European Parliament opinion legitimises social dumping and exploitation of workers
The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) strongly rejects the opinion of the internal market committee on the Enforcement Directive on the posting of workers, which has been adopted today. With this document, which will be forwarded as an opinion to the Employment and Social Affairs Committee (the leading Committee in this dossier) the protection of workers would become secondary to the internal market objectives.
National authorities would be discouraged from spotlighting fraudulent companies as only a limited number of control measures would be authorised. Furthermore, an amendment seeks to restrict even more the Posted Workers Directive by only recognising a limited number of collective agreements.
Veronica Nilsson, ETUC Confederal Secretary said: “This opinion is a huge disappointment and is unacceptable. The objective of the Commission’s proposal was to improve the protection of a very vulnerable category of workers against exploitation. The document adopted today would actually make the current situation even worse. Every day, thousands of posted workers are being exploited as cheap workers. The European Parliament cannot just ignore this reality in the name of internal market principles. The ETUC urges the Employment and Social Affairs Committee to distance itself from this opinion and to start a debate on how to tackle exploitation of workers and social dumping”.
ETUC position on posting can be found here: http://www.etuc.org/r/909
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