Cross-Border Labor in the EU: between Trans-Nationalisation and Renationalisation of Social Rights
Cross-Border Labor in the EU: between Trans-Nationalisation and Renationalisation of Social Rights

Summary/Abstract: Because of its sheer scale, cross-border labor in the EU constitutes an epiphenomenon that reveals the extremely low permeability of EU economic borders in terms of the labor market. As they have become more numerous over time, this category of atypical workers has made visible the complex construction of transnational norms by the EU that seek to reduce the legal barriers and inequal treatments that are a natural outgrowth of heterogeneous national institutional frameworks. Although EU-wide intervention grants special status to this category of workers and limits the risks of discriminatory treatment in terms of access to social benefits, attempts made by some member-states to renationalise these benefits reveal the fragility of EU guarantees. Motivated by budgetary or nationalist trends, renationalisation strategies have increased since the burst of the last crisis, encouraging cross-border representatives and EU institutions to counteract these strategies in more or less consistent ways. By focusing on institutional dynamics and actor’s strategies governing the construction or partial deconstruction of cross-border workers’s rights, the paper proposes to offer insights into one dimension of the transnationalisation process that participates to the EU integration.

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