EU : EU ministers promises to speed up the revision of the EWC Directive

A fast approval of the draft Directive on EWC. After the support of the European Commission to the joint amendments of the European social partners (see our dispatch n°080643), the Council of European Union had to express an opinion on the issue. “We have agreed to say that we will continue our work on this basis with the European Parliament. Our purpose is obviously to involve ourselves completely for the approval of this Directive as quickly as possible” explained Xavier Bertrand at the end of the meeting. It was one of the aims of the French presidency for this meeting : to ascertain all the governments’ awareness that their discussions “rely on a consensus”, as Xavier Bertrand mentioned it and that, consequently, “the pace of the discussions must be quick”. During the negotiations meetings, the delegations requested some technical clarifications related to, among others, the introduction by the European social partners of a new opportunity to negotiate derogatory agreements to the Directive (Art. 13). The negotiators are expecting the social partners to clarify if, in their joint advice, they had the intention to allow the existing agreements to derogate to the entire Directive -  i.e. included the legal provisions in force – or if they only wanted to allow derogations to the provisions that will be introduced by the revision. As a matter of fact, the wording  of the amendment which was negotiated by the social partners seems to lead the way to this possibility. The other main issue is the introduction of a threshold of 50 employees per Member State for the participation to the special negotiation body. Consequently, the pace of the debates within the Council should be very fast and the Parliament will be rapidly involved on theses matters so that it can approve its report in December. The goal is still to obtain a final approval of the draft Directive before the end of the term of the European Parliament in June 2009.