Highly Mobile Workers and the Coordination of Social Security in the EU

In a globalizing world, national borders are frequently crossed. Moreover, flexibility is a key skill in the knowledge economy of the 21st century. Accordingly, an increasing number of workers can be labelled as ‘highly mobile’, which are persons that combine various forms of work (on-call contracts, employment agency work, platform-work, teleworking etc.) that are carried out in several countries.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of a current and pressing problem for an increasing group of working people, whose social (security) protection is unclear or even non-existent. The main rule of EU social security law prescribes that the law of the Member State where the person works applies.

When there are several work countries involved, the multi-activity rule of Article 13 of Regulation 883/2004 is to be applied. According to this conflict rule, the applicable social security legislation is to be determined by the place of work or the place of residence. Which of these two connecting factors is decisive in situations of high mobility? The rather simple question of where is the highly mobile worker socially insured may become a difficult one.

The consequences for highly mobile workers and their employers are that social rights and obligations are not only sometimes difficult to determine, one could also question whether the applicable legislation as determined by the conflict rules of Regulation 883/2004 is appropriate for a certain highly mobile situations. While some problems are more of a technical-legal nature, others rather stem from procedural and administrative issues. How could these problems be addressed by EU social security law?

With many forms of flexible work and work activities increasingly being performed in several Member States, it seems more important than ever to map out mobility-related issues that highly mobile workers may encounter and to explore possible routes towards more legal certainty regarding their social security protection. That is exactly what the research presented in this book aims to attain.