By Chris Jones - 20th February 2006
Vladimir Spidla has warned that barriers to the free movement of workers risk the “long-term solidarity” of the enlarged EU.
The EU employment commissioner said that the freedom to live and work where they want seen as one of the chief benefits of the EU by a majority of citizens.
The Czech has launched a European year of worker mobility a Eurobarometer opinion survey showing attitude to free movement of people in the EU.
“Fifty-three per cent of Europeans said that this was what the EU represented to them,” he said on Monday.
“There are temporary arrangements in place in some member states stopping workers from central and eastern Europe from exercising this right.”
“We need to use the year of worker mobility as the opportunity to talk everyone concerned about how those arrangements can be removed as quickly as possible.”
“We need to highlight the undeniable benefits of enlargement and fight against dogma and irrational fears.”
The temporary measures came into force on May 1 2004, when the ten new member states joined the EU.
Twelve ‘old’ EU countries imposed total or conditional bans on migrant workers from the eight central and eastern European countries - Malta and Cyprus were not affected - with only Ireland, Sweden and the UK opening their labour markets to everyone.
The commission’s report on the first two years of the measures, published earlier this month, showed that most of the barriers to workers had proved ineffectual, and that the three countries that had welcomed workers had seen great benefits for their labour markets.
Several countries, including Finland, Spain and Portugal, are expected to scrap the temporary arrangements on April 30 and open their labour markets fully.
But Austria, which currently holds the EU presidency, has decided to continue its ban for a further three years, because of “pessimistic” forecasts about labour market developments.
“We do not have particularly high levels of unemployment, but the long-term forecast is not good,” said Austrian labour minister Martin Bartenstein.
“We have borders with many of the new member states, and already have the highest number of foreign workers of any member state bar Luxembourg – 10.8 per cent.”
“We are opening up our market step by step, and we will perhaps look again at how the temporary measures are applied, but not until we see a real possibility of change in the development of the market.”
Austria is particularly concerned about a flood of low-cost, unskilled labour from the new member states.
“Qualified workers from the new member states earning more than €2000 a month are subject to no quotas at all,” he said.
Mobility among Europeans – from both the old and new member states – remains extremely low, with just 2 per cent of workers living in an EU country other than their own.
This figure has remained largely unchanged for 30 years, and Bartenstein said it was vital to improve cross-border mobility to help Europe’s 18 million unemployed.
“We need to focus on ‘flexicurity’ – allowing workers to move to other countries but keep the rights that they have earned at home,” he said.
This means continuing efforts to make national social security systems more transparent and adaptable, as well as solving issues relating to temporary workers and posted workers.
Spidla confirmed that the European commission would publish a report on the posting of workers in the next two months, and would include a comprehensive set of guidelines on how the legislation should be interpreted.
Many member states have used different interpretations of the 1996 legislation to impose artificial barriers on cross-border workers, in particular those from the new member states.
The issue was also part of the heated debate surrounding the services directive in the European parliament last week, when MEPs voted to exclude references to removing these barriers from the text.
Among the events planned for the year of workers mobility are job fairs in 70 European cities and awareness-raising campaigns in border regions in Germany, Poland, Italy and Slovenia, among others.
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