Better enforcement through improved Nordic–Baltic cooperation

The Enforcement Directive (2014/67) aims to ensure that rules on posting apply uniformly across national borders and provides different tools to promote its purpose. The division of control and enforcement responsibilities and competencies differs from country to country, as does the trade unions' role in this area.

The objective of this project is to promote transnational cooperation among public authorities, including the promotion of the use of IMI. The project aims to share experiences and good practices not only within the participating countries but also with other Member States, social partners and the ELA.

The objectives are:

• Map enforcement measures in construction and the most exposed/salient parts of manufacturing.
• Explore new, innovative strategies and tools, and test out new tools in national inspections and ways to improve transnational cooperation in the enforcement of posting rules.
• Elaborate on the conditions and obstacles for national and transnational cooperation concerning enforcement.
• Investigate the conditions for transnational cooperation between authorities and social partners at different levels in the participating countries.
• Improve enforcement practices related to third-country posting from other EU Member States into Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

During the study, we will investigate:

• factors that promote or inhibit common understandings/ and goals across borders and between authorities and social partners
• factors that promote or inhibit successful inspections and other practices contributing to the enforcement of the regulations of posted work, nationally and transnationally
• factors that are transferable across national borders
• factors that promote or inhibit long-lasting collaboration across borders

Contacts and information channels across national borders are especially important between countries that are mainly sending and countries mainly receiving posted workers. Critical in this picture is the use of the Internal Market Information System (IMI). Our aim is to contribute to the improvement of existing exchanges between the labour inspectorates, including their use of the IMI, but we also want to explore ways to better the information exchange and division of labour between the inspectorates and the social partners in each country.

By building “stone by stone” and facilitating experience sharing and policy learning, the indicators and lessons from the proposed project can be further developed and serve as a basis and inspiration for future similar collaboration efforts in other countries/regions in the common market.

Methodology

• Organizing workshops in order for the participants to have an arena for continuing experience exchange and cooperation.
• Through document studies, literature reviews and qualitative interviews map existing enforcement regulation, the competence of the national labour inspectorates, strategies and tools employed in national inspections of posting of workers as well as in transnational cooperation, including the IMI, in order to analyse positive and negative experiences with different approaches. Through discussions of these findings in a workshop for all participants, the aim is to develop better knowledge of different approaches and to contribute to mutual learning
• Through action-oriented methods, we will test good practice in inspections aimed at post-ing of work, by among other things testing out new questions and approaches in national inspections and enforcement strategies.
• By evaluating the testing period, using qualitative interviews and surveys among inspectors in the partner countries, we will collect experiences with the adjusted approach and present recommendations.
• Through the dissemination of project results, we aim to spread the findings of the project to labour inspectorates, ELA, social partners and other stakeholders across the EU.