How National Parliamentarians Face Up to the Impact of the European Integration on the Labour Market? The Case Study of Posted Workers in France

This proposal focuses on how national parliamentarians take up to the impact of the European integration on the labour market, through the case study of posted workers in France. These posted workers have an employment contract in their home country in the European Union (EU), but are temporarily sent by their employer to France to carry out a mission. This type of use of the freedom of movement for workers and provision of business services has increased exponentially since the first enlargements to the East of the EU. In 2017, the number of posted workers in the EU was estimated around 2.5 million. With more than 516,000 posted workers, France is the second largest importing country behind Germany. The posting of workers is often associated with the exploitation of the gap between EU Member States' wages and social security contributions, but also with offences to national employment and social protection rights. The posting of workers has emerged as a public problem in importing countries like France. In times of crisis of the European integration, it is a growing topic in the French parliamentarian debates, which contributes to rising euroscepticism. During the last two legislative terms (2012-2017 and 2017 to the present), there has been a sharp increase in the number of questions related to posted workers that have been asked to the French government in the National Assembly. Through this case study, our paper aims at questioning how issues relating to the European integration are tackled in the national parliamentary debate. We will present a systematical and quantified analysis of the French parliamentary discussions about posted workers. Qualitative and quantitative text analysis allow the exploration of various ways to call out or denounce the French government, other Member States, European institutions or transnational and/or localized firms. It also sheds light on how territorialised (region, department, cities etc.) or professional sectors' interests are mentioned and the way related expertise is used. The political, territorial and sociodemographic characteristics of parliamentarians who invest the issue of posted workers will also be questioned and associated with the frequency of parliementary questions and the type of argumentation. The analysis will be based on material from an ongoing survey on the supervision of posted workers in the EU. In the French National Assembly, 598 questions to the government mention the posting of workers between June 1988 and June 2018. The data collected include the caracteristics of these questions (content, minister addressee, date, etc.), the parliamentarians' profiles (socio-demographic properties, position in the political field, indicators of longevity in the political field and the Assembly, etc.), and the features of their electoral district (EU-border or non-border department, rate of posted workers in the working population, unemployment rate, ratio of jobs in the sectors most affected by the posting of workers, etc.). A series of interviews with the most invested parliamentarians in these issues, or their collaborators, completes these elements.