Crossing borders and moving frontiers: Coordinating European social security for modern cases of global mobility

Modern cases of global mobility cause legal ambiguities as to which conflict rules to apply to govern the applicable social security legislation. Relevant to this end is the question of whether the situation is governed by the lex loci laboris principle, the posting provision, or the rules on normal work in two or more Member States under EC Regulation 883/2004. Each of these three legal mechanisms must be distinguished from each other. First, this article proposes a structure for handling such distinctions. Secondly, it discusses how these distinctions are made. It is concluded that the posting provision has a wide scope of applicability whereas the scope of applicability of the rules on normal work in two or more Member States has been narrowed. On the basis of the legal description, this article analyses a catalogue of standard cases of modern mobility for which it is not clear whether the posting rules or the rules on normal work in two or more Member States apply. As the tendency drives towards temporary global mobility setups, a starting point is that the posting rule applies. The article concludes that the current EU rules on the applicable social security legislation have substantial flexibility for managing new cases of global mobility.