On Monday 2 December, the EU Ministers for Employment and Social Affairs identified their priorities in terms of employment and social policies for the next European Semester 2025 and for the future Action Plan on the European Pillar of Social Rights.
The Member States have in turn stressed the importance of enabling vocational retraining and the upgrading of skills throughout life, and of releasing untapped potential in the labour market, whether for young people, older people or people who are far removed from the labour market...
Greece felt that there needed to be a “change of mentality” and that “lifelong learning must be the norm” at a time when the EU was lagging behind its competitors.
We also need to identify the needs and skills required on the labour market as early as possible, while improving pay and working conditions and work-life balance.
European businesses, faced with “very serious challenges of economic transformation”, need “simplification and access to capital at lower cost and to skilled workers”, said French Minister Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet.
We need to step up our training efforts, promote social dialogue and strike the right balance between competitiveness and social cohesion.
The German Secretary of State, Rolf Schmachtenberg, also stressed the need for an initiative on artificial intelligence in the workplace, the need to strengthen democracy in the workplace so that workers do not feel like victims of change, and the need to ensure fair mobility for workers and support it with greater digitalisation.
For the Netherlands, ensuring fair mobility and preventing abuses by Member States using posted workers from third countries must be a priority. We also need to modernise the social protection system and adapt it to new forms of work.
Italy, for its part, insisted on new financing instruments to support growth and competitiveness and tackle the new challenges on the labour markets.
Estonia argued against over-regulating labour markets, while Denmark favoured non-binding instruments to avoid disrupting national models.
The Vice-President, Roxana Mînzatu, felt that the debate had made it clear “that competitiveness needs a strong social agenda”.
For Valdis Dombrovskis, Commissioner for the Economy and Competitiveness, the message was also that “no additional administrative burden should be created”.
On Monday, the Ministers also adopted the 2024 employment guidelines and conclusions on skills shortages (see EUROPE 13526/18).
Workers’ mobility. The EU27 Ministers also briefly discussed the electronic declaration form for the posting of workers (see EUROPE 13522/19) and the informal note submitted by Denmark, along with Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Croatia, Finland, Greece and Slovenia, on “digital tools to promote the free and fair movement of workers in the EU”.
E-declaration introduces a multilingual interface on a voluntary basis, enabling companies to electronically declare the workers they post to the EU. A group of nine countries – including Germany, the Czech Republic and Lithuania – could test this interface connected to the internal market information system (IMI).
A number of countries, including Belgium, France and Italy, have stressed the need to involve the EPSCO sector in this process, which at this stage comes under the internal market and competitiveness sector. They reiterated the importance of ensuring that this tool remains impervious to posting fraud.
With regard to the Danish proposal, Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet acknowledged the need for simplification and digitalisation to facilitate the mobility of workers in the EU, but also hoped that these new avenues would not prevent the Member States from resolving the outstanding problems in the Regulation on the coordination of social security schemes 883/2004.
The search for a compromise on this reform (in particular the rules on cross-border unemployment and the legislation applicable to postings) remains “important” and France is “ready to help”.
In this document, Denmark calls on the Commission to extend the ESSPASS (European Social Security Pass) pilot project, which is testing a digital solution for checking the social security documents of mobile citizens in other EU countries.
The European Commission should study the possibility of incorporating a pan-European work card containing information on the employer, place of work, period of work and contractual relations. The institution could also build on the European digital identity portfolio and study the possibility of integrating information on the citizen’s full social security protection and professional situation.
Link to the Danish note: https://aeur.eu/f/ell (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)