On Wednesday 11 June, the Polish Presidency of the EU Council will attempt to gain support from the EU’s Committee of Permanent Representatives for the draft directive on quality traineeships, which it will submit to the European employment and social affairs ministers in Luxembourg, on 19 June.
To this end, on Friday 6 June, it presented a new compromise document in which it says it is making “minor changes needed to ensure a shared understanding, while keeping the necessary balance”.
The Presidency points out that, to date, it has specified which types of trainee and which types of traineeship are covered by the two objectives of the proposal (improving conditions for trainees and tracking down false traineeships).
However, the Presidency is still not proposing to exclude traineeships carried out as part of activation policies from Chapter III on false traineeships. It simply specifies, in the latest text, that Chapter III applies to any “person” engages in a false traineeship and no longer to any “worker”.
It also adjusts Recital 22 allowing the social partners to derogate from the provisions of the directive.
It introduces an option for “Member States to empower social partners, if they jointly agree, to uphold or conclude collective agreements establishing the objective grounds that are considered to justify a different treatment for trainees. In any case, the extent of different treatment [...] should be proportionate to the objective grounds and remain consistent with the objectives of this Directive”, states the new text, which is supposed to bring the Nordic countries ‘on board’.
On measures to defend the rights of trainees, the text states that in order to ensure effective protection of trainees, Member States should ensure that workers’ representatives can initiate any relevant judicial or administrative procedure to defend or enforce the rights and obligations arising from this directive.
“Member States which do not authorise employee representatives to act on behalf or in support of a trainee should not be obliged to do so”, according to the new proposal.
The countries that were not able to support the directive or that have expressed reservation to date are Austria, Belgium, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Slovenia, Finland, Lithuania, Malta and Estonia, and some were already planning, on 6 June, to abstain.
Numerous other delegations, including Italy, France and Greece, had not indicated their position. Bulgaria, Croatia and Slovakia, for their part, are said to have already announced their support for the text. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)