Brussels, 06/11/2012 (Agence Europe) - Although a blocking minority in the Council continues to oppose maintaining the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund (EGF) beyond 2013, on Wednesday 6 November the European Parliament's employment and social affairs committee (EMPL) approved by a very large majority (36 votes in favour, 2 against and 3 abstentions) the draft report of Marian Harkin (ALDE, Ireland). The report goes even further than the initial Commission proposal, as it calls not only to maintain the EGF but also to extend its scope.
The committee's MEPs have thus called to extend the co-financing capacity of the fund. The general co-financing scale, which the Commission wants to see unchanged, would increase from around 50% to 60%. However, a few exceptions have even been introduced to this enhancement - increasing the potential EU aid for workers who have been made redundant to 80%. In the case of a member state, which is eligible for cohesion funds, introducing a request for EGF support, a rate of 70% would be applied. Yet a few specific member states - those receiving EU financial assistance or benefitting from support from the European Stability Mechanism (Ireland, Portugal and Greece) - could request co-financing up to 80%.
The second symbolic point of this draft report concerns the categories of workers who would be eligible for EGF aid for 2014-2020. Like the Commission, the MEPs would like workers who have been made redundant - "regardless of their formal status" - to be included in the scope of the EGF. This concerns workers who had a fixed term contract, temporary workers, heads of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and freelancers.
However, where the MEPs have not followed the Commission's opinion is in including a specific category of workers - farmers. This point has not only provoked lively inter-institutional debate, but even in the Parliament opinions are extremely divided on the issue. Indeed, MEPs from the agriculture and rural development committee rejected their own amendment on Monday 5 November which called on their counterpart in the EMPL committee not to include farmers in Harkin's draft report (19 votes in favour, 19 against), in order to then vote against (2 in favour, 20 against) their own opinion on this draft. The absence of this opinion does not change the future fate of the draft, but it illustrates the discordance around the role and future of the EGF.
Moreover, the discordance has not disappeared, because if the draft report does not finally mention farmers specifically it does not, however, exclude such a possibility. Indeed in the view of the author of the opinion for the agriculture committee, Luis Paulo Alves (S&D, Portugal), "the establishment of commercial agreements involving agriculture is a matter of the utmost sensitivity and importance to farmers, and the worst service we can give them is to adopt a regulation that does not take into account the specific characteristics of their sector, becoming a useless and dangerous instrument to their interests", a Parliament press release says.
The circumstances in which the EGF could intervene have also been the subject of negotiations. First, MEPs said they were in favour of the permanent inclusion of a prerogative which for some time had been a simple derogation (2009-2011) - that is, the possibility for the EGF to help workers who have lost their employment due to the economic crisis. It is especially the "unexpected" nature of this type of crisis that provokes "serious economic disruption", which has been retained. Second, the EMPL committee has not followed one of its members, Frédéric Daerden, who had introduced an amendment during the 8 October session which would lead in the end to the EGF being able to act in anticipation. The objective of this proposal was to allow the EGF to support workers who are "under threat of redundancies in sectors for which a global restructuring process can be anticipated". This is an option which had even been studied by the Commission, but finally abandoned.
What are the next stages? The Cypriot Presidency has placed the EGF into the framework of negotiations on the multiannual financial framework 2014-2020. The Parliament will thus await the results of the next extraordinary European Council on 22-23 November. Very probably, the blocking minority - made up of ten member states - will persist in its refusal to envisage maintaining the EGF. If this is indeed the case, the MEPs could be led to giving their opinion on the Harkin report during a plenary session in order to give a signal to the Council that its position on the EGF remains unchanged and particularly firm. (JK/transl.fl)