The Rules of Posting: Intra-European Mobility of Labour and Pressure on National Regulations

Posted work represents an intra-European mobility that we will analyse with a transnational research on Portuguese workers in the construction sector in France. Posting is described by a triangular relationship between the Portuguese employer and his employee, acting as a subcontractor for a French company. This situation can be analysed by the encounter between formal rules and unspoken rules on the basis of cross-European policy of the labour market. We call the production process of the rule of posting an extraterritorial regulation in order to account for its origin outside the workplace in France. On the one hand this regulation is based on different sources of normativity linked to European law, the identity of the workers, territorial mobility and economic clusters. On the other hand, it leads to a conflict between the rules of the country of origin, Portugal, and the rules of the country of destination, France.