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Contents: 1. Resilience of equal treatment in the framework of EU immigration policy. 2. Posted TCN as migrant workers.
The European Court of Justice’s approach to labour migration is multifaceted and may even appear, at times, contradictory. On the one hand, the Court has, in a number of cases, and again recently, interpreted EU legislative instruments in the domain of immigration policy in favour of migrant workers, whose right to equal treatment is conceived extensively1. The Court has followed a rather consistent path on equal treatment, as if it could disregard the increasing prominence of “national preference” in many European countries, where extreme right parties are gaining strength, if not yet acceding to power. On the other hand, when the mobility of third-country nationals (TCN) for work purposes takes place under the auspices of free provision of services and the so-called “posting of workers”, their protection has not been a priority. The Court has conceived free provision of services extensively, as one could expect, and strictly reviewed national immigration law limiting the mobility of service providers’ employees. At a time of restrictive immigration policies in Member states, free provision of services is used as a means of providing migrant workers from third countries to employers across Europe in search of cheap labour.