Freedom of movement for workers

Objectives

§ Increasing the Community's workers' chances of finding work and adding to their professional experience;

§ encouraging the mobility of workers, as a way of stimulating the human resource response to the requirements of the employment market;

§ developing contacts between workers throughout the Member States as a way of promoting mutual understanding, creating a Community social fabric and hence "an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe", the main aim of the Treaties.

Measures to encourage freedom of movement include:

a. Mutual recognition of training

Freedom of movement is often hampered by differences in training from one Member State to another.

This is true particularly in the case of regulated professions for which states have prescribed purely national certificates and diplomas which they require the citizens of other states to possess, thus restricting considerably the practical significance of the freedom to take up employment without formally contravening the rule of non-discrimination on the basis of nationality. Not being able to harmonise the training concerned, the Community has followed the course of mutual recognition of certificates and diplomas:

§ firstly for specific professions;

§ then on the basis of general systems of equivalence.

Such mutual recognition was introduced primarily so that the professions covered could be practised on a self-employed basis but it also applies, of course, to employed persons.

The problem also exists in the non-regulated professions where failure to possess national professional qualifications, which are often the only ones known to employers, may hamper chances of finding work. Here the Community has introduced comparability of vocational qualifications: on the basis of a Council decision of 16 July 1985, comparability has been ensured for skilled workers in 19 vocational sectors; the result was published in the form of tables in the Official Journal. (The work was carried out by a specialised body, Cedefop, and completed in 1993.)

b. Exchanges between young workers

To encourage freedom of movement, the EC Treaty [Article 41 (50)] stipulated that Member States should encourage the exchange of young workers within the framework of a joint programme. This was first carried out through the PETRA programme, which lasted from 1988 to 1994: it was aimed at young people between 16 and 28 undergoing non-university vocational training, and provides grants to enable them to spend from three weeks to three months doing vocational training in another Community country. Some 45 000 young people benefited. After 1994 the PETRA machinery was integrated in the wider framework of the Leonardo da Vinci programme.

c. The EURES (European Employment Services) network

This was set up by Commission Decision 93/569/EEC of 22 October 1993 implementing Regulation 1612/68 mentioned above, to facilitate access to information by workers seeking a job in a Member State other than their own. This network is a data bank of job vacancies and applications (incorporating data from national administrations) and on living and working conditions in the Member States.