The Posting of Workers in an Eastern European Labour Market: From Social Dumping to a Multi-Faceted Labour Mobility Instrument
The Posting of Workers in an Eastern European Labour Market: From Social Dumping to a Multi-Faceted Labour Mobility Instrument

Summary/Abstract: The posting of workers has been fiercely discussed and analysed as a mechanism of social dumping in the Western European labour markets. This paper takes a reverse perspective and analyses the posting of workers in Slovakia as an Eastern European case whereby posting is presented as a multifaceted labour mobility instrument. We combine a review of the national regulatory framework and administrative data with stakeholder interviews to provide a rich account of why and how posting is used by employers and regulated and enforced by public authorities. We show that, while posting is a specific instrument of short-term intra-EU mobility formally enabling the mobility of services, it effectively plays a much wider role, transcending the low-cost competitiveness objective. We argue that the rise and embedding of posting in Slovakia is sustained by a specific regulatory and labour market context which is reliant on a flexible workforce with a weak enforcement of labour rights and characterised by erratic policy changes. Our study illustrates that the divide in the posting literature between sending and receiving countries is becoming outdated because supposed 'sending' countries like Slovakia are receiving substantial numbers of posted workers; they are also increasingly posting in a different way to earlier.

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