Fourteen Confirmed Engineers, and Nobody on Site

There is a moment on every European deployment where the programme looks finished. The rate is agreed. The subcontractor has confirmed the headcount. Fourteen names sit in an email, each one a real person who has said yes and turned other work down. Everybody involved believes the job is booked.

Then somebody asks the boring question — can these fourteen people actually pass through the gate on Monday morning? — and the programme turns out to be nowhere near finished.

Confirmed means someone has agreed to work. Cleared means they are allowed to. The distance between those two words is where deployments die.

This is not a theoretical problem. It is the single most common way a cross-border labour programme slips, and it almost never slips for the reason the client assumes. Nobody drops out. Nobody gets a better offer. The crew is willing and available throughout. They simply cannot be admitted, and by the time that becomes visible there are three days left rather than three weeks.

Here is what actually sits in that gap, in the order it tends to bite.

1. Employment status is not a detail, it is the foundation

Ask a subcontractor whether the crew are employees or independent contractors and you will usually get a confident answer. Ask for the evidence and the answer sometimes changes.

It matters more than it sounds. If the crew are employees, their employer runs payroll, deducts social contributions, holds employment contracts and carries employer’s liability cover for them. If they are independent, each of them carries their own registration, their own contributions and their own insurance — and the documents you need to collect are completely different.

Most supply agreements are drafted on the assumption of employment. Clause after clause will refer to the Supplier’s employees, to payroll, to statutory deductions. Sign that when the reality is a crew of independents and you have warranted something untrue about fourteen people you have never met. That warranty sits there quietly until something goes wrong, and then it is the first thing anyone reads.

Establish this in writing before anything else, because every other document depends on the answer.

2. Applied for is not the same as registered

Where a crew is engaged as independent contractors, each person needs a live business registration in the country of work. In France that is a SIRET number; the equivalent exists everywhere.

The trap is the phrase they have applied. Somebody who has applied and is waiting is not yet an independent contractor. They are an individual being paid for work with nothing behind them, and paying them in that state has a name in French law — travail dissimulé— with liability that travels up the contractual chain rather than stopping at the person who paid.

So the honest question is never “are they registered?” It is “how many hold a number today, and which ones?” That list, not the headcount, is the crew that can start.

3. The document that stops you paying someone else’s bill

This one is genuinely expensive and almost nobody asks for it until they have been caught by it once.

Under Article L8222-1 of the French Code du travail, a company contracting with a French supplier for more than €5,000 must obtain that supplier’s attestation de vigilance from URSSAF, and renew it every six months for the life of the contract. It confirms the supplier is up to date with its social contributions.

Skip it, and if the supplier has not paid those contributions, solidarité financièreapplies — you become jointly liable for them. For a crew of fourteen that is not a rounding error.

The attestation is free, downloads in about two minutes, and is the cheapest insurance in the whole programme. There is no good reason not to hold one.

The same visit should collect the registration extract — a Kbis for a company, an INSEE avis de situationfor a sole trader — and, where any of the crew are non-EU nationals, evidence of their right to work or to trade independently. That last one carries its own penalties and they also reach the party that failed to check.

4. Trained is not authorised

Electrical authorisation catches people out constantly, and the reason is subtle.

A worker completes the training and receives an attestation from the training body. It looks like the finished article. It is not. Under NF C 18-510 the training provider issues an opinion; the employer issues the authorisation itself, and it is only valid once the employer has signed it. An unsigned titre d’habilitation is a document that says training happened, not a document that permits anyone to work.

It is worth knowing what the levels mean too. H0, B0 and H0V cover non-electrical work carried out near live installations — working in a room with a panel, not working on it. For rack and containment installation that is usually exactly right. For any electrical intervention it is not, and the higher levels are a separate authorisation entirely.

Check the signature block. If it is blank, the first competent safety officer on site will notice.

5. Occupational health cannot be compressed

Sites routinely ask for a medical certificate for every worker. In France that means the visite médicale, which runs through the occupational health service an employer is affiliated to, on scheduled appointments. It is built around employees and around a calendar.

For a crew of fourteen, three days out, it is not going to happen. And for anyone engaged as an independent contractor it is not even the right route — there is no employer to arrange it.

The mistake here is promising it anyway and hoping. The better move is to go back to the site and ask what they accept in its place. In our experience most will take a fitness declaration signed by the worker against the specific tasks, or a short attestation from a general practitioner, which takes a day rather than weeks. Ask early, in writing, and you convert a blocker into a form.

What to do instead

None of the above is exotic. It is all knowable in advance, and the whole problem is that it is knowable in advance and usually is not asked about until the week of the start.

The pre-mobilisation gate for a European crew:

• Employment status established in writing, per person
• Registration numbers held, not promised — a list of names and numbers
• Attestation de vigilance in hand, dated within six months
• Registration extract for the supplier, current
• Right to work or trade evidenced for any non-EU national
• Electrical authorisation signed by the employer, not just trained
• Medical requirement agreed with the site in writing, with the accepted alternative named
• Every worker file complete before that person travels

The number that matters on Monday

When a programme is tight, the most useful thing a supplier can tell a contractor is not “we have fourteen.” It is “we have six cleared for Monday and eight behind them.”

Six compliant people through the gate on day one, with the rest joining as their files clear, is a delivery. Fourteen sent hopefully, with most turned back at the barrier, is the end of the relationship — and it costs the contractor a morning of programme they will never recover.

So the question worth asking your supplier, well before the start date, is not how many people they have. It is how many are cleared, and what they are holding for each one. If the answer is a headcount rather than a list, ask again.