Stepping up EU simplification efforts in the field of social affairs – a BusinessEurope position paper

Statement

BusinessEurope is strongly committed to helping shape an economically viable social market economy to preserve Europe’s social model. In our priorities for the EU social dimension 2024-2029, we called for two key horizontal shifts in EU social policy:

• Focus on boosting competitiveness, employment and productivity to sustain Europe’s social model amid demographic change. Avoid new regulatory initiatives that increase compliance burdens, especially for SMEs.
• Move towards a trust-based approach made of less detailed regulation in social directives, with more room for social dialogue.
• Stronger efforts are needed to simplify existing EU social legislation and reduce regulatory complexity for businesses. The social acquis plays an important role for EU competitiveness.

BusinessEurope is making concrete proposals on how to simplify EU social legislation without diminishing workers’ rights by:

• strengthening labour mobility and provision of services in the Single Market through swiftly adopting and implementing recent EU initiatives such as eDeclaration or ESSPASS to reduce administrative burdens and foster stronger use of digitalisation in social security coordination processes;
• introducing the changes suggested by BusinessEurope in the directives on pay transparency, platform work, transparent and predictable working conditions, working time and the REACH regulation;
• leaving flexibility on the methods to implement EU social directives at national level, including by giving the possibility to implement them by collective agreements negotiated in accordance with national industrial relations systems. It is important to develop the space for social partners to implement, apply, and where appropriate, derogate from social directives.

BusinessEurope calls on the Commission:

• To meet the simplification targets of cutting the regulatory burdens by 25% overall and by at least 35% for SMEs through the swift adoption of a labour market omnibus designed to simplify procedures, facilitate compliance and avoid disproportionate obligations and cost.
• To introduce ambitious simplification measures in the upcoming Fair Labour Mobility Package, including but not limited to digitalisation measures such as a legal proposal on ESSPASS and starting the technical work on the merging of ESSPASS, A1 and eDeclaration.
• To ensure that the upcoming Quality Jobs Act does not undermine European Commission’s simplification efforts by imposing additional regulatory burden on employers, and to rigorously apply the subsidiarity and proportionality to it.