Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-10-25-Speech-3-419"
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"en.20061025.30.3-419"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the Services Directive is one of the most important directives in terms of the freedom to provide services, making possible, on the one hand, fair competition among service-providing enterprises right across Europe, while also, on the other, containing unambiguous rules for the protection of the posted workers, and also setting down minimum standards applicable to all, while nevertheless providing sufficient flexibility to enable these standards to be enforced by the various national systems. At its heart is the principle of the same minimum wage or the same minimum conditions for the same work in the same place, which enables it to establish fair competition conditions for businesses on the ground. If, though, the Posting of Workers Directive is to be successfully transposed, it demands committed effort by all – on every side and at every level.
I would like, at this juncture, to thank those Members who worked with me on this report for their dedication, and, above all, for their inexhaustible patience with the negotiating process, as well as the staff of the committee’s secretariat, in the Tabling Office, of the groups and Members’ private offices, for their dedication and the innumerable extra hours they were required to work.
This report is a joint effort. It enjoys support right across the groups, and the reason why that is so is that all concerned have met others halfway and arrived at compromises for the sake of the matter in hand. It is out of its commitment to the Posting of Workers Directive that this House repudiates the Commission’s attempts at guidelines limiting the Member States’ opportunities to exercise control, for the Member States have the particular function of ensuring, by means of their control measures, that the minimum working conditions for the posted workers are actually complied with, and they must be able to continue to do so in future, and without exceptions being made.
Our criticisms of the guidelines will come as no surprise to the Commission, for it is using them for no other purpose than to reintroduce through the back door the substance of Articles 24 and 25 of its original draft of the services directive, which this House had, by a large majority, deleted, and to that deletion the Council consented, for neither employers’ nor employees’ associations, neither governments nor members of parliament, want the freedom to provide services at the price of workers’ fundamental rights. The reverse is true: there is a broad alliance of people who are convinced that this European Union of ours can succeed in combining the two, and that doing so will bring into being what we call the social Europe.
Our expectation of the Commission is that it should take seriously February’s unambiguous vote on this report as a guide to how it should proceed. That also means that we expect it to take into account this House’s views when evaluating the questionnaires that it sent yesterday to the Member States. It is unacceptable that the Commission should make demands of the Member States with the ultimate object of jeopardising compliance with minimum labour standards.
I might also add that the ECJ has made it clear that requirements needed in order to secure minimum labour conditions do not run counter to the freedom to provide services, and that, precisely, is what is made clear in this report. So it is, for example, that it has been demonstrated in practice that, contrary to the Commission’s interpretation, wages documents can also be needed in addition to certificates of time worked in order to secure workers’ right to their minimum wage, and the consequence of that is that, in future, legal counsel will be indispensable as parties in the wages negotiations described in Article 3(8) of the Posting of Workers Directive, or as representatives to make such negotiations possible by being available for the effective delivery of official documents. If the directive is to be implemented, then action will need to be taken to clarify matters in advance and to provide information on compliance with minimum employment standards.
It is with that in mind that I hope that the commitment of so many to this report will pay off and that the Commission will now, without any reservations, allow ‘the same pay for the same work in the same place’ to be established securely throughout the European Union."@en1
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