Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-03-15-Speech-4-216"
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"en.20010315.12.4-216"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, first of all I think we can congratulate ourselves on having brought a question before this House today which has been pending for far too long. It is impossible not to be surprised at this inability to resolve a precarious situation which affects the parliamentary assistants, people who assist us on a daily basis, whilst we are competent to legislate on certain aspects of the conditions of life and work of all the citizens of the fifteen Member States?
It is in fact a question of finding solutions to crucial and fundamental issues concerning social protection, the employment statute, occupational accidents and all the issues of social cover with which we are so familiar, so that we can deal with them in relation to all the workers in the fifteen Member States.
It is also a question of making an effort to clarify the definition of their working conditions, which, I admit, are rather the preserve of internal meetings. This issue has been raised over a very long period of time by our group and, as we have just been reminded, by other groups as well.
During the previous legislative period of the European Parliament, proposals to formalise the statute came up against the reluctance of the Council to turn assistants into officials and to include the tax dimension of the problem in the equation.
I think that today, however, we should be clear about what our objectives are. These demands are now no longer written in this way in the agenda. It is clear that we do not want to turn our assistants into Community officials, just as it would be out of place to want to link the issue of the assistants’ statute to that of Members of Parliament.
Why, as was expressed so well by Mr Rocard, do you vie with each other to complicate an issue where the stakes are so clear and so legitimate, and which may find solutions in procedures that are perfectly ordinary, accessible and simple?
The real issue today is to see how the Commission is going to follow up the work, which it asked an expert to carry out on this matter. It is true that the recent developments introduced by the Bureau of the European Parliament – the provision of contracts in the prescribed form and documents testifying to membership of a social security system and of an occupation accident insurance scheme – are good decisions, but the matter does not end there. It would be extremely important, for instance, to be able to check the information which is gathered.
However, the proposal put forward to regard our assistants as genuine cross-border workers so that they can consequently have recourse to Regulation No 1408/71, to which we just have to add a subparagraph in order to cover them, seems entirely appropriate.
Commissioner, our assistants expect the Commission to take the initiative. The Belgian Presidency would be doing itself credit by bringing this affair to a successful conclusion. However, Commissioner, you have just told us that proposals will be forthcoming before the summer. Thank you. We look forward to them. We thank you above all on behalf of all the assistants who work in this House."@en1
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