The electricians claim they have not been paid according to the
Finnish universally applicable collective agreement.
The case touches on two fundamentally important issues. Firstly, did
the Finnish trade union have the right at all to bring the posted
workers’ case to a court of law? Their employer claimed it could not.
But of course, answered the EU Court of Justice, which decided that
preventing the Electrical Workers’ Union from representing the
employees would be in breach of the EU’s directive on the posting of
workers and the EU’s charter of fundamental rights.
What does the minimum rates of pay comprise?
The other major question in this case is which of the benefits in
the Finnish collective agreement for the electrics and building
installation trade are included in the minimum rates of pay that the
Polish company must pay its employees. The directive on the posting of
workers introduces certain frameworks, but within these member states
can decide what the minimum rates of pay comprises.
And that could be many things, according to the EU Court of Justice.
Firstly, the host member state decides how the minimum rates of
pay are calculated. The collective agreement involved in this
case, for instance, divides workers into wage groups and stipulates a
minimum hourly wage or piece rate for each group.
As long as the division into groups and the wage calculation is
carried out in accordance with binding and transparent rules, the
foreign company must follow them. Daily allowances can also be included
in the minimum rates of pay, if these are paid on the same terms to
workers who are posted from a different country as for those posted
within their country.
Same issue as for Norway’s shipbuilding case
The case is about terms in a certain collective agreement, and wage
structures in other collective agreements might look very different.
But in principle this covers the same ground as the
Norwegian “shipbuilding case” which was decided by Norway’s Supreme
Court in 2013, leading to
a complaint from the EFTA Court. There is disagreement in Sweden
too over what the term minimum rates of pay in the directive
on the posting of workers means.
With the new judgement from the EU Court of Justice it is clear that
what the parties define as minimum levels in their collective
agreements for different categories of workers and working tasks, also
applies to posted workers, as long as the rules are clear and binding
so that they are applied equally to them and to domestic workers.
Equally important for Nordic trade unions is the EU Court of
Justice’s message that they cannot be prevented from representing
workers who have been posted here, in just the same way as they
represent domestic workers.
