Brussels, 14/07/2016 (Agence Europe) - The European Parliament's employment and social affairs committee adopted a report on Wednesday 13 July setting out the tools and instruments that could be used by the EU to tackle social dumping more effectively, instruments that would, furthermore, have the support of most MEPs.
While social dumping was unanimously condemned, views on how it should be addressed varied widely. Between the parties of the Left, which want principally to protect workers, and the parties of the Right, which take the view that it is mainly “honest” companies that bear the brunt, the solutions proposed at EU level still have to overcome the difficulty of the differences between western and eastern member states in how this form of unfair competition is viewed - as the diverging views on the posting of workers within the EPP Group bears witness.
The report that the committee has just adopted crystallises all these issues and is necessarily the result of delicate compromises. The rapporteur, Guillaume Balas (S&D, France), had to highlight in presenting the first draft of the report (EUROPE 11476) the great delicacy of this matter and acknowledge that several of his most ambitious proposals would have difficulty in staying in the final version of the report. That, indeed, is how things turned out and, even with the concessions made, the report does not always convince everyone - the Liberals in the ALDE Group, for example.
The creation of a European road transport agency is probably the demand in the report closest to the spirit of Community tools. The report lays the emphasis rather on cooperation between national authorities, for example, for work inspections and the exchange and pooling of information, such as a blacklist of European companies which have breached labour law. As for the European Commission proposal on the posting of workers (EUROPE 11592), MEPs struggled to overcome their differences. The compromise amendment that was adopted is rather “sit-on-the-fence”, even though MEPs call for the principle of equal treatment between local and posted workers to be respected. (Original version in French by Jan Kordys)