Failure looms over posted workers deal

Member state officials have all but given up hope of reaching an agreement by the end of this year on the proposed directive to protect foreign workers posted to another member state.

Despite assurances from Spanish Minister Antonio Grignan that he would do his best to engineer a compromise during his country's presidency of the EU, the issue has not reached the agenda of a single working group since July.

There is now widespread pessimism about the chances of concrete results at the 5 December meeting of social affairs ministers, given the failure of successive presidencies to break the impasse.

'The discussion seems to be planned basically to allow Grignan to show that he's trying to fulfil his promise to do all in his power to resolve the problem,' commented one member state official.

One ray of hope has been offered by suggestions that Italy would be prepared to soften its earlier line and agree to a 10-15 day threshold before posted workers have to receive equal employment conditions to domestic employees.

Spanish officials are continuing to talk to their Italian counterparts, but even such apparent flexibility from Rome would not be enough to break the deadlock over the time threshold which has so far scuppered all attempts to get an agreement.

Both France and Belgium already have domestic legislation granting posted workers equal status from day one of their residence in the host country - the so-called 'zero option' - and Luxembourg is set to follow suit with similar national legislation. They insist that any EU-wide legislation in this area must mirror their own.

Opponents of the zero option, led by the UK, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy, are pinning their hopes on suggestions that a legal challenge might be mounted against the French legislation, on the basis that it represents a restraint of trade and is therefore unlawful.

While Belgium has collective domestic agreements which are also binding on foreign companies and Luxembourg is on the verge of adopting a similar model, the French law is specifically targeted at companies from outside France, say officials.

The Danish employers' federation wrote to the European Commission in March to underline the problem and insisted there must be at least some short mandatory period before local conditions apply.

Danish firms have claimed that the amount of paperwork required, in French, to send workers to France is designed specifically to discourage foreign firms.

Unless Grignan can pull a deal out of nowhere - unlikely given that some countries already apply the zero option - the Commission will have to decide where the proposal should go from here.

But a Commision official refused to write off Spain's chances of success. 'Officially, we have not given up hope of a breakthrough,' he said.

Social Affairs Commissioner Pádraig Flynn is anxious to achieve some sort of uniform standard, but his officials stress that a threshold of less than a month represents a threat to the proper working of the internal market. An alternative solution, toyed with briefly by the French during their EU presidency, would be to leave it open for member states to decide what standards to apply. According to an official at employers' federation UNICE: 'This is a non-solution. The whole purpose of this directive is to have the same rules everywhere.'

If ministers fail to make any headway, Flynn made it clear in his social action programme that he would allow the EU social partners time to give their views on the next step before deciding how to respond.