New Posting of Workers’ Rules: Much Ado About Nothing?
Last week (19 March 2018) the European Council (EC) and the European Parliament (EP), after over a decade of debates reached an agreement on pay and working conditions of posted workers, or employees sent (‘posted’) from one EU country to another by their employer ‘to carry out a service on a temporary basis’.
According to the provisional agreement, enforcing the ‘equal pay for equal work in the same place’ rule, posted workers will need to receive remuneration equal to that of the host country’s workers and the costs of their travel, accommodation, and board will not be deductible from their salaries. Another important change regards the posting period, which will be limited to twelve months (with a possibility of extension for another six months). After that time, posted workers will be able to continue their work in the host country but all the local labor code rules will apply to them. After some discussion the negotiators moreover agreed that applicable to posted workers will also be all collective agreements ‘representative in a specific geographic area or profession’. As noted by a Member of
the European Parliament, Danuta Jazłowiecka, this provision is problematic because the texts of the collective bargains ‘(…) frequently are several hundred pages long, are not always publicly available and their translations into official EU languages are not available’.
Photo: A worker vacuum-cleans a red carpet ahead of the EU summit in Brussels, Belgium, March 9, 2017. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir
