EU Member State governments have agreed to clear legislation that upgrades workers' rights, including pension rights, when their employer moves them from one jurisdiction to another.
The new upgrades follow a Commission finding that the rules laid down in the 1996 Posting of Workers Directive “were not always correctly applied in practice by Member States”. At the time of the Commission’s new proposal, commission president José Manuel Barroso said: “The European Commission is taking concrete action to stamp out the unacceptable abuses".
The rules will affect around 1.2 million workers, mainly in the construction sector, who are ‘posted’ from their home country to work on contracts across national borders on a temporary basis. The the biggest ‘sending’ country is Poland, followed by Germany and France. Receiving counties include Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Corianne van de Ligt, policy officer at PensionsEurope, said that while “opinions differ widely” on the issue among its members, in general, “we can say the agreement is OK to us”. However, she added that PensionsEurope was “not very happy” with Article 5 (3) of the proposal, “as we think it might create extra costs”.
Article 5 (3) states: “The Member States may allow supplementary pension schemes not to retain the vested rights of an outgoing worker but to pay, with the worker’s informed consent, including as regards applicable charges, a capital sum equivalent to the value of the vested pension rights to the outgoing worker, as long as the value of the vested pension rights does not exceed a threshold established by the member state concerned".
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