The Right Not to Have Rights: Posted Worker Acquiescence and the European Union Labour Rights Framework

Free movement plays a fundamental role both in the institutional construction and normative expectations of EU citizenship. Not only has the emergence of the EU citizenship agenda mainly taken place along the evolution of mobility rights, but also the exercise of free movement rights by European citizens is crucial to the construction of a European civil and political society.  However, if we look at the experiences of mobile workers, it becomes clear that the individualizing approach to mobility as ‘market-driven autonomous action’ adopted by the EU guarantees neither postnational worker rights nor postnational identities. Rather, the capacity of mobile workers to collectively negotiate work conditions and labour rights has become increasingly constrained, due to the severed relationship between state, territory and citizen on which industrial citizenship has been built. The Arendtian (1976) dilemma of the ‘right to have rights’ – a dilemma derived from the claim that rights depend on the existence of a political community, which until now is the territorially exclusive nation-state, rather than universal personhood – emerges in relation to industrial citizenship, in particular in relation to the international.  This study will develop this argument through an investigation of how the right to have rights is resolved in the EU for mobile “posted” workers in practice in specific cases in Germany, Finland, Netherlands and the United Kingdom.