Zane Rasnaca

• Juris Doctor
• European Trade Union Institute

This report provides an overview of the ways in which EU and EEA Member States have regulated the immigration of third-country nationals who enter their territory for the purpose of work. Its focus is on short-term migrant workers and it presents the results of an extensive mapping exercise carried out by national experts from 23 EU and two EEA...

This report provides an overview of the ways in which EU and EEA Member States have regulated their social security frameworks in relation to short-term third-country national (TCN) migrant workers. It presents the result of an extensive mapping exercise carried out in 24 EU Member States, as well as Iceland and Norway, focussing on the relationshi...

In order better to illustrate the key challenges in the enforcement of remote workers’ rights, this chapter uses the example of digital nomads as a comparatively extreme case of ‘remote work’, as opposed to the more mundane kinds of remote working (for example, teleworking once per week from home in the same country where the office is located)....

This chapter aims to underline the linkages between rule of law backsliding and social policy by looking at the EU responses to the rule of law crisis. We also raise the question of its unintended effects on social policy. While, as already mentioned, rule of law breaches are geographically much broader phenomena, for space reasons we will only con...

Enforcement is the key ingredient that makes rights effective and ensures compliance. It can make or break a legal system. Despite this, enforcement of EU labour law has received little scholarly attention in recent decades and has rarely been examined in a comprehensive way. This book aims to fill this gap. Intended for academics and practitioner...

Without effective enforcement, EU labour law’s ability to protect workers would be seriously blunted. Th e degree of effectiveness very much depends on the respective legislative framework. This is the main reason for proposing a specific Directive on effective enforcement of EU labour law. To address several of the enforcement gaps identifi ed in...

It has almost become a cliché to say that the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing inequalities while also generating new ones. However, the following pages of this year’s Benchmarking Working Europe clearly reveal that, far from being a platitude, the nexus between the pandemic and rising inequalities is both increasingly measurable and...

Collective redress has a lot of appeal as an enforcement tool, but historically it has been seen as somewhat unfitting for the European legal landscape. Despite this, many EU national legal systems have introduced collective redress mechanisms. The area of EU labour and social law, however, has been slow to catch up with this trend. This article di...

This article introduces the special issue on ‘Collective redress in labour law’. Even the best labour code in the world would be practically useless without procedural rules to enable its enforcement. The contributions in this special issue show that, while the mechanism of collective redress certainly functions with mixed results and often is unde...

The Latvian response to the COVID-19 crisis can be praised as successful since the pandemic reached its peak as early as 1 April and there has been a gradual decrease of new cases since then. Nonetheless, the consequences for the labour market are significant. Latvia adopted several measures, including a wage subsidy, income support for the self-em...

Intra-EU employee posting remains a politically and legally contentious matter that continues to feature on the agendas of lawmakers, trade unions and researchers alike. Numerous cases brought before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), as well as recent and ongoing revisions of the posting-related EU legal framework, suggest that pro...

The posting of workers is often the subject of the legal and political discourse. To a large extent this is driven by factors originating at EU level – be the controversial rulings by the CJEU, or EU-level reform of posting-related rules. As the reports on the 11 EU Member States covered in this book show, both the debates and the case law are ofte...

The right to provide services on a cross-border basis is one of the fundamental economic freedoms enjoyed by companies in the EU. To fulfil their contractual obligations, companies are allowed to temporarily send-or post-their employees to other EU Member States. The status of these employees is set out in EU law and national-level regulations, as...

With the current Covid-19 crisis, the issue of social inequalities within and between EU Member States is once again brought into stark relief. Endowing the Eurozone with a «re-balancing» social dimension is a way forward against such inequalities. Currently, however, the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) does not contain mechanisms that could move...

Presentation of on-going research on implementation of the European Pillar of Social Rights

This chapter investigates ‘democracy at work’ in theory and presents some empirical evidence of it in practice in today’s European Union. Beginning with a conceptual discussion of how we can understand the meaning of democracy at work across a range of different approaches, we go on to explore its beneficial impact on civic democracy, economic perf...

This background analysis surveys how, and for which groups of workers, European Union member states regulate reimbursement of travel, board and lodging costs. The report provides an overview of national and EU law and analyses how these costs are regulated in relation to the worker’s salary. It also offers an analysis of the existing legal framewor...

In C-566/15 Konrad Erzberger v TUI AG, the CJEU had to deal with the implications of transnationality for workers’ codetermination rights in a German multinational company. It concluded that a national legislation precluding workers from foreign subsidiaries from participating in elections to parent-company boards fully complies with EU law as it c...

The main objective of this chapter is to review the extent to which recent developments in the field of wages and collective bargaining con-tribute to achieving these objectives. The issues addressed in this chapter will be the country-specific recommendations as regards wages and collective bargaining, and the development of real and minimum wages...

Social and economic interests of ‘new’ and ‘old’ Member States along centre and periphery axis – Judicial and legislative developments concerning the posting of workers – Continuous deepening of the divide between centre and periphery – Lack of placement of new Member States’ social interests at the EU level – The need to place social interests fir...

Published in Social Europe journal, https://www.socialeurope.eu/giving-junckers-proposed-european-labour-authority-real-clout Every year the State of the Union speech (SOTEU) serves a certain purpose. This year it was all about encouragement and promise. It was all about promising ‘big things’ – more Schengen, better enforcement of the rule of law...

Since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008, the European Commission’s approach to the issue of wages and collective bargaining has been based on a strategy of internal devaluation which primarily aims at the improvement of price competitiveness by lowering the relative prices of goods and services produced in a country vis-à-vis its trading pa...

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has some basic structural features similar to that of most judicial bodies. According to the treaties, the members of the Court are chosen from individuals whose independence is beyond doubt and who possess the ability required for appointment to higher judicial offices. The involvement of the Court...