Luxembourg, 15/10/2013 (Agence Europe) - At their meeting in Luxembourg on Tuesday 15th October, EU labour ministers were not able reach agreement on the proposal on application of Directive 96/71/EC on the posting of workers in the framework of the provision of services. We did all we could, said the Lithuanian Presidency after a final attempt to close this matter which did not, however, result in adoption of a general approach. A fresh attempt to find a compromise is expected at the next Employment and Social Affairs Council on 9-10 December, so that interinstitutional negotiations can begin during this Parliament. If no solution is found, the posting of workers will be discussed again at European level only in two years' time.
While everyone agrees that the present directive is virtually useless since it has not been applied and that keeping things as they are is not good, in the words of French Labour Minister Michel Sapin, there is, as yet, no agreement with the Council on the measures that could be used to tackle the increasing numbers of cases of abuse and fraud, often called “social dumping”. What posed ministers problems today were Articles 9 and 12, which relate respectively to implementation conditions of national monitoring measures and to specific measures to ensure compliance by sub-contractors of the relevant employment conditions for posted workers.
The final compromise tabled, however, brought progress on some areas of friction. The kinds of monitoring measures (Article 9) should not be limited by this updating of the directive, the “open list” option winning the support of most member states, though not all (Spain, France, Germany and Estonia). On Article 12, no satisfactory proposal was made, Sapin told a group of journalists after the debate. In his view, there has to be real joint responsibility in Europe among stakeholders, the one doing the contracting and all of the companies who work to complete this contract, as the favourite tactic in fraud is to complicate circuits with large numbers of firms or “letter-box companies” involved.
The ministers who blocked the final compromise were unhappy that joint and several liability (Article 12) was not included as compulsory throughout the EU, even though they had accepted a compromise which, they said, watered down the scope of Article 9. This, according to France, was a fine example of “political skill”. It led to a real clash between two groups of states: on the one side, the United Kingdom, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovenia, Croatia and Poland which accepted the Presidency's final compromise, and on the other, France, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and Denmark which, wanting joint and several responsibility to be compulsory, rejected it. (JK/transl.fl)