The Seasonal workers directive: much law about nobody?

The EU Seasonal Workers Directive (2014/36/EU) was adopted with a dual regulatory objective: to manage third-country national labour flows and to ensure their protection against exploitation. While its inclusion of progressive guarantees—most notably the equal-treatment clause—initially prompted cautious optimism, subsequent practice reveals that the Directive fails to deliver protection to its intended beneficiaries. We argue that this shortfall results not only from a flawed conceptualisation of “seasonal work” at the legislative stage, but also from structural weaknesses in the Directive’s implementation and enforcement architecture. The instrument presupposes administrative capacities and monitoring mechanisms at national level that, in many Member States, remain either underdeveloped or entirely absent. Moreover, its reliance on individual enforcement—requiring workers to activate complaint mechanisms or pursue litigation—rests on unrealistic assumptions about workers’ access to justice and ignores well-documented limits to rights-based enforcement in migration governance. These deficiencies underscore a fundamental disconnect between the Directive’s subjective legal category of “seasonal worker” and the complex, fragmented labour realities in which such workers are actually employed. As a result, the regulatory framework remains ill-equipped to govern the sector or ensure meaningful protection in practice.