Brussels, 28/08/2006 (Agence Europe) - On 25 August the European Citizen Action Service (ECAS) said in a press release that it had received “hundreds of calls, emails and replies” to its hotline on free movement rights for workers, including those from the new EU Member States. The project is part of the European Year of Workers' Mobility. ECAS identifies three broad kinds of obstacles to mobility: (1) the information and advice deficit: where advice and information services do perform well, they are only contacted by individual citizens after the problem has occurred; (2) administrative confusion: since May 2006, several Member States (Finland, Greece, Portugal, Spain Slovenia and Italy) have done away with transitional restrictions with regard to workers from the new Member States, and others (France, Belgium, Denmark and Luxemburg) have tried to make them more flexible; however, with these changes in the rules, people are unsure about which rules apply to which country (see EUROPE 9251 on the situation in the United Kingdom, which, like Ireland and Spain, immediately opened its labour market to workers from the eight Central and Eastern European Member States); (3) cases of exploitation of migrant workers, forced to work excessively long hours while being paid less than the minimum wage.
Former European Commissioner and ECAS Chairman Mario Monti will present a new report “Who's still afraid of EU enlargement?” to a meeting of MEPs in Strasbourg on 5 September. Further information can be obtained from hotline@ecas.org.