The EU’s Fair Labour Mobility Package must put clear emphasis on fairness and put an end to labour abuse arising from free movement. Only by ensuring fairness for workers in the Single Market can free movement strengthen the competitiveness of companies that follow the rules
Free movement is the core of the EU Single Market and has helped companies and workers alike to prosper. Without it, there would be no European Union. It is key to Europe’s competitiveness that we continue to remove unnecessary burdens for companies and workers to ensure that the Single Market remains one of the most competitive and prosperous economies in the world.
However, free movement has also enabled the cross-border spread of insidious business practices by which some companies seek to gain profits by circumventing applicable working conditions and evading taxation. Such practices include letterbox constructions, opaque subcontracting chains that hide liability, undeclared work, social security fraud and fraudulent posting of workers. Together they undermine fair competition, erode workers’ rights and severely damage the EU labour markets.
As Enrico Letta notes in ‘Much more than a market’, “One of the downsides of free movement is that it can be used to undermine or evade existing labour standards and regulations in order to gain a competitive advantage over bona fide companies”.
