Is the Workers Regulation 492/11 fit for purpose?

Using legal geography, as well as insights from socio-legal studies, we want to consider how the European Union (EU) legal regime on free movement in art.45 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) , and specifically the Workers’ Regulation 492/2011 , operates in practice in the case of low paid EU migrant workers. We argue that while the rules on free movement facilitate (and in the case of movement to the United Kingdom (UK) facilitated) the movement, the actual impact of those rules on the day-to-day experience of EU migrant workers is relatively small and, for what may be structural reasons, fail to deliver on the expectations of the drafters, namely that free movement be exercised in "freedom and dignity", and that "equality of treatment be ensured in fact and in law in respect of all matters relating to the actual pursuit of activities as employed persons". We argue that this is because the type of free movement the drafters had in mind—by the migrant worker travelling alone or with a family to seek a job or to take up one already offered—does not reflect the reality of low skilled EU migration where (often unregulated) agents in the home state recruit large numbers of people, often for a fee, to work in factories in the host state, offering poor quality accommodation as part of the employment package. We wish to argue that aspects of Regulation 492/2011 need to be reconsidered in the light of the realities experienced by (low paid) EU migrant workers, drawing on concepts of dignity in the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the broader principles in the Pillar of Social Rights to create an active duty on the part of local authorities to be more interventionist.