On Wednesday 13 November, the European Commission will be presenting a legislative proposal to introduce a multilingual public interface that will enable companies to make electronic declarations when posting workers within the European Union. The aim is to reduce the administrative costs inherent in these declarations without weakening regulatory requirements.
Use of this multilingual public interface will remain voluntary for Member States. Based on the experience gained in declaring the posting of international lorry drivers, this interface will be connected to the Internal Market Information system (IMI) at an estimated cost of €3 million over the first five years.
The standard form to be completed by companies posting their workers will provide the relevant information to enable factual checks at the workplace: information relating to the service provider, the posted worker, the posting activity, the contact person for the competent authorities and the recipient of the service. The list of information required was finalised at the end of 2023 by an ad hoc group of experts.
The Commission estimates that participation in this initiative by a group of nine EU countries - potentially including Germany, the Czech Republic and Lithuania, the three countries behind a specific declaration in the spring of 2024 - will reduce administrative costs by €1.4 million (a 58% reduction compared with the baseline scenario). This reduction would be close to €14 million for the EU27 as a whole (a decrease of 81%).
In its legislative proposal, of which Agence Europe has received a copy, the EU institution also mentions substantial time savings for operators. The application of Directive 96/71 governing the posting of workers would also be facilitated, thereby ensuring respect for the protection of workers’ rights, as well as making it easier to locate workers at the place of their posting.
At the beginning of November, the European Trade Union Confederation warned against a purely economic approach to introducing this electronic declaration (see EUROPE 13518/21). It is surprised that the current average cost of €10.78 for a declaration is already considered too high for employers, when the social costs of non-compliance with EU rules appear to be much higher in terms of respect for workers’ rights and distortion of competition within the Internal market.
See the draft proposal for a regulation: https://aeur.eu/f/e9k (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion and Solenn Paulic)