Faced with the stalled negotiations on the regulation on the coordination of social security systems, the European Parliament submitted several proposals to the Council to relaunch the negotiations, in particular on the issue of frontier workers, at the interinstitutional meeting on Wednesday 13 February.
On that day, the meeting in fact got off to a bad start: the European Parliament's proposal to give frontier workers the choice as to which Member State was responsible for social benefits and for monitoring their job search (see EUROPE 12047) remained unacceptable to the Council, while the guarantees for accompanying the worker provided by the European Commission at the Parliament's request (see EUROPE 12185) did not satisfy the negotiating team at all.
After a break in the meeting, Parliament came back with two major proposals to unblock the negotiations. First proposal put forward: the Council accepts the freedom of choice be left to frontier workers. This alternative seems, all in all, unlikely, according to several sources.
The other option put on the table by Mr Balas (S&D, France) would be to keep the model adopted by the Council, namely the Member State of activity (switchover after 3 months) is responsible for social benefits and monitoring, and not the Member State of residence, as is currently the case.
But in this case, workers should be able to register with the employment services of the Member State of residence while receiving benefits from the competent Member State. Parliament also suggested the introduction of compensation for unemployed people who would lose out between the social benefits of the Member State of residence and the Member State of activity.
In addition, Parliament would like to see export until all social benefit rights for frontier workers have been exhausted. The Commission would work on this last point.
At the technical level, the co-legislators would exchange views on issues related to equal treatment. Article 4 would therefore be deleted. The question of the applicable legislation, and in particular of multi-active workers, would also hotly be debated. (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)