capacity. Enforcing the principle of ‘equal pay for equal work in the same place’ requires stronger monitoring and institutions at national and supranational level. Above all, broader and deeper transnational co-operation is needed between authorities, such as via joint inspections...