Brussels, 12/07/2016 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday 20 July, the European Commission will announce that it wants to keep the draft legislation on the secondment of workers, unveiled on 8 March, unchanged. The draft legislation has been given a yellow card by eleven national parliaments, mainly from countries in Central and Eastern Europe.
Such decisions have to be taken at a weekly meeting of the College of Commissioners, where Employment Social Affairs, Skills and Worker Mobility Commissioner Marianne Thyssen will justify her view that the opinions expressed by eleven national parliaments to the effect that the Commission's proposal (EUROPE 11507) fails to respect subsidiarity are not justified. Thyssen explained her intentions during a debate organised at the European Parliament's legal affairs committee on Tuesday 12 July.
During the debate, the Commissioner swept aside the three main reproaches made by the eleven parliaments. She says the problem raised these days by the secondment of workers cannot be resolved solely at national level because it is essentially a cross-border issue. Secondly, it is not true that the Commission's proposal interferes with systems of setting salaries because it only tries to ensure application of the rules set by the member states for their own workers to seconded workers. Finally, the reproach that the 8 March proposal was presented too late in terms of the deadlines for implementing the 2014 application directive meant (EUROPE 11577) does not apply either, because the new proposal is complementary and essentially addresses the question of remuneration, which belongs to the underlying 1996 directive.
The Single Market is not a jungle and fair, clear rules are needed to cover secondment, she stressed in the light of many questions from MEPs that were more about the substance of the directive than subsidiarity as such. She said that the Commission's response to the yellow card will deal solely with respect of this principle, adding that the analyses that were carried out clearly showed that the proposal complied with subsidiarity. She said that as these analyses have not changed, she was going to offer the same proposal to the College of Commissioners as in March. During the debate, the EPP group split along similar lines as the Council of the EU (EUROPE 11574), several of its MEPs expressing doubts about respect of subsidiarity and desire to send the question to the EP's legal services. (Original version in French by Jan Kordys)