Bridging the gap between legislation and practice in the posting of workers

POW-BRIDGE studies the gap between procedures (legal basis) and practices (experiences) in posting rule enactment, identifies challenges and develops and shares effective ways of addressing these challenges for posting companies and implementation agencies. It particularly investigates how the Directive interplays with other EU and national legislation in terms of social security, health insurance, temporary agency work, and company law. The geographical scope of the action includes: Austria, Slovenia, Italy, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Serbia, and North Macedonia.

AIMS

The posting of workers is a dynamic form of labour mobility, which has received considerable political and policy attention principally in terms of preventing social dumping reflected in the revised Directive passed in 2018. The main aim of the project is to strengthen the efforts for the implementation and enforcement of the Directive in an inclusive, participatory and transparent form.
The strategic objectives of the action are:

To promote and enhance effective and transparent application of EU rules on posting;
To promote a more active participation of employers in the process of evidence-based policy-making;
To establish, consolidate and expand multi-stakeholder cross-border collaboration among EU Member States and candidate countries.

The specific objectives of the project are based on the strategic objectives and meet the criteria of the call. They are:

To improve transnational multi-stakeholder cooperation between public authorities, social partners and the research community by setting up mutual learning labs for the exchange of knowledge and information among the participating sending and receiving countries.
To increase access to information in terms of rule enactment of the Posting of Workers Directive and its Enforcement Directive in the eight countries of the action.
To strengthen the evidence base through the collection and evaluation of original data in order to deepen the understanding on a) how the Directive interplays with other EU and national legislation in terms of social security, health insurance, temporary agency work, and company law; b) how the interplay of different complex national systems might lead to potential challenges and eventually inequalities and exploitation; and c) how to address these challenges through policy reform.

METHODS

The research component of the project will investigate the gap between procedures (legal basis) and practices (experiences) in posting rule enactment as well as how the implementation of the Directive interacts with other EU and national regulations related to posting and how this influences employers’ practices and their deliberations to engage in posting. The study will focus, in particular, on national rules and regulations on social security, health insurance, temporary agency work and company law; aspects that have been less studied in this context. Primary data will be collected in each country that will enable the assessment of the impact of these different regulations on actual practices and to what extent these differ across the countries. The method used for the primary data collection will be based on vignettes which will be specifically designed to meet the purposes of the assessment, i.e. elicit insights from both sides of the institutional relationship: posting employers and street-level bureaucrats/state agencies' representatives on posting practices. The kick-off, mutual learning labs, strategic board meetings, and the final international conference will serve as activities that aim to both enhance cooperation and assist in sharing information among participating stakeholders and to a wider audience.