Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2014-04-15-Speech-2-726-000"
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"en.20140415.91.2-726-000"2
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"Madam President, this is the final session of the current mandate and my final session as a Member of the Parliament. I will be leaving after 30 years and I would have liked to have ended my time as a Member on a high note.
Unfortunately, I do not think this proposal is a high note. In my opinion, it is a bad piece of legislation. In September 1996, almost 20 years ago, we debated the original Posting of Workers Directive. At that time, my region was a region of very high unemployment and many construction workers were going from the north of England to work off-the-books at construction sites in Germany. I spoke in that debate as Chair of the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs at that time, and this is part of what I said: ‘back in my constituency, week in and week out, people who have fallen foul of this situation bring their problems to me and my office; people who have suffered injury at work, who suddenly find that they have no legal employer, who cannot seek redress or compensation, people who are not only not paid for the work they have undertaken but find that their social security contributions have not been kept up by their supposed employer, or people who have virtually found themselves trapped, paying extortionate rents on tied accommodation controlled by their employer’.
If we wind the clock forward almost 20 years, the reality facing many workers today is that they are recruited, say in Poland or Hungary or Bulgaria, by a letterbox company based, say in Cyprus, they are then sent to work perhaps for 10 weeks at Flamanville in France, maybe 12 weeks building a stadium in Glasgow, and a further 10 weeks at a nuclear power plant in Finland. The fact is that this proposal will do nothing to stop those workers suffering the problems my constituents were suffering almost 20 years ago.
There were three crucial articles in this proposal for my group: Articles 3, 9 and 12. On Article 3, the amendments tabled by my group were rejected in the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs. The amendments carried overwhelmingly on Article 9, to allow Member States to put in place the national control measures they deem necessary, were 95% rejected by Council. The much-needed amendments carried in committee on Article 12, on joint and several liability in subcontracting chains, were 100% rejected by Council.
Article 9 is really quite shameful. The series of Court of Justice cases begun by the Laval Judgement created real legal uncertainty in this area of the law. This proposal should have been an opportunity to remove some of that legal uncertainty, but the only way Employment Ministers could reach agreement was to make Article 9 as ambiguous as possible. Can a Member State add a new national control measure if they come across a new way of avoiding or circumventing the rules? In other words, is it an open or a closed list of national control measures? Half the Employment Ministers are selling this as a victory back in their home Member States because it is a closed list, and the other half are selling it as a victory because it is an open list. It will create more, not less, legal uncertainty.
I hope Members will not do the usual thing and simply follow their group whip lists on this. I hope they will pick up the proposal and read it for themselves – particularly Article 9 – to see the problems for themselves and I hope that, having done that, they will reject this bad proposal."@en1
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