The European Parliament and the EU Council are expected to meet again on Thursday afternoon, 29 October, over the Regulation on the coordination of social security systems for an “open ended” meeting.
The fact that this meeting is “open” does not mean that it will be conclusive given that the September meeting was in the same format (see EUROPE 12572/38), we are told. However, co-legislators would like to make as much progress as possible to enable the German Presidency of the EU Council to prepare a new proposal to be presented to the Permanent Representatives so that a new mandate can be obtained.
The points that remain outstanding are still the same: the duration of the export of social benefits for frontier workers, the question of whether to include the duration of working time in the definition of the criteria relating to multi-activity and, finally, prior notification of the posting of a worker.
On the subject of prior notification, the digital solution could be a solution, as is the case in Belgium. That leaves the exemptions. The German proposal for an exemption based on the length of posting would still garner a lot of support among Member States. The question of the exemption being based on ‘business trips’ would still be debated just as much.
Regarding the export of social benefits for border workers, the European Parliament, (which wanted an export of 15 months) and the EU Council (which wanted an export of six or even three months) would be exploring new avenues: the export of benefits would be calculated according to the duration of contribution.
This approach has not been approved, but it could enable the most recalcitrant players (the Netherlands, Luxembourg) to work out a positive political formulation on this particularly sensitive subject, we are told. According to another source, this solution would be a non-solution and would basically amount to some form of status quo.
As for pluriactivity, there would be two possible ways of using the time criterion to define the State of residence: either an individual working time criterion, which would take its starting point as the hours worked by a worker (a solution that would be difficult to implement for inspection purposes), or a criterion of a company’s collective working time.
In the latter case, the criterion would be the Member State in which the largest share of a firm’s collective working time has been worked in the previous month. For the time being, however, the EU Council would be vehemently opposed to this solution. (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)