On Wednesday 7 May, the European Union Member States were still unable to agree on a mandate for negotiation with the European Parliament concerning the proposal for a regulation introducing a multilingual interface enabling companies to electronically declare the workers they post to the European Union (see EUROPE 13522/19, 13523/18).
The proposal aims to reduce the administrative burden on companies, especially SMEs, and to simplify and improve cooperation between Member States within the single market by creating a voluntary electronic declaration tool for the posting of workers.
A blocking minority has been formed by countries such as France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria and the Netherlands. For some, it was a question of bringing this proposal more into line with the Posting of Workers Directive.
Member States will be asked to consider the issue again on 14 May, with a revised text. However, the aim of the Polish Presidency of the EU Council is to have this mandate adopted on 22 May, at the meeting of Member States’ competitiveness ministers.
Use of this multilingual interface remains voluntary for Member States, but the idea is also to make it as attractive as possible so that Member States end up using it, even though mobility comes up against very different national legislation. This e-declaration consists of a standard form with around thirty data items relating to the service provider, the posted worker, the posting activity, the contact person for the competent authorities and the recipient of the service. Questions were also reportedly raised about this data on 7 May.
Some social protection bodies, in France for example, have already expressed doubts.
“The list of data – which is fairly restrictive – does not allow Member States to add requests for specific data needed to monitor workers. Working hours, social security affiliation status and other information required by inspection bodies can no longer be collected. This aim to simplify would even end up, in certain cases, having the opposite effect”, said the REIF (Representation of French Social Security Institutions to the EU) in April (see EUROPE 13624/20).
The form would then “only cover employees who are posted, which means that several countries would need to keep different prior declarations for other categories of workers (the self-employed), increasing the administrative burden on the inspection services”. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)