Case C-341/05 Laval [2007] ECR I-11767

• Laval posted workers to its Swedish subsidiary. The union sought to negotiate more favourable terms and went on strike, blockading the entrance, when they were refused. As a result the subsidiary went bust.

• Laval sought a declaration that the industrial action. Same conclusion reached as in Viking.

• Court said that for the strike to be a lawful derogation from, in this case, Article 49 (freedom to provide services) there had to be a legitimate aim, proportionality test, AND all other options had to have been exhausted. 

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(make a connection here with discussion of fundamental rights in tutorial 2: what is revealed about the ranking of potentially clashing rights? see

C Barnard’, ‘Fifty Years of Avoiding Social Dumping? The EU’s Economic and Not So Economic Constitution’, in Dougan and Currie, Fifty Years of the European

Treaties: Looking Back and Thinking Forward (Hart, 2009) 311; Nic Shuibhne, ‘Margins of appreciation: national values, fundamental rights and EC

free movement law’ (2009) 34 ELRev 230.

RELATED CASES

• Case C-438/05 Viking Line

• International Transport Workers’ Federation and Finnish Seamen’s Union v Viking Line