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Thomas Händel, elected this week as chairman of the European Parliament’s Employment and Social Affairs Committee (EMPL), said it was still important for him and his four committee colleagues to continue the push for a more integrated employment market, including a focus on pension matters. The MEP, a member of Die Linke, said the “main question” for EMPL committee in the coming years would be how to address issues of social equality by addressing workers' rights. Asked about the passage of the revised IORP Directive, he said he believed it would “remain impossible” so long as any of the 28 member states “oppose and deny any EU competences”. In addition, the very different systems might be impossible to equalise,” he said.
“Concerning certain elements of the Portability Directive,” Händel said, “we have to wait for the first exchange of views between the political groups here in the Parliament. “But the increase of eurosceptics and the anti-EU movement will not make it easier to discuss the free movement of workers, and therefore pensions as well.”
Händel, now in his second term as an MEP, said he hoped a parliamentary majority could be found to “ensure the promise” made by the EU decades ago to create an environment where employees were free to work and live wherever they chose. “That necessarily means everyone should have the right to take pension credits with him, wherever he chooses to live,” he said.
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