On Friday 5 April, the organisations BusinessEurope, DigitalEU, SMEUnited, Eurocommerce and Eurochambres announced on X that they had written to the President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, on the subject of the e-Declaration for the posting of workers.
“The Commission included in October 2023, as part of its work programme for 2024, an initiative to implement a common form in electronic format (so-called ‘e-Declaration’) to facilitate posted workers declarations. The purpose of this initiative, meant as a voluntary initiative for the Member States, is to rationalise reporting requirements and facilitate the cross-border provision of services”, they explain, calling on the Commission “to come forward with this much needed initiative as a priority matter in 2024”.
By providing a common electronic form, this e-Declaration will help to solve two key problems for service providers: - lack of, fragmented or unclear information regarding the documentation, translations, registration requirements and the responsible authorities in different Member States; - high administrative burden and associated costs for service providers.
Many Member States have introduced additional reporting obligations to the Posting of Workers Directive, with estimated costs in 2019 of €660,000 in Austria, €830,000 in France, €1,660,000 in Italy and €16,720,000 in Germany. Contacted by Agence Europe, the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) stated that “this initiative for an e-Declaration on posting cannot simply serve to reduce burdens and costs for business”, but more importantly must help to improve the cross-border monitoring and enforcement of posted workers’ rights and employers’ obligations. The legal basis for this e-Declaration initiative is the 2014/67 Enforcement Directive on Posting and Article 9 entitled ‘Administrative requirements and control measures’. The information collected via this form must ensure effective monitoring of compliance with obligations (of the Posting Directive) and allow factual controls at the workplace. In order to be of real added value, such an initiative “must help to strengthen enforcement so as to detect high-risk postings and better target inspections”.
Link to the letter: https://aeur.eu/f/bn8 (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)