There and gone again? Migration to and posting of third-country nationals from Slovenia and Poland

Drawing on research conducted in the framework of the POSTING.STAT project for Slovenia and Poland, this article contributes to the literature on the posting of third-country nationals (TCNs) within the European Union from the perspective of the sending countries. Our research questions are: What are the current posting trends and patterns of mobility of TCNs from Poland and Slovenia? How do national legal and policy instruments in Poland and Slovenia shape the recruitment of TCNs and facilitate the posting of these TCNs to other Member States? We find that the recent growth in posting from both countries is driven by the substantial increase in the number of posted TCNs, which might signal at least their complementary role, if not the replacement, of posted nationals with TCNs to sustain the established business models of posting from Slovenia and Poland. We observe two trends. Firstly, national legal and policy instruments encourage labour migration from certain third countries with which Slovenia and Poland have historical ties and geographical proximity, which are then embedded in their national labour markets. Secondly, both countries remain source countries for the posting of workers, a pattern they have been able to sustain by increasing the use of TCNs for posting. Hence, despite a growing share of TCNs involved in posting, most TCNs continue to be based in Slovenia and Poland, suggesting posting or onward migration are not necessarily the main reason these workers go to Slovenia and Poland in the first place. Yet, the increase in numbers of posted TCNs observed in both countries, regardless of stricter regulations and the Covid-19 pandemic, suggests that posting in labour-intensive sectors such as road freight transport and construction is increasingly becoming a segmented labour market. We argue that the posting of TCNs might grow into an important intra-EU mobility channel, with the caveat that while certain EU countries will insist on restricting direct access to their national labour market for TCNs, other EU countries, especially those that so far have acted as labour or services suppliers, will lend themselves as gate-openers for the intra-EU mobility of TCNs.