Trade Union Strategies and the Regulation of Posted Work

In many countries in Europe, posted work has become a common way to employ migrant labour in construction and other industries. This is because it allows the employer to save on labour costs, by avoiding certain aspects of host country collective agreements and social fees. More than that, however, it makes enforcement of even the labour standards which apply to posted workers difficult and complicated for trade unions, so that often posted workers do not receive the minimum standards to which they are entitled. Unions have developed a number of strategies to deal with this, which in seek to patch the holes in national and sectoral regulatory institutions made by CJEU rulings and the regulatory evasion strategies of transnational contractors. As Wagner (2015) notes in the German context, there is a process of institutional drift occurring as a result of posting, as the behaviors of firms diverge from those agreed in formal institutional settings. Trade unions, however, adapt their behavior, and formal settlements change as a result. New institutional settlements bring in new elements, using these to patch up the old settlements, and reestablish a degree of union labour market influence. This paper will describe and characterize these new institutional settlements for the construction industry, drawing on interviews of posted workers and trade unionists in the Netherlands, Finland, Germany and the UK.