On Thursday 3 April, Member State experts discussed, as agreed, the new compromise text by the Polish presidency of the EU Council regarding the Traineeships Directive (see EUROPE 13610/12).
The new text contained only a few substantive and editorial clarifications, but the meeting left a mixed impression, according to some sources, and was not very encouraging for progress towards an agreement.
The presidency reportedly emphasised the difficulty of finding compromises and asked delegations to call on their respective governments to show greater flexibility, both those wanting to further reduce the text’s ambition and those wishing to make the text more protective, with Spain, for example, always falling into the second group.
According to one source, part of the discussion was devoted to dispelling doubts about the text’s interpretation, but the same questions already asked at previous sessions reportedly came up again, possibly causing some irritation.
The respective positions thus apparently remained unchanged.
Some delegations continue to call for expanding the scope of traineeships covered. For these delegations, which are close to the European Commission’s positions, the aim is to make the text more ambitious. Others, on the other hand, criticised the recent changes and called for more room to manoeuvre at national level. Germany, Sweden, France, Portugal, the Baltic States and Finland are in this group.
The presidency had proposed that “Chapter II (Equal treatment) and Chapter IV (Implementing and accompanying measures) should apply to trainees undertaking traineeships on the open market who have an employment contract or are in an employment relationship“.
And for false traineeships, “which are in fact employment relationships, the scope of Chapter III (false traineeships) includes any person carrying out a false traineeship, regardless of the type of traineeship“. The presidency, however, maintained the exclusion of internships with a formal link to education and training from the directive’s scope as a whole. These countries therefore once again requested that internships linked to labour market entry policies be excluded.
Regarding this same chapter, discussions also reportedly focused once again on the addition made to the text during the Hungarian presidency to bring the Nordic countries “on board”, namely the possibility for social partners, through collective agreements, to determine the objective reasons for differentiated treatment of trainees. Some delegations fear disguised derogations from the directive.
Nor was there any agreement on the list of factors that would make it possible to distinguish genuine internships from jobs disguised as internships, between those in favour of a prescriptive list and those who supported a merely indicative list. The latter camp includes the Netherlands, France, Germany, Ireland, Sweden, the Baltic countries and Denmark. These countries want to preserve their systems for inspecting and monitoring false traineeships, without hampering the capacity of the competent authorities.
The Polish presidency is due to produce a new text on 23 April, with a view to a further meeting of the working group on 30 April. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)