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2020, there were 1.7 million cross-border workers in the European Union, creating difficulties in determining the applicable legislation for social security matters. The reason for this ...complexity is that even in cross-border activities, the legislation of only one Member State is applicable according to the Coordination Regulation 883/2004. This article examines the evolving landscape of social security coordination in the European Union. It explores the interplay between the European principle of free movement of workers and the complexities arising from various national social security systems, combined with the increase in telework. The article outlines the foundational legal frameworks underpinning social security within the European Union, including the Coordination Regulation EC 883/2004, and discusses primarily the challenges in applying these rules to cross-border teleworkers. It further analyses the implications of the new Multilateral Framework Agreement, providing a nuanced understanding of its role in offering simplified procedures and legal certainty for habitual cross-border teleworkers. The article also highlights the Agreement's limitations, including its restricted scope and the persisting administrative burdens. The discussion extends to the broader context of ongoing legislative efforts and the need for more flexible and modern social security coordination rules in the European Union. The article aims to shed light on the critical issues surrounding social security coordination in an era of evolving work practices.
Drawing on two young French cross-border workers’ entries into the Swiss labour market, this article examines the origins of this type of migration project, highlighting the importance of specific ...resources in accessing cross-border worker status. In border municipalities, the early formation of dispositions to cross-border mobility and the possession of inherited assets facilitate entry into this way of life. But in places situated further from the border, it is the workplace that appears to be a crucial space in obtaining resources to access the neighbouring country. Far from the border, cross-border migration represents a highly prized form of social advancement. Conversely, it appears more as a necessity to the children of the working-class people living near the border.
À partir des trajectoires d’entrée sur le marché du travail suisse de deux jeunes ouvriers français, cet article interroge la genèse d’un projet migratoire et met en avant la centralité de ressources spécifiques dans l’accès au statut de frontalier. Près de la frontière, la formation précoce de dispositions aux mobilités transfrontalières et l’héritage de patrimoine accumulé par les générations précédentes rendent plus aisée l’entrée dans ce mode de vie. Plus loin, la scène du travail apparaît centrale dans la mise en place de relais pour réduire les distances avec le pays voisin. Promotion sociale convoitée depuis ces vallées plus éloignées où l’industrie décline, cette migration apparaît à l’inverse comme une nécessité collective pour les enfants d’ouvriers des communes frontalières.
This study examines how variations in homicide rates in Mexico are associated with the likelihood of participating in cross‐border work, that is, living in Mexico but working in the U.S. Based on ...Mexican census data from 2000, 2010, and 2015, and information on homicides, a series of ordinary least squares models are estimated to analyze the relationship between cross‐border commuting and homicide rates at the individual level. Fixed effects models are also estimated to study this relationship at the municipal level. The results show that from 2000 to 2010 the increase in homicide rates in northern border municipalities in Mexico reduced the likelihood of being a cross‐border worker, while from 2010 to 2015 the decrease in the homicide rate increased the probability that workers engage in cross‐border work. The decline in the number of cross‐border workers is likely in part a result of the escalation in drug‐related violence that may have led them to change their country of residence.
The paper develops a parametric variant of the Machado–Mata simulation methodology to examine quantile wage differences between groups of workers, with an application to the wage gap between native ...and foreign workers in Luxembourg. Relying on conditional-likelihood-based 'parametric quantile regression' in place of the standard linear quantile regression is parsimonious and cuts computing time drastically with no loss in the accuracy of marginal quantile simulations in our application. We find that the native worker advantage is a concave function of quantile: the advantage is small (possibly negative) for both low and high quantiles, but it is large for the middle half of the quantile range (between the 20th and 70th native wage percentiles).
The Republic of San Marino, one of the smallest Countries in the world, introduced several emergency measures to contrast virus spread, supporting subordinate workers and families. The regular labour ...law measures have not been altered, with the exception of the employment retention schemes and income reductions.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the government measures to curb it in the past two years have had a significant impact on the mobility of workers within the EU. In this article, we analyze the measures ...adopted by the Slovenian government and the governments of some neighboring countries in the first half of 2020 and examine how these have affected international mobile workers. We identified the economic and social risks to which workers have been exposed following their return to Slovenia or while working in neighboring countries. Such risks were largely due to inconsistently adopted measures on an international level and the adoption of measures at short notice.
•We estimate the substitution between training apprentices and hiring cross-border workers.•We instrument a firms share of cross-border workers using its distance to the national border.•Both OLS and ...2SLS estimates are negative across alternative specifications.•The substitution effect is larger for, but not confined to, occupations with higher hiring costs.•The increase in firms share of cross-border workers from 1995 to 2008 led to about 3,500 (or 2%) fewer apprenticeship positions.
In this paper, we study whether Swiss employers substitute between training apprentices and hiring cross-border workers. Because both training apprentices and hiring skilled workers are costly for firms, we hypothesize that (easier) access to cross-border workers will lead some employers to substitute away from training their own workers. We account for potential endogeneity issues by instrumenting a firm’s share of cross-border workers using a firm’s distance to the national border and therefore its possibility to fall back on cross-border workers to satisfy its labor demand. We find that both OLS and 2SLS estimates are negative across a wide range of alternative specifications, suggesting that firms substitute between training and hiring workers when the supply of skilled workers is higher. Our preferred 2SLS estimate implies that the increase in firms’ share of cross-border workers within our observation period, from 1995 to 2008, led to about 3500 fewer apprenticeship positions (equal to about 2% of the total number of apprentice positions).
Since most research on economic metropolisation has until now concentrated on "high added value" workers on both sides of the border, little place is left for analysis either of the less valued ...categories in the process of metropolisation, or of the diversity of jobs within the regional labour markets. What, then, is the position of less favoured social categories in the evolution of cross-border metropolises over the last decades, when compared with managers or other liberal professions? To answer this question, a case study is carried out here on the cross-border commuters in the Lorraine Region (France), who participate in great numbers in the metropolisation of Luxembourg, by comparing them to those who work in France. The objective of this article is to give an account of the spatiotemporal evolution of the principal social classes among the cross-border commuters, based on the French population censuses. These databases, from 1968 to the present day, are comparable both in the time and space. The results confirm that a cross-border metropolis of Luxembourg has been formed, notably since the 1990s, by a substantial increase of highly qualified cross-border commuters, as well as by an augmentation of the less qualified workforce during this period: thus, in the Region of Lorraine, even in 2013, the share of the cross-border working class (commuting to Luxembourg) remains greater than that of the working class within France. Moreover, complex links exist in the phenomenon of metropolisation between historical social segregations and specifically metropolitan segregations in terms of the socio-spatial organisation of the territory in question: for example, the secondary urban centres of the French metropolitan area, such as Thionville or Metz, serve as a residential reservoir for the most highly qualified cross-border commuters, especially when this type of workforce has already been observed in these agglomerations in the past. Primary results point to the need to learn more about the conditions of different residential trajectories, as well as about the social status of different workforces on each side of the border.
Mobility of workers living in one country and working in a different country has increased in the European Union. Exposed to commuting factors, cross-border workers (CBWs) constitute a potential ...high-risk population. But the relationships between health and commuting abroad are under-documented. Our aims were to: (1) measure the prevalence of the perceived health status and the physical health outcomes (activity limitation, chronic diseases, disability and no leisure activities), (2) analyse their associations with commuting status as well as (3) with income and health index among CBWs.
Based on the 'Enquête Emploi', the French cross-sectional survey segment of the European Labour Force Survey (EU LFS), the population was composed of 2,546,802 workers. Inclusion criteria for the samples were aged between 20 and 60 years and living in the French cross-border departments of Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg. The Health Index is an additional measure obtained with five health variables. A logistic model was used to estimate the odds ratios of each group of CBWs, taking non-cross border workers (NCBWs) as the reference group, controlling by demographic background and labour status variables.
A sample of 22,828 observations (2456 CBWs vs. 20,372 NCBWs) was retained. The CBW status is negatively associated with chronic diseases and disability. A marginal improvement of the health index is correlated with a wage premium for both NCBWs and CBWs. Commuters to Luxembourg have the best health outcomes, whereas commuters to Germany the worst.
CBWs are healthier and have more income. Interpretations suggest (1) a healthy cross-border phenomenon steming from a social selection and a positive association between income and the health index is confirmed; (2) the existence of major health disparities among CBWs; and (3) the rejection of the spillover phenomenon assumption for CBWs. The newly founded European Labour Authority (ELA) should take into account health policies as a promising way to support the cross-border mobility within the European Union.
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This contribution focuses on the legal position and working conditions of cross-border temporary agency workers. In the context of the relationship between the free movement of workers and the ...freedom to provide services, the applicability of the Temporary Agency Work Directive (TAWD) and/or of the (revised) Posting of Workers Directive (PWD) to several different arrangements for cross-border temporary agency work is explored. Furthermore, the tools to prevent circumvention and to encourage compliance with and the enforcement of these legal instruments are discussed. With regard to the role of temporary work agencies and other intermediaries in practice, there seems to be an overlap between facilitation and exploitation, with numerous studies and reports underpinning this assertion. Despite the more favourable position of ‘recruited’ transnational temporary agency workers on paper, the gap with ‘posted’ temporary agency workers is not so wide in reality. For all cross-border temporary agency workers in low-waged sectors, significant problems related to non- or semi-compliance with the applicable regulations arise. After discussing the main challenges relating to non-compliance and enforcement, as well as available tools for cross-border cooperation, some potential future solutions to the aforementioned problems are outlined. In this regard, a pragmatic stance is taken as no ‘magic bullet’ solutions exist.
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