The European Parliament and the Council are preparing to launch negotiations on the revision of the Regulation on the coordination of social security systems (Regulation 883/2004) on Tuesday 15 January, in the margins of the plenary session in Strasbourg. The negotiations will be conducted at a brisk pace, as there are so many subjects to discuss and the time allocated to complete the legislative file is short.
However, both on the European Parliament and Council sides, some hope to be able to complete negotiations before the European elections. For the time being, the dates of the interinstitutional meetings are 31 January, 13 February, 21 February and 26 February. For others, the timetable is simply untenable. “[He] believes five is enough, but he’s delusional”, confided a source close to the file.
There will be no shortage of topics to be discussed, as the positions of the Parliament and the Council differ on certain points, starting with issues relating to unemployment benefits. Thus, over the minimum working period in a Member State necessary to total benefit entitlements, the Council set the trigger threshold at 1 month (see EUROPE 12047, 12046), where the European Parliament decided to set it from the first working day (see EUROPE 12141, 12140). As for the export of unemployment benefit rights when a job seeker moves to another Member State, the period was set at 3 months by the Council, compared with 6 months on the Parliament side.
Negotiations on the applicable legislation should also be particularly sensitive on the issue of frontier workers. The Council has set three months as the period from which responsibility for paying social benefits changes to the Member State where the frontier worker pays his contributions, where the European Parliament leaves it to the job seeker to determine which Member State is responsible for paying contributions and monitoring his job search - a proposal that the Council strongly dislikes. In addition, the Council has introduced a specific implementation period of 7 years for the very specific case of Luxembourg, which the European Parliament has not provided for.
The Parliament’s proposal for a financial deposit mechanism in the event of a delay by the competent authorities of the Member State of affiliation in forwarding the necessary documents to the authorities of the host Member State of a sent worker, or the maximum period of posting (set at 24 months on the Council side against 18 months on the Parliament side), should also give negotiators some difficulty. (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)