EP Set to Guarantee Labor Mobility within EU, Ensure Fair Working Conditions for All

Labour mobility within the EU should be made easier for workers as well as for employers, with clearer rules to ensure fair, equality-based working conditions. This is the aim of a report drafted by European People's Party MEP Radan Kanev and his team before the start of the corona-crisis, a report that has acquired particular importance in light of the restrictions connected with the pandemic.

Initially, the document was drafted as a response to the deep divide among the political groups, and between East and West on the questions of labour mobility. It also has a powerful effect on the legal protection of hundreds of thousands of mobile workers, including from Bulgaria. According to data of the Committee on Social Affairs, Employment, Education, Culture and Civil Society, there are more than a million and a half cross-border workers, but the number of seasonal workers is much higher. Many of them were abandoned by their employers and dropped out of the social system after the outbreak of the pandemic. Very often seasonal workers who contracted the virus are left without social security. That is why the Covid-19 crisis alerted the people who set down the rules in the EU to the fact that they should turn their attention to mobile and posted workers, and that their work cannot be a synonym of modern-day human exploitation.

"It is on human beings that we must focus, on workers, on the problems they face, as well as on small companies and the problems they have," MEP from Bulgaria Radan Kanev emphasizes in his report:

"The moment the Covid crisis hit us, it posed innumerable new questions and challenges with regard to this report. All of a sudden we realized that labour mobility is far from guaranteed, that there are a host of problems...